Category: mobileStorm for Marketing – Product Updates

mobileStorm, an 11-year veteran of mobile, email, and social communication, announces the release of mobileStorm 5.0, a powerfully designed, cloud-based communication solution for marketers and healthcare organizations.

Los Angeles, CA, Oct. 11th, 2011 – mobileStorm, Inc. (www.mobilestorm.com), a “communication powerhouse” according to the Ford Motor Company, announced today that it has officially released mobileStorm 5.0 (aka mS5), a new, cloud-based communication platform for healthcare payers and providers as well as marketers from a variety of industries.  “mS5 has been several years in the making,” says mobileStorm CEO & Founder Jared Reitzin. He continues, “We have studied where digital communication has been headed for the past decade. Now with the computing power of the cloud, enormous amounts of behavioral data can be crunched in real time, resulting in powerful recommendations that can enable any-sized business to reach the right person, via the right channel, at the right time. mobileStorm is working hard to make intelligent communication a reality, and mS5 is the first step towards that goal. Our mission is to create the most intelligent communication platform on the planet.”

mobileStorm’s offering represents the culmination of the company’s extensive experience servicing the messaging needs of major brands such as Humana, New Balance, and Kaiser Permanente.

Amazing User Experience

mobileStorm 5.0 focuses intensely on user experience. The system was designed with the Apple way of thinking that “less is more.” Designed to be a clear, simple, and easy-to-use tool for messaging, the cloud-based SaaS platform breaks the communication process down into three simple steps: plan, compose, and schedule. Front-end user experience technology such as HTML5 enables the “drag and drop” of many objects, screen slide transitions, and dynamic displays of data. An amazing user experience is incredibly valuable for the healthcare industry where typical enterprise software systems are bulky, ugly, and difficult to use. Mr. Reitzin continues, “We want our healthcare partners spending more time on keeping their consumers healthy and less time trying to figure out how to create and send messages.”

Integrated Communication

“The first phase to achieving our mission of communication intelligence is to ensure our clients can communicate with their customers over multiple channels; and we needed to make sure that the channels were not in their own silos,” says Mr. Reitzin. “With mS5, adding another channel to a single campaign is as simple as clicking a new tab. Imagine being able to run an SMS poll alongside an email offer, and both messages are working together to influence your customers to act. We spent two months alone validating how to provide a multi-channel campaign experience in three steps.”

Advanced Reporting

In the same way that multiple channels of communication have been integrated into a campaign creation experience, mobileStorm took an integrated approach to reporting. A client sending out an email and SMS campaign at the same time can view an integrated dashboard for detailed reports such as open and click-thru rates, message failures and reasons, complaints, and unsubscribe data.  mobileStorm’s goal, Mr. Reitzin said, “is to save our clients time and give them what they want–one screen with all of their important information in one place.”

Additional Features:

mobileStorm 5.0 also supports campaign goal-setting, advanced audience segmentation, message personalization, social media integration with Facebook and Twitter, advanced list management, as well as tightened security and one-click customer service. For its enterprise healthcare customers, mobileStorm received its HIPAA compliance in June of this year.

To find out more about mobileStorm 5.0, please visit www.mobilestorm.com/ms5.

About mobileStorm

Based in Los Angeles, California, with more than a decade of mobile and email messaging experience, mobileStorm has delivered billions of messages on behalf of thousands of premier customers such as Humana, NASCAR, American Idol, and Kaiser Permanente. As a Communication Service Provider (CSP), mobileStorm’s mission is to help companies communicate with as much relevancy as possible, allowing everyone to win, from the ISP or carrier who delivers a message to the consumer who desperately wants to engage with content that matters. mobileStorm backs up their web-based technology with expert advice and legendary customer service that drives ROI for its customers.

We’re pleased to announce a new feature of the mobileStorm platform that allows users to quickly and easily share the Online version of their campaigns via social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and more.

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We’ve been notified that AOL has recently made some updates to their system and is doing a little Spring Cleaning!   In a nutshell AOL is going to be cancelling some inactive mailboxes.  These are mailboxes that have been abandoned by users but still receive mail.  As we all know mailing bulk mail to inactive addresses is a good way to invite email delivery problems into your Marketing house.  So AOL is doing everyone a favor by eliminating ‘some’ of these inactive addresses on their end.  They could easily turn them into Spamtraps and really put a hurtin’ on honest email marketers but they have decided to simply delete these mailboxes (Thank you AOL!).

As a result, we at mobileStorm are going to be making changes on our end to remove these addresses from your email lists.  Customers may notice an increase in AOL Hard Bounces next time they send an email campaign and it’s possible that overall Active subscriber counts will see a slight decrease as well.  Unfortunately mobileStorm has no further information on exactly how many AOL mailboxes will  be removed on their end.   Please rest assured that this will only benefit your email marketing efforts moving forward.

Changes will be happening starting Friday 7/9 and should subside once all bad addresses have been removed from your lists. How frequently mobileStorm customers send email campaigns to their entire database will determine how long this ‘inactive mailbox removal’ process will last.  If any customers have any questions about this please feel free to call us at 1.866.492.7886 (press 2) or email us at support@mobilestorm.com or hit us up in Live Chat from inside the mS system.

