Lease Your Own Mobile SMS Marketing Platform
Posted by victor on Jul 25, 2007 in Mobile Advertising, Mobile Marketing, SMS / Text
eMarketers, wanna know how you can jump into the Mobile SMS Marketing space and begin to sell your own Text Messaging Campaigns? If you live in an area fairly populated with Mobile users this can be a nice addition to your Agency offerings.
I just checked out the turnkey SMS marketing tool from Mobile SMS Marketing and it looks very interesting. For starters, it’s a snap to sign up for their Reseller Program where you can purchase bulk rate SMS messaging at $.035 – $.05 per message. Plan on paying closer to $.05 though unless you’ve got some really serious marketing plans because the rates don’t dip down to the $.035 range until your kicking out 1m Text messages per Month (outbound).
Mobile SMS has a $395 Reseller setup fee which they are willing to waive. The Monthly maintenance fee for a White Label solution is $395 per month with a minimum 6 Month commitment. Go look at Realty2Cell if you need to see a great real life working example of how a White Label SMS Marketing Solution is being leveraged in real estate.
Here are the benefits of a White Label SMS program.
- It’s fully customizable with your own logo.
- You set your own price points.
- Full stats and reporting platform.
- Full line of services available from SMS, WAP, WMS and XHTML.
- Web based management interface.
- Unlimited keyword usage.
- Unlimited user accounts <– this means you can sell this service to as many businesses as your heart desires.
I know $.05 sounds economical but plan accordingly. The $395 per month maintenance fee means that you’re going to need to have some business lined up because from a cost perspective that represents the cost of 7,900 messages. Here are some samples that I put together to help you understand the pricing structure.
Based on 25k messages:
Look what happens to the Net when you add volume (250K messages)! Your costs decrease because bulk rate prices kick in 150K messages and again at 500K and 1M. More importantly take a look at the Net versus the Cost compared to the sample above.
There is an exception on the pricing side. Mobile SMS publishes pricing for customers that don’t want to purchase White Label Solutions so you may want to look that over and use that as a guideline to set your own pricing. However, it’s not required but I did use a discounted rate in the second sample above.
Mobile SMS Marketing recommends the White Label approach if you’re planning on sending more than 6000 messages per month. Don’t benchmark that though because if you only send 6,000 messages you’ll lose money.
We’re here to make money not lose it right! If anyone wants my spreadsheet I used to make the above samples just email me from the contact form here and I’ll send it to you so that you can play with the numbers on your own.
Update: Here’s the sample spreadsheet Beaudon: Sample SMS Messaging Cost Calculator
Beaudon Spaulding | Jul 26, 2007 | Reply
Good day. I would like a copy of your spreadsheet as we are launching SMSPolitical.com on August 15th.
Does your platform have “look up” capability, an a bind with all the major wireless carriers?
CHeers,
Beaudon
victor | Jul 26, 2007 | Reply
Beaudon, I’ll shoot that over to you in a couple of hours when I get home. I do believe the Mobile SMS Marketing does operate with the major carriers but let me find that on their site first and I’ll post back here with the reponse.
victor | Jul 26, 2007 | Reply
Check the bottom of the post, I updated it and added the spreadsheet.
victor | Jul 26, 2007 | Reply
From the Opportunities Page I located:
“All mobile phone campaigns in the USA must be 100% opt-in (permission-based) and operate using a short code. We are providing you with our short code – 41513. This code proves that we are recognized by all major phone carriers in the USA and Canada. ”
I’d say this doesn’t exactly answer your question regarding major carriers so I’m contacting the company to find out.
Beaudon Spaulding | Jul 26, 2007 | Reply
Victor,
Thank you much.. I’ll pull down the spreadsheet. We’ve been sending 150k messages per day since Feb out of a Canadian gateway and bouncing back to the US. Duel positive where we get a better currency exchange, an have LPN ability for correct pre emptive “look ups” to make certain we are distributing to the correct carriers.
Total volume of records is 97mm but 34% double optin with audit trail back to source URL & time stamp authentication. The balance of records our legal has considered as a true single opt in with accompanying messaging letter.
victor | Jul 26, 2007 | Reply
Wow, that’s awesome. If you’re not getting .035 (U.S) as your rate now you might want to check their program out.
When I got home this evening I put a call into Mobile SMS Marketing to find out what the story is on the major carriers. Naturally, I got voice mail so I expect to hear back from them on Friday and I’ll put the update here in the comments ok?
Tero Sahrakorpi | Jul 27, 2007 | Reply
Victor,
There is also a monthly maintenance fee for the basic Mobile SMS Marketing service. A one keyword account is $99 per month with a 6 month billing plan. If you add that to the resale sample, 6000 messages is the correct number.
A list of supported carriers have been added to our order page.
Thanks,
Tero
MobileSMSmarketing.com
Tero Sahrakorpi | Jul 27, 2007 | Reply
Beaudon,
Supported carriers are: Cingular ( the new AT&T Mobility), Verizon Wireless, Sprint, Nextel, T-Mobile, Alltel, Virgin Mobile, Cellular One, US Cellular and Boost.
