Mobile Marketing for Your Employees

Informing Your Employees

Whether you’re expanding your team, or just getting on board with mobile marketing, it’s important to be on the same page with those who help run your business. As a manager, your time is extremely valuable, and you likely find yourself delegating tasks to your associates. But do they know how to handle the tasks you give them? Do they know the difference between an SMS and an MMS? Do they know your keyword and shortcode? Can they help customers find their coupons and help them redeem them? With the Streamwerks Mobile Marketing platform, you can send out text blasts, multimedia messages, text-to-win contests, and much more! However, when you have a specific marketing plan in mind, handing that responsibility over to an employee can be daunting when faced with these questions. In this blog, we’ll talk about how to train your employees about different messaging media types, platform training, messaging etiquette, and your point of sale.

Platform Information

As you begin to hand over more marketing to your employees, show them how to navigate the Streamwerks platform. There are many features on our platform, but you’ll find that your company only uses a few of these. Go through each tutorial on the features that you use with your employees to ensure that your marketing tasks go out quickly and efficiently. This can be especially important with time-sensitive content, such as Text-to-Win Contests, and Loyalty Programs.

Once you’re logged into the Streamwerks Media platform, you can click on the small video icon in the corner of each feature. If you don’t see a button on some of these features, this is completely normal. These are features that require additional training linked to other parts of the platform. These can be explained and taught in one-on-one training with us.

As you plan ahead for special events, saving to a later date can ensure that you don’t accidentally send it out immediately before it’s done. And while you may know this, your employees will not. Training within the platform is painless and easy. If the tutorials aren’t helping either, or you need a personal refresher on how to use your features, you can also call/email Rob at Streamwerks for one-on-one training to get back up to speed.

Explaining SMS vs. MMS to Your Employees

You just figured out a great event announcement idea, and you want to send it to your customer base as soon as possible for the upcoming weekend. You let your marketing associate know that you want to send out a message with the idea. Does your employee know the difference between an MMS and an SMS? Or which one would be better suited for this type of message?

Here’s a quick breakdown of the main differences between the two:

SMS (Short Media Service, a.k.a. text message)

  • Basic text message of up to 160 characters
  • Can create message templates
  • Great for quick promos or reminders for events

MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service, a.k.a. video/image with text message)

  • Multimedia files and text message of up to 500 characters
  • Can send an audio file, video, image, pdf, vcard
  • Great for large announcements, or wordy promos that can be better accomplished in an action-packed video/image

For either message, you want to stay within the character boundary. Not only is this for the sake of having one singular message sent out (having more than one could result in the messages being sent in the wrong order, as it will send in multiple parts), but you also need to respect the attention span of a customer. Sending out paragraphs to a customer’s phone could result in them opting out if they have to read too much to see what you’re offering. You and your employees will be able to see the character count below the message box. It will appear red when you’ve gone over the character limit.

Message Etiquette

So now your employees are trained on how to use the platform, and they’re ready to start sending out messages. Now comes the training on message etiquette. This includes the timeliness of sending a message, the content of the message, and the quality of the message. Mobile marketing is a powerful tool and should be used responsibly.

Timeliness

It’s 3 am, and your phone suddenly buzzes with urgency. You wake up, bleary-eyed to see who has texted you at such an odd hour. It’s a coupon for a BOGO ice cream! Not only are you irritated that you’ve been sent a message at a very late hour, but to ensure it doesn’t happen again, you opt out from that list! Whether you think the coupon sounded great or not, the time at which you received it was enough for you to stop shopping at that business. When you are training your employees to send out messages, remind them to always keep the texts between the hours of 9 am and 10 pm, just as you would a normal business. Even when you’ve forgotten to send out a last-minute reminder, if it’s outside of these hours, save it for the next day.

Content

You have an allotted amount of messages that you buy with your monthly marketing plan. We encourage you to use some of these messages to communicate with your customer base! Your customers like to be seen as “insiders”, “VIPs”, and “Those in the Know.” Send them information about your building updates if you are under construction, for example, to build excitement; or let them know about an employee’s birthday if they interact with the employee often. In addition to this, it is important to note that even if you are a business that caters to age-restricted items, there is no filter or screen that prevents underage users from receiving your messages. To comply with federal messaging regulations in this aspect, alcohol, tobacco, firearms, gambling, and other topics/themes are not allowed to be sent via SMS or MMS.

Does this prevent your business from creating content to send to your audience? Of course not! For example, a brewery could create a contest to win a Mike’s hard cider cooler, but you wouldn’t be able to include the alcohol’s brand name in the message. People could see the brand in an image attached to the contest, but the message being sent out would only include “you’re entered to win a cooler!”. Including words like “alcohol”, “jackpot”, “cash”, etc. will prevent your mass messages from reaching your customers. Be sure to give your employees a compiled list of “red-flag” words during your training that could create problems with your content.

If you are concerned with accidentally including a restricted word in your advertising, Rob can work with you to help craft messages for raffles, contests, and loyalty programs without including some of these regulated words, or suggest alternative ideas to getting your messages out and noticed.

Want some great ideas for how you can create a text-to-win campaign for your company? We’ve explained it all in this blog!

Text-to-Win and QR Code Scan-To-Win Campaigns

On a final note for this section, we do not permit any hate speech or violent themes, and any attempt to advertise with these will result in an immediate suspension of your account.

Quality

As you allow your employees’ creative freedom to interweave with MMS’s and coupons, ensure that the images your company sends out are of high quality! There is a restriction on file size when uploading these images and videos (Image dimensions: 1024×1024 px, Image File Size: 1MB). When you are inserting these media into your messages, having an incredible image can be just the wow factor you need to pull someone to your store. However, sending out a blurry, difficult-to-read image can also do the exact opposite for your business. Before you send anything from your computer, teach your employees to send a test image to their phone and your phone. You can find this option within the Text Message and MMS feature underneath the opt-in/contact lists. If you can then approve it from that test, then you know that you’re good to send it out to your customers!

You can type in the phone number with or without dashes.

Point of Sale

It’s important to know all the points above, but without a contact list, you don’t have any customers to send messages to! When customers visit your storefront, have your employees remind them to type their phone number into the kiosk. If the customer is new to the business, asking them to opt in properly is crucial. People are sensitive about their information and don’t like to give their phone numbers to a business they’ve visited for the first time.

We recommend giving your employees a script for this step. For example, they can say “Please enter your number into our kiosk so we can send you in-store deals and important information”, or whatever you prefer. This opens up the dialect to explain a loyalty program if you have one, or special deals and coupons that opt-ins have access to. By building this relationship, you can grow the number of people you reach with offers.

Make Your Employees Experts in Mobile Marketing

Your employees are essential to the marketing of your brand, as they are the face that your customers will often interact with. Giving them the proper instruction and tools to efficiently use your platform builds their confidence in assisting customers and makes them knowledgeable and reliable sources of information for your storefront. This is crucial for allocating your time as a store manager and creating a team that believes in your brand on a personal level.

Streamwerks Media provides services that are here to help you as you and your employees learn to use the technology. Alternatively, Streamwerks can also act as your marketing administrative assistant for a nominal fee. As you begin to plan your monthly marketing ideas, reach out to Rob and bring along your marketing assistant to slowly incorporate these blog practices. We’ll sit down with you and your team to go over demos and Rob can start training you to set your team up on the path to mobile marketing success.