Mobile Coupon Delivery with SMS Text Messaging
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For Content Developers, and businesses of all types, one of the uses for an Open Source SMS Text Messaging Application is the ability to deliver brand building communications and buying incentives (euphemism for a mobile coupon) directly to the mobile device of your audience or customer.
Companies have been delivering promotional material by snail mail (junk mail) and email (spam) for a while now, and we the collective consumer have been ignoring most of it for years. Downside with junk mail is that we have to keep track of the marketing materials once we receive it and with both methods there is the strong likelihood we never asked to receive it in the first place.
Delivery of opt in marketing materials to the mobile devices of consumers who sign up to receive them has the potential to become a step in the right direction here.
Take an ultra simple scenario — you’re driving home from work one evening wondering what to do for dinner. Suddenly you receive a SMS alert on your mobile phone with a coupon from your favorite grocery store (who has suddenly realized they are overstocked on a perishable item and has to move them out today) telling you about an incredible special on take out dining. All you need to do now is stop in on the way home, show them the coupon on your phone and you and the grocery store are winners. You get your dinner dilemma solved at a nice discount, and they made a much needed pre-spoilage extra sale while spending very little to do it.
Same scenario works for the podcaster, vlogger or any Content Developer who’s audience has requested that you send them a notification whenever you have new content available. Simply push out a SMS Text message with a link to the MP3 audio file or 3GP video file of your show. You get to deliver quality and timely service to your audience and your audience gets the easy ability to download the latest episode of your content to their mobile device. Everyone is happy and your relationship builds. No doubt another step forward in the democratization of distribution, as long as both sides are willing participants.
With the advent of location based marketing - l commerce - built around the global positioning technology in the latest generation of cell phones these scenarios could get even better, or even worse. An important success factor for this space is going to be the ability of the wireless carriers to limit unsolicited messaging on the mobile platform. It is actually somewhat surprising that spam messaging is not much worse already on mobile devices. If this non problem so far is due to some secret voodoo magic the wireless carriers are working, then we owe them our thanks. If it has just been dumb luck so far, then we’ll take that too.
The point to take away from all this is that you don’t need to be Superman in order to deliver your content to mobile devices. The tools and the audience are ready.
I’ll be posting results from some tests of delivering mobile coupons, MP3 and 3GP files to mobile devices via SMS delivered links next week.
tags: Mobile Devices; Mobile Marketing
update: 3gp video, MP3 audio and mobile coupon delivery test results on can be found in post Delivering 3GP and MP3 Content with SMS Text Messaging.
Content Developer Comments
Comment on Open Source SMS Text Messaging Application by Creg FieldingTxtWire has a web service that will return the cell phone carrier. Just pass it a phone number and it will tell you who the carrier is even if the phone number is ported from one carrier to another. Our database is updated daily so even numbers that are ported today report correctly tomorrow. If you would like a demo account call. We have several large corporations and online software vendors using the service. cfielding@txtwire.com http://www.txtwire.com Comment on Open Source SMS Text Messaging Application by Kyle2008
Great post DC. Very interesting approach to sending SMS. Is the source code for this actually available anywhere? Thanks! Comment on Open Source SMS Text Messaging Application by JustUs1776
Great post. I'm a LAMP Developer and I was wondering if anyone has been able to build their own GSM server. That is, a server that can utilize a GSM modem to send direct, local messages to cell or IP phones. I'm working for a not-for-profit health care organization and have a suite of applications that I'd like to improve communication turn around time by sending SMS messages our nurses IP phones and our Physician's cell phones. I've found a ton of services that are all cost prohibitive and was hoping for an open source solution. Comment on Open Source SMS Text Messaging Application by Roy
My son's teacher would like to be able to send short text messages to students. I'm looking for a simple solution that would allow him to broadcast to 20-40 students a "reminder" about class info. This article looks very promising, but It appears to be server based. Can this type of program be modified to run run stand-a-lone, ie flash drive, desktop...? comment feed...