As I look at our customers business, one common phrase underlines each of our clients campaigns: stndrd txt msg rates aply (which translates in English to ‘standard text message rates apply’). Many end users confuse this to mean that Cellit, or the message sender, will impose some fee for receiving the marketing messages that are being sent out – a subscription fee, if you will. Rather, it refers to the various fees carriers charge each of their mobile customers for sending and receiving text messages (regardless of who they come from). Since I have a comprehensive plan (including all data, SMS and cell phone calls) – I rarely think about how many text messages I send or receive. However, many end users have limited SMS plans or pay on a per-text basis.
I recognize that a limited plan, or a per-text plan, would significantly alter my behavior patterns and does alter the behavior patterns of those end users I speak of. I would be more selective about which mobile clubs I subscribed to and how often they communicated with me, reserving the bulk of my available text messages for those critical 156 character blurbs of wisdom from friends and family.
There are two ways to solve this problem. First, encourage the carriers to include unlimited text messaging as a standard feature on all of their cell phone plans, or second – a concept called FTEU. Free to the End User (FTEU) refers to the sending company bearing the full cost of any associated fees. FTEU is a common practice in the European Union, as their revenue model has always relied on the sender (whether an individual or company) to bear the cost of the message. However, in the US, the sender and the receiver jointly bear that cost – which makes for some tricky accounting on the part of the carriers, and thus – delayed adoption of FTEU.
Market forces will eventually force carriers to bundle unlimited text messaging into all of their service offerings in much the same way we’ve seen data limits on internet access disappear from the landscape (remember those great AOL CD’s that offered 160mb of free data downloads for only $19.95/month!). I’m not worried about that, as I can’t control the speed at which the market adopts this mentality.
However, I’ve begun to engage the carriers on the issue of making FTEU easier for individual companies to implement. This I can impact. Imagine how many more end users would engage our mobile marketing messages and subscribe to our clubs if they knew that 100% of the cost was being born by someone other than themselves? While we wait for unlimited text messaging to become universal, FTEU offers a solution wherein marketers can benefit from the end result in the here and now. Sure – there’s cost associated with it, but I think it is great business practice, and eliminates one potential barrier for consumers to opt-in to your marketing messages.
