The power of the mobile channel is something that every business needs to appreciate. If you think about it, it’s a marketer’s dream. When was the last time you left home without your mobile phone? As long as the golden rules of marketing are observed – relevance, convenience, timeliness, then the possibilities are almost endless. With that in mind, here are 10 ways marketers can utilise this channel.

1. VIP preview campaigns
   This is a great added-value service you can offer to a select group of customers by alerting them to new stock arrivals, exclusive viewings or personalised offers and if you encourage your VIPs to forward the SMS to a friend in order to expand your customer base.
2. Launching a new product?
   Send customers the latest information about your new product, including their nearest point of sale. Give your customers the opportunity to reply in order to receive bonus packs or free samples.
3. Sale campaign promotions
   Why not tell your customer database about your latest sales promotions in advance via SMS. You can send a simple text message to inform customers of upcoming sales, a new store opening in their area, limited offers etc straight to your customers, regardless of where they are.  (more…)

To help us achieve our ambitious growth plans, we have appointed our first ever Marketing Director – Geoff Love, formerly Customer Marketing Director of HomeServe plc.

Julian Hucker, Esendex CEO explains; “Geoff helped grow HomeServe from 1m to 3m customers and this is exactly the type of growth that we’re planning, so his experience will be vital.” 

Geoff will be responsible for setting and executing Esendex’s global marketing strategy and says;

“It’s great to be joining the company at such an exciting time. The new products and services we have in the pipeline, along with the launch in the US represent massive opportunities.  And of course, there’s still loads of potential in Europe and Australia.  So we need to work even closer with our existing clients, understand them better and see how we can help add even more value to their businesses.”

Whilst Esendex has almost 10,000 clients, Geoff points out that there are even more companies out there who still aren’t using SMS to talk to their customers and staff. 

 ”We need to help them understand how using SMS can grow their businesses, provide better customer service and cut costs  – particularly in the current economic climate, when everyone’s looking to make their business more efficient.”

Last week Esendex participated in the Nottingham Chamber of Commerce 5-a-side football tournament.

Plenty of promise was on show from the fledgling team, with many team members playing their first competitive football match! Esendex FC were undefeated in the group stages with four wins and a hard-fought draw against teams with a larger pool of players available (and a few ringers). The tournament came to a close in the knock-out final due to a series of bizarre refereeing decisions.

As group winners we may yet make the regional play-off’s later this month, if not we’ll continue to train and look to win next year’s event.

Man of the tournament was Neil ‘Schmeichel’ Kilbride, with a number of fine saves – but this really was a great team effort.

The Inbound Issue for Vodafone Virtual numbers has now been resolved.  We apologise once again for any disruption this unexpected service degradation has caused you.

Esendex is experiencing a severe incident, which is resulting in a degradation of service. This incident affects Inbound traffic to Vodafone UK Virtual Mobile numbers.

Vodafone have advised us their engineers have identified a fault on the telecoms network and this has been escalated. If we are given any further updates in the meantime we will advise you as soon as possible. We apologise for any disruption this unexpected service degradation may cause you.

We have just released a new C# SMS SDK to help customers integrate with the new Esendex SMS API. The new C# SMS SDK is open source and is published on CodePlex under a LGPL license. By making the source code available free of charge we believe that developers can benefit greatly and that by consuming our services we can continue to evolve and enhance our C# SMS SDK.

The C# SMS SDK includes examples of integration with some of the key Esendex features, including; Messaging, Inbox, Contacts and Sent Items. These examples have associated unit tests, in line with the TDD (Test driven development) an approach used by the Esendex development team.

For those of you who wish to start sending messages straight away, there’s comprehensive documentation for the C# SMS  SDK  and a quick start guide within the developer area of our website which will explain all of the resources you can interact with in detail.

If you are an existing customer and would like to try the new C# SMS SDK simply log in to your account as usual and visit  http://esendex.codeplex.com/releases. If you don’t have an account then please sign-up for a free trial now – we’d love to hear what you think.

