Text message marketing just got a whole lot easier… and less expensive. Tatango is now offering unlimited text messaging to all of our customers. With our new pricing, we’re allowing you to focus more time on your business, rather than how many how many text messages you’ve sent, how many you have left, etc.

Unlimited text messaging is based on the amount of subscribers you have in your SMS campaign. For example, you can send unlimited text messages to up to 250 subscribers for only $24/month. You can see our different unlimited text messaging plans below or click here to go to our pricing page.

Now that Tatango offers unlimited text messaging, why not sign up for our FREE 7-day trial and give text message marketing a try.

Great news for anyone wantig to launch a text-to-vote, text-to-win or text-for-info campaign, you’re now able to create as many SMS autoresponders as you like, for only $49/month. Each SMS autoresponder comes with an unlimited amount of text messages, so there are no hidden fees or additional costs that you have to worry about.

Create an SMS autoresponder free with our 7 day trial.

Looking for ways to use an SMS autoresponder? Below are some examples to help get you thinking in the right direction.

• Giveaway swag with text-to-win
• Advertise on your car with Text-for-info
• Download an app using text-for-info
• Real estate agents using text-for-info

So what are you waiting for? Create your own SMS autoresponder today!

What’s interesting is the difference between what mobile marketing tactics marketers are using when compared to how people are actually using their mobile phone. This kind of difference though is normal in a new industry like mobile marketing, and I expect the tactics being used to reflect consumer usage much better during 2012.

View all of the slides from the eMarketer Webinar: Mobile Advertising and Marketing—Key Trends and Benchmarks.

Last week we held a text-to-win contest to win one of ten Clingo Universal Car Phone Mounts. To enter, all you had to do was text TATANGO to 68398 on your mobile phone. Congratulations to the people below that won.

1. Matt Drengler
2. Darryl Lee
3. Ashley Smith
4. Brett Weiss
5. Melanie Balducci
6. Adam Feber
7. Daryn Picklesimer
8. Barb Haley
9. Peter Nathan
10. Cesar Villa

Want to create your own text-to-win campaign? Try Tatango free for 7-days.

a) Description of the program. It’s required that you state specifically what the subscriber is subscribing to. (i.e. To receive weekly discounts and special)

b) “Msg&Data rates may apply”. This exact phrase is required below the call to action within the advertisement.

c) Provide a resource for help. A resource such as a website or phone number where subscribers can reference all terms and conditions must be included in the advertisement. This can be replaced with “T&C, text HELP” if you wish.

d) Opt-Out instructions. Instructions on opting-out of the SMS campaign must be included in the advertisement. (i.e. Opt-out, text STOP)

e) Frequency of SMS campaign. Its required that you make it clear to a subscriber how many SMS campaigns you will be sending per month in the advertisement.

For years now, SMS marketing providers have charged fees for additional keywords. Don’t know what an SMS marketing keywords is, watch this video.

Yesterday I had a customer call and me ask why we charged these additional fees. To be completely honest, I didn’t have a good answer… everyone else is doing it? That answer didn’t sit very well with me, so from now on, Tatango is giving our customers unlimited SMS keywords at no additional cost.

If you’re an existing Tatango customer that has additional keywords, no need to do anything, we will remove the additional fees immediately from your account going forward.

Unlimited keywords also apply to our SMS Autoresponder product. This means you can create as many text-to-win, text-to-vote and text-for-info campaigns as you want, for the low price of only $49/month.

Want to take Tatango and unlimited SMS keywords for a spin? Try our 7-day free SMS marketing trial.

When it comes to preferred methods of receiving mobile coupons according to U.S. mobile phone owners, text messaging captures over 50% of the market share. This outweighs email, apps, qr codes and even location based check-ins. This is definitely great news for SMS coupons and even better news for businesses that are currently embracing SMS coupons to reach their customers.

Do these statistics on preferred methods of receiving mobile coupons sound right? Let us know in the comments section how you would like to receive mobile coupons from your favorite brands.