From AOL Postmaster:

As part of the migration to the new email architecture, some inactive mailboxes are being canceled. Our sender reputation systems were adjusted prior to this change so that the increase in invalid recipients would not negatively impact mailers.  Please follow your normal procedures for removing accounts that repeatedly return as invalid.

mobileStorm is excited to announce the addition of mobile applications as an add-on for PRO customers seeking quick entrance into the exploding mobile apps space.

With the addition of mobile apps, PRO customers can quickly and seamlessly introduce a branded iPhone/iPod Touch app featuring any content distributed through their existing RSS feeds.  In addition, mobileStorm streamlines the process, meaning your mobile app can be built, tested and submitted to Apple’s App Store in a matter of days, not weeks or months.  Our dedicated staff holds your hand throughout the entire process, ensuring a quick and painless process of getting your branded mobile app out the door so you can reap the benefits.

Some core features of our new mobile app offering include;

• Full compatibility with iPhone and iPod Touch, including full inclusion to Apple’s App Store .
• The ability to easily add news content, calendar events, various Web content, and blog posts.
• The ability to automatically add content from existing feeds including RSS, Blogger, Twitter, YouTube, Flikr, and more directly into your mobile app.
• The ability to edit artwork and change your app at anytime.
• The option to search for additional content that may not be specific to your own brand and co-publish it in your app.
• The ability to easily customize the look and feel of your app.

Mobile apps are available now to all PRO customers.  Learn more here, or schedule a demo to see what our creative expertise can do for you!

As part of the continued evolution of our product offerings, we’re always looking for ways to enhance usability.  As such, we’ve made a small change to the “delete” function pertaining to rows of data.

On all pages where a list of records is displayed, we’ve removed the Delete button from the individual rows.  Users can still delete an item by checking the checkbox and then clicking ‘Delete Selected’.

The following sections are affected by this update;

• My Lists
• My Forms
• My Campaigns
• My Subscribers
• Targets

The change comes as we follow the usability principal that dangerous actions should not be easy to perform.  Placing the delete button on each individual row may cause users to accidentally delete valuable information.  By creating one extra step, it ensures any data that’s deleted was truly meant to be removed.

As part of the continued evolution of our product offerings, we’re always looking for ways to enhance usability.  As such, we’ve made a small change to the “delete” function pertaining to rows of data.

On all pages where a list of records is displayed, we’ve removed the Delete button from the individual rows.  Users can still delete an item by checking the checkbox and then clicking ‘Delete Selected’.

The following sections are affected by this update;

• My Lists
• My Forms
• My Campaigns
• My Subscribers
• Targets

The change comes as we follow the usability principal that dangerous actions should not be easy to perform.  Placing the delete button on each individual row may cause users to accidentally delete valuable information.  By creating one extra step, it ensures any data that’s deleted was truly meant to be removed.

We at mobileStorm are always busy bringing you the latest and greatest in terms of features and functionality, and today we’re happy to announce that we’ve added a new feature: SMS bounce reports.

The new feature breaks down SMS campaign bounces by type and carrier, giving you a better understanding of how and why your SMS messages aren’t being delivered.  More information is provided about the exact subscribers who bounced by clicking on “View Details.”

Various bounce types are returned based on specific reasoning, including:

• Hard — The cell phone number no longer exists on that carrier
• Soft — A soft bounce is when the carrier’s message queue is full at the time of delivery.  The cell phone number is still valid, it just couldn’t be delivered at this time.
• On Blocklist — The cell phone number is on a carrier blocklist and cannot be delivered.
• Spam — Your SMS campaign was considered spam, and as a result, was rejected by the carrier.
• Unknown — The carrier replied back with an “unknown” reason for the delivery of this message.

The new feature is available now for all current mobileStorm clients.  If you’re not a client, we encourage you to take a look at what mobileStorm can do for your business by going one-on-one with one of our marketing specialists.

We’re always working with our clients to bake more goodies into mobileStorm Go and Pro to fully optimize the user experience. Every feature request means an opportunity to make our product more powerful and boost campaign performance.

We’ve just added some new features to mobileStorm that our users have been asking for and here they are:

• You can now view Delivery Confirmation Receipts for all carriers in your SMS delivery report

• Any failed MT (Mobile Terminated) SMS Messages will now show in your SMS delivery report

• See the exact date and time that SMS messages have been sent when you export your SMS Inbox

• You can now expand parent email events in “email campaigns” to see the individual “recurring” scheduled events

We’ve also broadened our carrier reach adding Cellular South and nTelos to the list of carriers our clients can text through. This increases potential audience reach by over 5 million people.

We continue to upgrade our product on an ongoing basis to ensure that all our client’s needs are met.

If you’re a client you can benefit from all the most recent updates now. If not, we encourage to go one-on-one with our marketing professionals and take us for test drive at http://www.mobilestorm.com/pro/schedule-demo/.

Until our next update . . . it’s back to the kitchen to keep perfecting our recipe.

All the best,

The mobileStorm Team