Clients ask me all the time: What’s better for their mobile strategy, using a shared short code or a dedicated short code? Each has its own set of pros and cons. In this post I will set the record straight.

Shared Short Code

PROS

1. Time to market: Sharing a mobile marketing company’s short code is the fastest way to get into the mobile space. For instance, clients using the mobileStorm 4.0 platform can create a keyword like “SHOP” and within 10 seconds, that keyword is live and can receive texts from any carrier in the United States. Becoming a mobile marketer takes seconds, not months. Your time to market with a shared short code is extraordinary.

2. Cost: Short codes are expensive; it’s not like buying a $7.99-per-month domain from Godaddy. If you are sharing a code, typically there are very little additional costs involved other than paying for your messages going out.

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You might have heard that mobileStorm recently launched RSS messaging. That makes us the only company globally that provides 6 ways to communicate with prospects and customers from the same web-based control panel.

RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is a relatively new web technology that is used to publish frequently updated content such as blogs and news. The first version of RSS was created in March of 1999 for use on the my.netscape.com portal. A 2004 Pew study found that 1 out of 20 people online said they used an RSS aggregator to read content online. So, I can only image how big that number is today. RSS was also the 3rd most searched for “what is” term on Google last year.

All major online portals use RSS to push content to their sites. MyYahoo, for example, is basically just a bunch of RSS feeds. Yahoo lets you customize which news you do and do not want to see. Additionally, Firefox and even Outlook 2007 now have RSS readers built into their applications. This allows you to subscribe to a feed by simply clicking an icon, and the feed is added to your RSS reader.

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As you may have noticed in the past couple of years, open rates have declined, making it harder and harder to reach the inbox. This is due to the large anti-spam systems that ISPs have had to put in place to thwart spammers. Unfortunately, permission-based mail also gets treated as spam. So how do you improve your open rates?

Well first, let’s talk about what an open rate is. An open rate is the percentage of mail you have sent, divided by the number of unique people that have opened your message. So if you successfully sent an email to 100 people, and 50 of those people open your email, then you would receive a 50% open rate (that would be a nice figure huh?).

A lot of marketers feel the larger the list they have the better things will be, but this is simply not true. It’s all about the quality of a list, not quantity. Why would you want to continue to send emails to people who don’t care? People who don’t open your email (and we aren’t talking about plain text emails here), don’t care about your content. You need to get real with yourself and face the facts. The first thing you should do is go back over the last 10 campaigns you sent, and remove all of the people who have not opened your email.

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Jared talks about a brand new upgrade in Stun! called Video Broadcasting. mobileStorm clients can now easily upload videos into Stun! and have them distributed to multiple video communities like youtube, myspace and dailymotion, as well as gain valuable insight into how those videos are performing: