Email marketing is a well established and highly effective marketing method but SMS (Text Message) marketing is still in its infancy – TextAnywhere looks set to become one of the major players in this channel.

In a world where most people carry a mobile device around with them that is capable of sending and receiving SMS text messages it is a surprise to me that thsoe little mesages are not more widely used for marketing purposes. They are used all the time by businesses to communicate for admin purposes – why, even my local doctors surgery sends me a text to remind me if I have an appointment the next day – but, as yet, not so much for marketing.

I don’t imagine that will remain the case for long however, so here’s an opportunity to get ahead of the crowd and get your SMS marketing campaign up and running.

To do that, you are going to need some software or some kind of SaaS platform that provides the service. We’ve looked at a few of these but one that pops up regularly is TextAnywhere with their TextCampaign mobile marketing tool which enables you to conduct personalised 2-way SMS marketing campaigns from any web-connected pc or tablet.

TextCampaign enables users to create and manage large-scale SMS marketing campaigns. Just open a (free) account with TextAnywhere and you can use your databases and lists of mobile phone numbers to become the campaign recipients.

TextAnywhere has an easy-to-use step-by-step user interface that helps users to setup and run a text-messaging campaign in no time at all. Just upload your file of recipients and type in the message you wish to send. You then just schedule the campaign’s delivery slot – now or in the future.

You can also stagger the sending of the SMS messages over a poeriod of time so as to enable you to make sure that you have resources available to respond to any replies or responsesyou may get. Coverage is more or less global abd can include any number of recipients with each message cpable of being personalised. You can also check the delivery status of every message sent with replies being received into your email inbox. They can also be consolidated into a spreadsheet, for working on later.

There’s some new EU legislation on the horizon that affects both email markleting and mobile phone marketing and TextAnywhere have thought about that in advance – thier system will enable you to comply with that legislation, which is a weight off your mind when fines can run into the millions. Your TextCampaign can maintain an un-subscribers’ Opt-out List whereby message recipients just need to text back “STOP” to make sure they do not get any more messages.

Best of all, TextCampaign is free to use and there are no no set-up or monthly fees. You only pay for the messages you send and that can be by pre-purchasing a pack of messages, or by monthly invoice based on usage. Message packs start at £12.25 for 250 texts but you can get bigger discounts by purchasing larger packs.

With my digital marketer’s hat on I can sit here and say that TextAnywhere is a very useful tool to have at your disposal but be sure to use it carefully. Plan your SMS campaign with thought and don’t be tempted to blast your contacts with too many messages. Used properly this is a powerful tool but I’m equally sure that if you do it wrong it could turn around and bite you on the bum.

There’s a free trial available so give it a go.