Part 3 of our series of “How-To’s” for mobile marketing focuses on perhaps the most important part of running a mobile marketing campaign: gathering subscribers. No mobile marketing campaign is going to succeed unless it has subscribers, and the more the better.

The absolute, down-to-brass-tacks, true purpose of marketing deals directly with building customer loyalty through trust and building relationships. Customers may patronize a business every so often, but it is the customers that had an outstanding experience that keep coming back for more. The goal of a business should be to build these kinds of relationships with customers and maintain them.

Most businesses have their busy days and their slow days. Of course, this is relative to the business in what they consider to be “busy” or “slow”. I myself have been on both ends of the spectrum, experiencing days so busy that I felt like a chicken with my head cut off and days so slow I thought time had stood still. Nobody likes slow days, so many businesses try to increase their traffic on those designated “slow” days.

Advertising is a must for any business to be successful. Whenever a business has advertisement, whether it’s paper fliers, business cards, a radio ad, or a billboard, there is an element of waste in those advertisement. If a business prints 10,000 fliers and hands them out, the percentage of those advertisements that will convert to sales is about 2% and sometimes even as low as less than 1%. Obviously this could vary depending on how the flier presents itself, what offer is being advertised, and how the business targets the audience. However, at even a 2% conversion rate, those 10,000 fliers only yielded 200 sales. In this event, the element of waste is 98%.

A common question we are asked here at TXT180 is how to track a mobile coupon’s redemption and the conversion rate of their mobile coupons. Because this question has come up in several of our conversations, we have amended our list of How To’s for Mobile Marketing to include some information about this. One item of great importance when considering mobile coupon campaigns is that mobile coupon redemption will always require an action to be taken at the P.O.S (point of sale) of the business. We’ll use this consideration in how to develop a coupon redemption and conversion tracking method.

Subscribers for a mobile marketing campaign can be gathered in a wide variety of ways. Previous TXT180 articles have been written describing various ways of gathering subscribers, and in this article in our How To series for mobile marketing, we’ll explore a specific method of gathering subscribers through giveaways.

There are many different ways to implement a text message marketing account, some not necessarily for marketing purposes. There may be instances when a business may want to use a text marketing account for informational purposes only. A text for info account can accomplish this purpose, but in a different way than you may imagine.