SMS marketing best practices as a whole were created for mobile marketing to ensure that all mobile marketers have a standard to follow concerning consumers rights and to give the most favorable user experience possible to customers in the mobile arena. The Global Code of Conduct was created by the MMA as a way to keep privacy standards in place and to keep the mobile marketing industry accountable to its customers in order to bring together the entire mobile industry and their wireless policies and practices under one roof.
However, the Global Code of Conduct is over 100 pages long and not an easy read. It is important for you and your partners to understand the best practices in SMS marketing. This is even truer if you are a member of the Mobile Marketing Association. Just in case you don’t have time to read the entire document or you need a brief refresher course, here a few of the main points to keep in mind and get you started on your path of understanding these mobile guidelines.
Why The SMS Mobile Marketing Standards Matter
According to the MMA, the idea of instituting tight consumer privacy practices is to “guard the mobile channel from abuses by marketers that are unethical, and keep the consumer backlash and regulatory scrutiny high.” At this point in time, SMS marketing is still pretty new in terms of a marketing strategy. While text messaging and other kinds of mobile marketing are effective, those that were popular before such as email marketing are dwindling. The reason for this is that spam is not nearly as bad in the mobile marketing arena as it is with email marketing. As long as support for consumer privacy laws stays strong, mobile marketers will continue to have success in their field.
Five Main Points Behind the Mobile Marketing Code of Conduct
There are five categories in the MMA Code of Conduct:
- Notice: Notice gives customers everything they might need to make decisions about which marketing program to use.
As a marketer you must let your customers know exactly what they are signing up for. If you own a website where customers can sign up to be on your list, you must let the customer know what kind of communication to expect, when it will arrive, and how much of it they will get.
- Choice & Permission: Choice and permission allow customers to choose which mobile messages they want to receive.
In order to assure best practices in SMS marketing, a marketer must give the customer the chance to opt in or out of an opportunity. The way this is done does not matter as much as the actual consent. You can either deliver this consent through a form, SMS, or any other method that is clear to the consumer. This should be done on a continuous basis in order to keep spam at bay.
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