Casino Spam Sms
Jumping the Curve
- Casino sms payment – step-by-step guide: First of all, open Deposit options and select Pay by SMS. After that, select the payment amount and click the Deposit button. Then enter your mobile number in the special field, click the “Continue” button and wait for SMS. After you receive the SMS, you will need to confirm the payment during 15.
- You can literally spam someone’s phone with texts or phone calls for up to 24 hours. The user will never know who sent the prank, which makes it perfect for when you need to stay anonymous! You can even send your own custom message if you want to, but we found the default text messages they send are really funny.
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Guy Kawasaki (managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm and a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine and previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc.) speaks of a concept called “jumping the curve.”
I was fortunate enough to listen to Guy speak at Preview Las Vegas in 2008. The long and short of it is that companies often fall victim to success and don’t invest in the next evolution of their industry. One example Guy uses is the business of keeping food cold. Originally people had to go up to high altitudes to get ice for storing food. Then factories began to produce ice and delivered it to customers. Finally we had the home refrigerator which could freeze ice, eliminating the need for delivery. No one company survived all three stages of this evolution. Prior businesses died out and a host of new businesses emerged at each stage of the evolution. The moral is that your business is relevant one day and can lose relevance if you don’t pay attention.
The Gaming Curve
As a long-time veteran of casino partnerships, experience tells me that the trend of adoption and the use of SMS will follow the same rates of adoption, success and failure that I’ve seen in 7 years in the casino entertainment industry for other new channels, especially email. Casino properties sell “entertainment,” nothing more. At least in Las Vegas, the value proposition is very broad with offerings from high-end spa to low-brow topless shows. This melting pot of time-eating fun is based on one thing.
I have had the privilege of working closely with some of the greatest minds in the gaming world. Jenny Holaday, a seasoned revenue management, marketing and branding whiz kid whois widely known for her role with Harrah’s Entertainment as Regional VP of Marketing in Atlantic City overseeing over $2B in revenue for 4 premiere properties, said the most interesting thing to really break down the fundamental problem in finding gamers. She said, “You can have two twins with identical habits, incomes, attitudes, etc. and one’s a gamer and one’s not and there’s nothing that will tell you who is who until they come into the casino and game.” With this in mind, we understand that gaming customers are identified over time through their gaming history and why the industry is so offer-based.
The Email Jump
Direct mail is the backbone of casino marketing and has been for over 30 years. Gamers are conditioned to receive offers in their mailbox. They crave the next exciting offer and will often complain when the offers they “earned” are not received. This conditioning of anticipating offers in the mailbox has not been an easy habit to break. The use of email marketing by casino marketers has only recently been widely used in this decade. The more progressive markets that have developed a “best practices” approach to email marketing like many Las Vegas resorts experience high rates of return, reduced expense over direct mail and shorter implementation periods for loyalty campaigns.
In working with the most progressive property on the Las Vegas Strip, I saw first hand the initial depression of open rates and click-thrus while increasing deliverability and database size. In 2006 this property began utilizing email for hotel and gaming offers dropping their direct mail expenses nearly 50% over 2 years allowing for the rapid development of a robust and effective email program. From 2006 to 2007 this property experienced a 6% drop in email open rates (from 50% to 44%), sending nearly 3MM emails in 2007, an increase of almost 16% over 2006. The number of email campaigns increase by 18% from 2006 to 2007 with 202 campaigns sent in 2007. The trend is higher deliverability (through an obvious attention to “best practices”,) more campaigns, more recipients, lower open rates and lower click-thru rates. This property adhered to compliance with the guidelines set by all the major ISP’s and maintained a very clean database.
It is safe to say that these rates have continued to drop as email boxes become more and more saturated with marketing messaging, spam filters block more mail, the target audience becomes desensitized to messaging and other environmental factors. Email response rates will normalize over time giving casino marketers a reliability to deliver messages and offers to customers, but the early days of abnormally high ROI will be a forgotten side-effect of ideal market conditions for those that started right and started early with their email marketing program. For those that began late, that high rate of return will never be realized. As bad as this sounds, email marketing should be utilized by each and every casino in every gaming market throughout the world as the most cost-effective direct marketing method available.
The SMS Jump
Experience tells us that the use of SMS will follow the same rates of adoption, success and failure that we’ve seen for other channels in the casino entertainment industry such as email. Think of the analogy by Guy above, but replace our need for “ice” (or really the ability to keep perishables cold) with our need for gamers. There are many different ways of delivering the message that will entice these key drivers for successful acquisition and retention of customers. Similar to the early days of email marketing for gaming properties, the ideal climate exists right now for those that have begun a responsible mobile marketing program.