While these types of shady characters would be nearly impossible to catch or prosecute, there is a simple answer to stopping this madness. Instead of trying to cut off the source of the mobile phone numbers, we as an industry can stop the practice of allowing customers to import lists such as these. (If you haven’t seen the demonstration of how I was able to spam 1,000+ mobile phone numbers in under 60 seconds using a Tatango competitor, it’s well worth the read) If we don’t stop the practice of allowing customers to import mobile phone number databases like these into their SMS campaigns, this could easily be the death of the SMS marketing industry.

If you’re new to SMS marketing, the proper way to acquire mobile phone numbers isn’t by buying them, it’s by having them opt-in to receive messages specifically from your business. If you’re interested in learning more about doing SMS marketing the proper way, I encourage you to watch our video lessons on SMS marketing.

This video is even more hilarious when you read the fine print on his website below. Look Jamie, you can’t have it both ways… If you’re selling mobile phone numbers, telling them what service to use to send them text message spam, and even giving them ideas on what types of text message spam to send them, the following statement on your website doesn’t let you off the hook. Shame on you.

Be sure to check out our other SMS marketing video lessons in Tatango University for more SMS marketing videos. Also, be sure to signup to receive our email alerts so you’re the first one to know about new videos and blog posts here at Tatango.

Video Transcription

Hey everyone, Derek Johnson with Tatango.com. SMS marketing is awesome, but to qualify that awesomeness, you have to figure out how to measure your success. You can send out a ton of messages. You can get a lot of people on your campaign, but really, you have to measure the success to figure out if it’s worth it to keep the campaign running.

There are four different ways to measure the success of a campaign, especially an SMS campaign. The first one is list growth. This is the amount of subscribers that are subscribing to your list or SMS campaign. This is calculated by taking the current amount of subscribers. So let’s say I had a thousand people in my list, and the past, let’s say I had 500 last month, divided by the past, 500. That will give you a percentage growth, and you can use that month-over-month to see how well you’re doing in terms of advertising and promoting your list.

The next one is the churn rate. This one is really important because this one is a metric that will tell you if the messages you’re sending out are valuable enough for your clients to stay in the campaign. What this one is, is you take the amount of people that leave divided by the current subscribers, and that will give you a percentage there also. You want to track that month-over-month to see, wow, in May, the messages we sent out were not very well-recepted because we had a high churn rate. Or, in October, we didn’t have any churns, so those are the messages that our customers really, really like.

The number three is redemption rate. This one is really important, because this one puts money in your pocket as a business. Redemption rate means how many customers come into the store with that text message compared to how many customers are actually on that list. That will actually give you a percentage. Most of the time for redemption rates, we see anywhere from like a five to a thirty percent redemption rate. Those are the kind of numbers you want to shoot for when running your own SMS campaign. Again, every business is different, though.

The last one, which I would say is the hardest one to track, but the most important for any business, is the cost per redeeming subscriber. It’s actually the longest one, too, in terms of words. What this means is you take the redemption rate, this one right here, and let’s put that here. You take the redemption rate, and you divide that, actually, no, you go backwards. You divide the cost per message. The Tatango cost per message is about $0.07 to send a message to each individual customer. You take that number, and then you divide it by the actual redemption rate. What that will tell you is, that will tell you, out of the entire service – obviously Tatango is a paid service – out of that amount of money, how much is it costing for each individual customer to come through the door? Hypothetically, let’s say you have 100 customers in your list, and you’re paying $100, and you get 10 customers through the door. Well, it’s costing you $10 per customer to bring that customer through the door. You want to track that, and you want to get that as low as possible, because then it has the highest return for you, because, hypothetically, let’s say the average ticket or the average pizza, let’s say, at your restaurant is $10, well, if it’s only costing $0.20 to bring in a customer, you just made $9.80. Now, if it costs you $1 though to bring in that customer, you’re now looking at $9.00. Not as good. Still pretty good, but not as good. That’s a huge number that you want to track when running your SMS campaign.

Hopefully, these four metrics will help you, and then you can gauge the success of your SMS marketing campaign.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com