From Loyalty Management Magazine article featuring Vayulogic’s CEO Victor Varney (September 2009)

Q: “I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about incorporating SMS into loyalty program marketing. What should I expect from an implementation perspective? What hurdles are there, what’s the typical timing? There are a lot of different companies in the marketplace offering services, some tips on what to look for would be very helpful?”

A: SMS text messaging is becoming a very important factor in loyalty program marketing. Because this is a 100% permission based medium, those marketers who delay engaging in text based conversation risk losing out to competitors who establish a text relationship quickly – unlike email, customers are going to become very judicious over time about allowing other brands to communicate with them via text. This is a clear case of “first mover advantage.”

Tips to looks for – avoid at all costs working with text messaging companies that are willing to take a list of customers’ mobile numbers (or worse offering you such a list) to send text messages to. These folks are spammers and you run the risk of having customers and the carriers coming after you for engaging in “SPAM” texting. There are many very professional text messaging service providers who can help with campaigns or short lived programs. Their expertise as marketing agencies with mobile technology can be very effective running a short run program. But if your interests in a long term loyalty program, “persistent” service that allows you to engage in text conversations with your customers over a longer period, look for a text message service provider that can build both a data base that tracks all of your customer text interactions and can plug into your back end loyalty program applications. Even more important is that the text message service provider can provide you with assurances that your customer data and only you can send text messages to your customers. There are some text messaging service providers that will claim your “opt in” customers as mobile numbers that they will sell or share to other brands. Not something you or your “loyal” customers would be happy about.