David was interviewed on Direct Marketing News, where he gives a brief description of what Cellit is, touches on mobile coupons and offers, and where mobile, as an industry, stands as of this year and beyond.
NFIB, the Voice of Small Business, just release an article outlining tips for boosting sales through text messaging, which featured Cellit’s David Wachs. The tips include targeting current customers, driving new business and going viral.
“Text message marketing is a low-cost way to get deals into your customers’ hands to drive sales. Texts are more convenient than email or print coupons, so it’s no surprise that they’re effective. Coupons sent via text message are redeemed eight times more often than those sent via email, says David Wachs, founder and president of Cellit, a mobile marketing company in Chicago.
To start sending texts, sign up for a mobile marketing service. Most charge a monthly fee, and some provide additional support, such as advertising materials and coupon-redemption tracking. You can send and schedule texts through an online account.”
Every day, there’s another “mobile technology” company popping up…another competitor, for us to compare ourselves against. While I’m all for choice and competition, comparing us to them really isn’t doing either of us justice. Let me run through our typical competitive analysis (without naming names) and you can be the judge.
History: Cellit’s been around for over 6 years. The competition? 1 year or less.
Client Roster: Cellit has several Fortune 100 retailers and restaurants (at the corporate level) in addition to mom-and-pop clients. Nearly all of them are ongoing clients… not 1-off promotions. The competition? Typically 1 or 2 brands for which they’ve done a promotion here or there.
Team: Our experienced management team comes from a mix of management consulting, technology, broadcast and advertising. The competition? Usually a few guys who’ve worked for an ad firm, with no technology background.
Customer Support: We have three full-time, dedicated customer account managers that spend their entire day working with their assigned clients. We offer customer support for 10 hours each day, and have on-call tech monitoring and support 24 hours a day. The competition? Typically, as these companies are run by 1- and 2-person shops, it’s hard to provide any real customer support.
Development: Our software was developed 100% in-house. We are able to turn around updates much faster than our competition, and often our programmers can develop custom software for our clients in less than a week. With five full-time developers, nobody can match our team for turnaround, experience or customer support.
Connectivity: Cellit connects to all major carriers (“Tier 1″) as well as many of the “tier 2″ and “tier 3″ carriers through direct connections. Our competition: typically just the tier one carriers.
Throughput: Up to 800 messages a second. Our competition: up to twenty (20) messages a second.
Technology: Cellit offers all of the following:
Robust campaign manager with 30+ rules that can be chained together with “and” and “or” logic”
Scheduled, recurring, campaigns
Dynamic branching
Unlimited data collection, via “data fields” that can validate based off “regular expressions”
Automatic, dynamic coupon code generation via our proprietary algorithm, or we can leverage client coupon codes
Full, open, webservice based (SOAP) api, enabling the direct integration of our backend databases with theirs.
REST-based triggers
Our competition? Typically, not even close.
Coupon Redemption: We offer plug-ins for MICROS, Agilysys (and shortly) POSitouch. We also offer the Widgit for Windows-based POS systems, and the iWidgit (for iPhone/iPad) and Widgit for Android. The competition typically has no solution!
Security: As Cellit holds data for some of the largest companies in the world, we are PCI-certified and regularly audited by an independant third party for security holes. Our competition typically has not made security a priority.
In a nutshell, when you compare Cellit to the competition, hopefully you’ll come to the same conclusion our clients have: there is no comparision.
We are all for creative uses of SMS at Cellit, but we have to agree with the national council in Tajikistan that is banning divorce by text message. Apparently, Tajik men are leaving to find in work in Russia, then divorcing their spouses via SMS. Mobile devices are pretty powerful, but some things really should be handled face to face.
“Text message marketing is a low-cost way to get deals into your customers’ hands to drive sales. Texts are more convenient than email or print coupons, so it’s no surprise that they’re effective. Coupons sent via text message are redeemed eight times more often than those sent via email, says David Wachs, founder and president of Cellit, a mobile marketing company in Chicago.
