SMS Marketing Best Practices

TMZ News SMS Alerts Gets an Upgrade

Here at Tatango we love when brands take our SMS marketing advice. Recently the Hollywood gossip news site TMZ did just that, making major improvements to their TMZ SMS alerts. What was our advice for TMZ to improve their SMS alerts? Our advice was that instead of linking to their mobile homepage http://m.tmz.com in each SMS alert, they should be linking directly to the article that they’re referencing in the SMS alert. You can read the original post here if you want.

Below is one of the TMZ news SMS alerts, in which they linked to their mobile homepage instead of the actual article.

TMZ SMS Alerts

Now TMZ is linking directly to the article mentioned in the SMS alert, as you can see below.

TMZ SMS Alerts - New

Why is this little change so important for TMZ SMS alerts? There’s a few reasons why a new outlet would want to link directly to a news story in their SMS alerts, rather than linking to their homepage. Let me explain below.

By linking directly to the article in the text message, TMZ will see higher click through rates. Why? When people receive a text message that includes a link, they have to make a decision about if they have time to open that link, which can be impacted by that subscriber’s mobile device, internet speed, if they’re connected to wifi, etc. By not linking directly to the article mentioned in the text message, it’s pretty obvious to a subscriber that they’re going to click on the link to http://m.tmz.com, then have to search through the articles, then click on the article that was mentioned in the text message. Way too much work in my opinion, especially when a subscriber is going to make an almost split second decision if they’re going to click or not. If the subscriber doesn’t click because it seems like too much work, that means one less visitor to their website.

Once the subscriber clicks, TMZ would be able to track the amount of traffic that each individual text message brings to the website by using something like Tatango’s link shortening feature that tracks that amount of clicks each link gets.Better yet, TMZ would be able to figure out what wording, phrases, and topics generate higher click-through rates. This would then help them select stories and message copy in the future that would perform the best.

 


Jump to Content