AMNET’S ezesms website launch last week has implications beyond its marketing significance – it also offers cost-saving benefits for businesses small or large.
The website is fully interactive and allows a company to send sms text messages from a PC to a mobile phone. The different programs available mean that a company can send more than 250,000 sms messages at one time.
An Amnet case study of Quirk Corporate, a WA building services company, has demonstrated immediate telephone cost savings. The system was designed to help the company’s secretaries liaise with its 20-mem-ber field staff. Based on an average mobile call of two minutes, Amnet’s study reveals that, if the company was to send 500 messages, it would save about $400. And the more messages sent, the bigger the savings.
Amnet managing director Richard Whiting said the website not only gave businesses cost-saving communication, but also an effective means of communicating with staff.
“This is an effective and personal way to communicate, and it is unobtrusive,” he said.
“You save on the mobile call cost as well as retrieval costs, because many people out in the field are often driving or in meetings and can miss the call.”
There are, of course, the obvious marketing benefits to using the ezesms site. At 13 cents a message for 250,000 messages it is certainly a cost-effective way to promote services, and the recent privacy legislation will not hinder the process, Mr Whiting said.
“People have to agree to give their mobile phone numbers. We do talk to our clients about privacy. But global companies are realising the benefits of sms marketing, like Grolshe did in the European Cup,” he said.
As an advertiser, Grolshe offered its members free updates of the soccer, which included when their favourite team scored a goal and the final scores. Harvey Research surveyed 500 mobile phone users who signed up for the service and found a 78 per cent positive response to the text advertising and a 60 per cent recall rate to the three advertisers who used the sms messaging during the 2000 European Cup.