Well done to Leanne, Customer Support Assistant who is our Esendex Employee of the Month.  Paul Spencer, Commercial Manager Northern Europe Region, presented Leanne with the award at the end of last week.

Leanne’s put herself forward for extra work and completes her tasks and daily responsibilities effectively.  She’s also shown dedication and commitment outside of work by studying for a HNC in computing.  She will be learning how to programme in VB / ASP.net and also how to use SQL.

Congratulations once again to Leanne!

Yesterday, I saw an interesting tweet from the Mobile Marketing Association Forum, quoting;

“97% of SMS opened, 83% in one hour but typically within 4 minutes”

This is a pretty fascinating statistic, especially when compared to email where only 25% are opened (according to the IAB) and probably even fewer of these are actually read.

There are more mobile phones than people, with more individuals using one mobile phone for business and one for personal use.  People also have a tendency to carry their mobile phone around with them all the time, everywhere that they go.  It is therefore not surprising that many businesses and organisations are using SMS software to communicate with their audience, especially considering that most text messages are read.

Here’s some examples of when using an SMS gateway can capture your target audience instantly;

• Increasing purchasing power – send Bulk SMS with last minute deals and promotions

• Ensure appointments are not forgotten – for example sending doctors and beauty salon SMS appointment reminders

• Emergencies – for example hospitals use the service to inform high risk patients of dosing reminders

• Time sensitive situations – for example a recruitment agency will be able to contact a candidate with job details

If you would like to try our SMS gateway, why not sign up for a free trial? – it would be great to hear what you think!

We’ve just started a trial with Feefo: the UK’s most trusted independent customer feedback forum.  It’s early days but so far the feedback on our business SMS solutions has been extremely positive (click on the logo below to see the feedback to date)

At the moment we’re just using Feefo for those customers that sign-up for PAYG terms – we tend to have less opportunity to catch up with these customers than with those that are on a monthly contract. However, assuming that the pilot goes well we expect to rollout to all of our customers, across all markets and all SMS solutions.

As ever, if you have any thoughts or ideas on how our SMS service can be improved please get in touch at support@esendex.co.uk

David Ogilvy said “Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius, faith and perseverance to create a brand” and that’s been very much in our minds as we plan the rollout of our new brand.

Why bother? The old logo worked fine and it’s difficult to prove that we ever lost a customer because they didn’t like our branding.

The trigger was probably the realisation that the logo’s structure wasn’t optimal for online use (the chevrons took too much space) and this was a constraint as we looked to improve online navigation. We considered simply tinkering but Esendex had changed: we’d grown significantly despite the recession and a number of threads were being pulled together:

• The company’s vision had been clarified and we were developing our positioning;
• We’d committed to a strategy of continued growth and were planning to launch in the US;
• The new Echo portfolio of services were well underway.

And so we decided to not just change the logo but rebrand the business and our entire online portfolio, ready for the next 5 years.

After an extensive search we decided to work with a local agency, Alight to help us through the process.  The logo itself dropped out relatively easily, in part because we’d done our homework but also because we were clear on what we wanted to achieve.

This new branding reflects the maturity and ambition of Esendex.  It’s modern, serious but clean and professional.

That of course was just the beginning.  We’ve completely redesigned and rethought our brochure sites, our online services will need to be redesigned, there’s stationary, invoices, and of course the “online proliferation”.

The first tangible evidence will be the launch of our US website, which goes live shortly.

After that “B” or Branding Day is 1st August when we start the rollout across the rest of the organisation, with a plan to update each of our sites in the coming months and all our applications.  It’s a huge task for everyone involved, particularly the marketing team who’ve worked hard on something that they’re justifiably proud of and the development team who’ll need to rework all our online tools.

I’m looking forward to seeing the new identity come to life in the months ahead.