Take the Las Vegas market with tourist population of about 40MM (That’s about 13% of the entire population of the US!) that are being trained to use their cell phones while on a casino property. Databases on the Las Vegas Strip range from 7,000 to 50,000 active cell phone numbers of those that have opted in to receive casino entertainment messages direct to their cell phone. The number for most of these properties are increasing exponentially as gamers become more comfortable with releasing their mobile phone number to marketers. Outside of Las Vegas, mobileStorm‘s casino partners throughout the country are experiencing similar success.
Casino Spam Sms App
According to the Nevada Commission on Tourism, a study conducted by Nielsen indicates that the mobile Web is growing at a rapid pace; as of May 2008 there were 40MM active mobile Internet users in the U.S. alone. A more recent study by PhoCusWright indicates that the smart phone adoption is reaching critical mass and by 2010 half of travelers will be utilizing the mobile Web while on vacation. As more and more Americans access the mobile Web the demand for relevant offers sent to mobile phones is expected to increase.
More food for thought…In a recent article on 4Hoteliers.com, the Sabre Travel Network recently surveyed 800 corporate and leisure travelers from Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America and North America covering topics ranging from preferred features to fees travelers might pay for travel applications. They found that 69% of these travelers owned as smart phone (78% if we drill down on just North American travelers) and 47% are over the age of 40! The article goes on to explain what types of messaging travelers are getting to their phones:
- Flight notification (72%)
- Weather forecasts (68%)
- Viewing of hotel locations via map (67%)
- Flight performance (65%)
- Destination information/city guides (64%)
The Next Leap
All this information gives us a pretty clear picture of what mobile marketing means to the travel industry. 2010 will be a very “formative” year for travelers as marketers either adhere to best practices and begin at the beginning of their mobile marketing program or abuse the right to have a true one-to-one relationship with their customers.
Several common mistakes of those entering into mobile marketing that we’ve seen have prompted us to create a list of “Don’ts”:
- Don’t overshoot the audience in terms of their technical capabilities to create downloadable mobile apps. This will work for a select few that have mastered their mobile device but will likely not be appropriate for the majority of your customers. We were at a recent trade show and had to show most of the executives how to execute a text message on their iPhones. I seriously doubt most of them were downloading applications for offers from their favorite hotel.
- Don’t send too many text message. If you are sending too much through SMS without each message being of relatively high value compared to offers sent through other channels, you are ruining it for everyone. Mobile is sensitive and very personal. We as marketers have a duty to protect this channel and not ruin opportunities to acclimate people to responding to text message offers.
- Don’t rush the process. Give your customers and potential customers time to get used to the idea of receiving messages from you on their phone. Send your mom a text tomorrow and see what happens. I know if I send one to mine, it would be just as effective to throw my cell phone as far as I can in her direction. She is the quintessential gamer…55-year-old women who will spend hours trying to earn her next set of snowman salt and pepper shakers. I am happy she just really started using her email account in 2009. I think we may hit our breakthrough with text in 2010.
- Don’t repeat offers that you are giving through other media. This is where customers create value for giving up their mobile privacy. If your offer is weak in comparison to other general offers, your customer will feel betrayed and your efforts will likely backfire. Offers sent via SMS should be unique to that channel and be highly relevant. Save your best offers for SMS and just like Pavlov’s dogs, they will begin to salivate every time their phone buzzes.
The days of MMS (multimedia message service), location-based technology, integration of POS/Hotel/Player Tracking systems and all the bells and whistles of mobile marketing are available today, but the consumer is king. Much like where email is today after a few decades of mainstream use, mobile will take time for people to get used to and we as marketers control the outcome of what that looks like by how we treat the medium.
Smart Casino Sms Spam
The vast majority of us are not “innovators” or “early adopters”. We can segment our mobile efforts to include those that are more proficient with mobile devices, but the majority of those that have mobile phones will not be able to accept complex messaging or messaging that requires a complex set of steps to access it. For now, KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) is a good rule of thumb and the key is working with a mobile partner that gets where the population is in this bell curve and moves along it seamlessly with technology, best practices, knowledge of ever-changing compliance issues and carrier requirements and just a dash of common sense. I believe we are going to move at least half of mobile phone owners over into the “Early Majority” in regard to utilizing text to receive offers by the end of 2010.
Please go to our whitepaper on Casino Mobile Marketing:
There is a ton of recent and relevant information on what happened on the casino landscape in 2009 in mobile.
– Darren Withers, Director of Business Development @ mobileStorm
A lot of people ask me if there is a CAN-SPAM Act for wireless text messaging. In other words, are there any laws that pertain to sending spam to a cell phone? The answer is yes and no. Confused yet? If you have a strict attorney but would like to to take advantage of this explosive marketing medium, then this article is for you. Let me walk you through how this message type is currently regulated.
