Considering how new the medium is, conducting SMS-based campaigns, especially educational ones, may seem daunting or challenging. But I assure you, there is a lot that you probably already know.
A large part of running a campaign is using common sense and focusing on what you already know (ie, audience, content, objectives, and outcomes).
Here are a few tips to keep in mind:
Engage Your Audience, It’s a Two-Way Street
- A mobile educational campaign should be about engaging and interacting with your audience, not just pushing information, content and surveys at them. Add value to what you send out. Don’t provide too much information or content in the message…that’s what a website is for. Mobile messaging is unique in that it’s such an exclusive channel to your audience. It has to be done right from the first message on.
Provide Value
- Be creative in this. Give them something that they need for a particular time or situation. For example, say you’re engaging your audience at a conference, send them alerts and reminders of key presentations, abstracts, plenary sessions with time, location and speaker information.
Be Open, Reliable and Timely
- Because it’s such an exclusive channel, gain their trust. Ask for their permission to participate. In healthcare, the information and the timeliness of the information is critical to your audience.
Utilize Other Media
- Mobile messaging should not be seen as an add-on for your programs but rather as an integrated component. The learning objectives you have for your other media formats should be the same for the mobile component as well.
- Utilize mobile messaging to enhance audience awareness, generation and participation in activities such as live meetings, satellite broadcasts etc., by providing opt-in information in flyers, BRCs, email invites, posters, handouts, slides, pre- and post-tests etc.
Have a Plan
- Mobile messaging in education can be an integral part of learning. So make sure that you have a detailed plan of what when and how many times to send them (pre-tests, post-tests, evaluation, alerts, auto-responders etc) information related to your program.
Push, Not Pull
- Mobile educational campaigns work best when your audience has an opportunity to be involved. Use your faculty or thought leaders to engage your audience, ask trivia questions, be funny (seriously), poll them and ask for feedback.
Be Clear and Concise
- In a medium where you are limited to 160 characters per message, it’s unbelievably important that you be as clear as possible about what you want to convey. Let your audience know what the value is in participating, what your expectations are and what they need to do.
Outcomes
- Outcomes are key! It’s necessary to assess how effective your education was. So make sure that you have access to detailed analytics that can provide you with such information.
Mobile messaging can be a powerful medium in the education space, but ‘with great power, comes great responsibility.’ And as long as you keep in mind the above tips, you should see fairly significant results.
For more information on how 2digiti, contact us at vg@2digiti.com
2 Comments
Comment by Daniel Guinee — January 5, 2010 @ 12:39 pm
Seems great. How do you get the access to the cellphones, so as to distribute your messages?
Comment by 2digiti — January 5, 2010 @ 2:27 pm
They are all opt-in subscribers. You would have to provide a short code to all of your materials, handouts, emails, BRC’s,website etc and have them opt-in. And as you build your subscriber list, they stay with you through multiple programs. This can be seen as a barrier or as an opportunity.
Obviously, conversion rates for opt-in methods are much smaller, but you do get targeted and higher participation, interaction and feedback from those subscribers you do have. Also, if done properly and one doesn’t get overzealous in the messages they send to the subscribers, you tend to have a very ‘brand’ loyal group.
For example, while not specific data to our industry, awareness rates for marketing programs can be high as 23% (some ‘data on file’ even has it over 40%) over normal methods.
Here are some more interesting statistics:
1. About 24% of those with texting capabilities opt-in to receive text messages from a company.
2. 94% of all text messages are read; and 75% of these are read instantly.
3. Some campaigns have even shown a 90% higher than average click thru rate from a SMS message.
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