The price for SMPP messages with that kind of volume will be less than $0.035 ea.
Tero
victor | Jul 27, 2007 | Reply
Thanks for checking in Tero.
Terence Chang | Jul 28, 2007 | Reply
hmmm… it does sound very interesting.
The fee seem to be high ..
victor | Jul 29, 2007 | Reply
$.05 is high, I’d recommend trying to negotiate that down. I suspect that if someone can bring some serious volume to the table that they can easily get below 3 1/2 cents per message though.
Tero Sahrakorpi | Jul 29, 2007 | Reply
Our messaging and service fees are very competitively priced. We have seen companies charge up to $25000 for similar branded solutions. This type of complex platforms take a long time to develop. We also provide first class customer service to our clients, in many cases this includes money making marketing ideas.
The monthly $395 maintenance fee can easily be covered just by signing up 3-4 paying customers.
victor | Jul 29, 2007 | Reply
There you go Terence.
Greg Harris | Jul 30, 2007 | Reply
We’ve been doing this here in the U.S. for a while as well.
You’re not going to get prices at around $.03 unless you do tremendous volume. Don’t be misled. Understand what your costs will be as you grow, and don’t just choose a vendor on what their price is at low volumes.
http://www.mobilemarketing.net/resellers.aspx
Billy Jones | Jul 30, 2007 | Reply
I have seen reseller programs that do not charge a monthly fee. A good friend of mine uses one and they are awesome. Make sure you do your homework. Also, these guys talk about 160 characters. What about the opt-out message. Thought that was required , no?
Tero Sahrakorpi / Mobile SMS Marketing | Jul 31, 2007 | Reply
We offer a free to join affiliate program with a 30% recurring payout.
http://www.mobilesmsmarketing.com/affiliate_program.php
The opt-out message is 65 characters.
It is definitively good to do your home work when choosing your mobile marketing partner. However, many companies make it difficult by hiding all their pricing info. Makes you wonder why…?
Greg Harris | Jul 31, 2007 | Reply
Beaudon Spaulding | Jul 31, 2007 | Reply
Afternoon.. My current gateway out of Canada has binds with all wireless carriers for an SMS program that I pay way less then 3 cents a record on. I’ve been using them since Feb07 and now we are moving to phase two of our program which is binary content to the handset.. granted only some of the carriers will allow it but the conversions are huge and viral inbeded shortcodes for sign up allow us to get a 4-1 delivery return.
Absolutly one needs to do their homework, but the posts above are all correct in terms of someone sticking their toe in before investing large sums of capital.
We are charging political canidates up to 8-10 cents per message if they are looking to be within an arms reach of perspective voters
Tero Sahrakorpi | Jul 31, 2007 | Reply
Greg, I wasn’t necessarily referring to you. You probably have your reasons for the low pricing. Services are not created equal and thus cannot be and should not be priced equally.
We allow our customers 160 characters as every message doesn’t have to have the opt-out part.
We actually haven’t modeled our business after yours as we started with our http://www.promo2cell.com service already some time ago.
Also, please notice that Netcom Consulting, Inc has been established in 1995. We were for example amongst the first companies to create pop-up killing software. It is usually so that other companies follow very closely what we do.
As a general rule I don’t consider this type of messaging very constructive. Hopefully we can in the future concentrate on more productive issues.
Tero Sahrakorpi | Jul 31, 2007 | Reply
Beaudon,
Could you explain how you use the viral inbeded short codes in your campaign. Are you sending your customers to a wap page with a sc?
4 to 1 return is not bad.
Beaudon Spaulding | Jul 31, 2007 | Reply
In stating earlier, our latest project is binary content to the handset.. It’s a monthly fee collected by the carrier distributed back through our billing aggregator. These programs are so new in the US, that we could not pass up in the opportunity, viral results could present. Thus, in the binary content the short code to sign up is displayed to the user viewing. A WAP or web destination is available through the phone if they chose or they can head to the site itself to sign up and we’ll push a pin verification to the phone. Not sure I answered the question direct, if not I can have one of our techs provide me a more detailed response.
Tero Sahrakorpi / Mobile SMS Marketing | Aug 1, 2007 | Reply
Sounds like a subscription based PSMS service. It would be nice to take a look at your site though.
Yalimar | Feb 2, 2008 | Reply
Hello,
My name is Yalimar And I am looking to invest some money in this SMS text World Which now days are very popular, To be Honest I don’t know much about this if someone could help to Start this process I will Aprecciate it.
my email. Yalimarperez@tampabay.rr.com
web | Aug 26, 2009 | Reply
can i add this to my website
http://www.spiralteck.com
TJ Kirgin | Aug 27, 2009 | Reply
Another great U.S. Mobile Marketing company offering a dynamic and commercial grade SMS White Label Application is Anchor Mobile Marketing in St. Louis SMS White Label
Mitch | Mar 12, 2010 | Reply
Does this program work in Canada? What can any person with some cash to invest expect?
Thank you