There are two types of “text messages” that can be sent to a cell phone:
1. SMTP: Otherwise known as Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, this is the same protocol used when sending an email. Cell phones are able to receive text messages in the form of an email. A lot of carriers still support this. For instance, to send an email text message to a Cingular customer, you would email their 10digitmobilenumber@mobile.mycingular.com
2. SMPP: This is now the preferred method of text messaging, where the message gets routed through a gateway that connects directly to the carrier. This protocol is also known as Short Message Peer-to-Peer.
Our company’s product, Stun!, delivered text messages via SMTP for quite awhile but recently we switched to SMPP for a number of reasons. For one, SMPP is secure and is sent over a VPN (Virtual Private Network) connection with the specific carrier attached to the message recipient. The carrier collects a toll on every message sent, which means that your message has a much higher likelihood of being received correctly than an SMTP-based one, which isn’t routed through the carrier. As a result, the carriers also give you more information as to which numbers are good and bad (a.k.a bounces). Finally, the protocol has two-way capabilities so your subscribers can respond to your message as well as receive them.
Overall, SMPP has a ton of more features and is the right way to go if you are providing marketers with a feature-rich and scalable platform. Now that we’ve covered the differences between the SMS protocols, let’s talk about how these messages are regulated. We’ll be begin with our favorite, the CAN-SPAM Act.
CAN-SPAM Act and Text Messaging
In 2003, Congress enacted the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act to curb spam. As required by the Act, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted rules that prohibit sending unwanted commercial e-mail messages to wireless devices without prior permission. This ban took effect in March 2005. The FCC’s ban covered messages sent to cell phones and pagers, if the message used an Internet address that included an Internet domain name (as seen in my Cingular example above). The FCC’s ban did not cover “short messages,” typically sent from one mobile phone to another, that do not use an Internet address (such as an SMPP message).
To help enforce its ban, the FCC required wireless service providers to provide all Internet domain names used to transmit electronic messages to wireless devices. The FCC published this list on its Web site at www.fcc.gov/cgb/policy/DomainNameDownload.html. Senders were prohibited from sending commercial e-mail messages to any Internet domain name on this list without the recipient’s express prior authorization.
In other words, SMTP protocol is pretty heavily regulated when it comes to sending messages to subscribers who did not give their “express prior authorization.” However, the CAN-SPAM Act provided no regulation when it came to SMPP protocol. Still, that doesn’t mean that you are free and clear with SMPP, thanks in large part to a widely interpreted television consumer protection act from 1991.
Casino Spam Sms Message
Telephone Consumer Protection Act:
One of the articles of The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA), includes sending text messages to cell phones using an automatic telephone dialing system. The TCPA prohibits the sending of such messages “to any telephone number assigned to a paging service, cellular telephone service, specialized mobile radio service, or other radio common carrier service, or any service for which the called party is charged” 47 U.S.C. 227 (b)(1)(A)(iii). The FCC has made it clear that without the prior express consent of the called party, the TCPA prohibits any callusing an automatic telephone dialing system to any wireless telephone number. This prohibition encompasses both voice calls and text calls, including SMS messages sent to wireless phone numbers.
While it might be argued that that the SMPP protocol is not an automatic telephone dialing system, this is still a gray area. Moreover, the underlying directive of the TCPA can be easily extended to include the SMPP protocol, which didn’t exist when the law was initially instated. The intent of the TCPA is to make sure that consumers expressly consent to automated calls or messages sent to wireless devices given that consumers may be charged to receive such calls or messages, which can also be intrusive. Since the act covers such a wide range of devices (at the time, wireless messages were meant for pagers), it is definitely possible that newer wireless technology also falls under these general guidelines. The key is again is the notion “express written consent”, which, in the case of text messaging, means some sort of opt-in proof. Fortunately, Stun! users already have this protection built into the application so meeting these requirements is a very simple matter.
Conclusion:
I am sure in the future will see more federally regulated laws that will be more technology specific. Most of the regulations proposed today are being driven by the carriers themselves as well as wireless content and messaging companies. It’s a necessary step to make sure that the government doesn’t outlaw such messaging altogether, which is always possible. Currently, the main organization that manages industry standards is the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA). It is important when selecting a service provider for text messaging that their platform is compliant with industry standards and carrier requirements. Most importantly though, no matter what platform or protocol you are using, make sure that you are obtaining the proper permissions to send someone marketing text messages or you run the risk of being blocked or worse in the future when the FCC will inevitably start to levy fines as they do with the CAN-SPAM Act. Being a good mobile marketing “citizen” is very important these days and can go a long way to making sure you are getting the most out of this exciting and dynamic communication vehicle.
For more information on mobileStorm’s text messaging services, visit mobileStorm’s product overview.
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Jared Reitzin
CEO
mobileStorm Inc.
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