When a Good Plan Comes Together: SMS Service Integration – Part 1

You don’t need an IQ above 145 to integrate an SMS service – some careful planning will suffice…

“Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning” – Winston Churchill

A lot of speculation as to the reasons why businesses fail seem to be doing the rounds these days, especially since more than 32,000 businesses were predicted to fail for the 2009/10 period.

One of the most common reasons across a number of different websites, is bad management… many business owners don’t seem to know how to manage their business, with the result being imminent doom & gloom.

Arguably, good business depends on good planning. And the same is true for the SMS service you want to use to provide your customers with increased value; to provide them with a reason to stay loyal to your business…

Operational Planning: Now & Then

A number of planning models exist both in print and online. All of them, however, seek to answer four or 5 key questions:

1. Where are we now?
2. Where do we want to be (after x period of time)?
3. How will we get there?
4. How will we measure our progress?
5. (Optional: Where can we tweak?)

Answering these questions successfully won’t guarantee your success, but the answers will provide you with a roadmap of where you want to go and how you could get there (I’m using the conditional form, as planning often differs, even if slightly, from reality). Let’s look at how the above can be applied to plan successfully for the implementation and deployment of an SMS service.

1. What types of customer communication do you currently use?
   • Do you want to distribute promotional information, account information or a combination of different types of information?

This isn’t exclusive to an SMS service: whenever a new form of communication is brought into an existing communication strategy, care should be taken to see how these various forms of communication will affect one another.

Additionally, what do you want to use the SMS service for and what are the results you expect from it? Answering these questions is a bit more tricky than might initially appear:

2. What do you expect from an SMS service?
   • Can it easily provide a return on investment (ROI)?
   • Can it increase revenue, either on its own or in conjunction with other media types or when used in a different department?

What are your monetary expectations from your SMS service:

It should also be considered whether and how the SMS service can be used to fuel customer retention (one of its great benefits) as well as customer acquisition – it is inevitable that there are some customers that will want to leave. But, with some careful planning and a well thought out SMS service, it is possible to tip the balance in favour of new customers whilst retaining the majority of current customers.

Next week’s post will cover how you can get there. But in the mean time, read more on our SMS service page.

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Tags: customer communication, Developers, Financial Services, Marketing, Messaging in action, SMS campaign planning, SMS Service