Welcome to “the Friday Five,” our bi-monthly feature that highlights articles from around the web to give readers insight into the inner workings of the SMS industry and offer mobile marketers valuable information and helpful advice.

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SMS alerts cut deaths caused by elephants in rural India

Business Insider

The first entry for the week is a Business Insider post from Paris-based international news organization Agence France-Presse. In what is somewhat of a departure from the types of stories that we typically feature here in the Friday Five, the AFP piece recounts the life-saving application of SMS by the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF). The environmental organization launched an initiative in southern India that utilized SMS notifications to alert community members of the presence of migrating elephants that had been causing deaths in the region for years. Click the link for the full story!

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What Is Your Quit Rate?

Melinda Krueger

Moving away from life-saving applications of SMS platforms, the next entry for the week comes from Associate Principal of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Mobile Insider contributor Melinda Krueger. Krueger’s article highlights a metric that should quickly become a mainstay for mobile marketers: the quit rate. What is the quit rate, you ask? Well, as Melinda herself puts it, the quit rate is “the ratio of users who unsubscribe to those who act.” I’ll let her do the rest of the heavy lifting when it comes to explaining how analyzing quit rates can help you improve your SMS campaigns. Head on over and check it out!

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Very drives 45pc mobile sales increase with Shazam, geo-targeted SMS

Chantal Tode

And speaking of running successful SMS campaigns, our next entry comes from Mobile Marketer Senior Editor Chantal Tode and it profiles a holiday marketing campaign that was executed by online British retailer Very. The campaign integrated geo-targeted SMS messages with Shazam television-synced display ads and was a huge success for the company. Chantal’s article goes into much more detail about Very’s campaign and the obvious benefits of integrating two distinct marketing channels into one seamless campaign.

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Nickelodeon underscores importance of kindergarten prep via texting program

Alex Samuely

Continuing on with the theme of marketing campaigns, the fourth entry on our list comes from Mobile Marketer editorial assistant Alex Samuely. Samuely’s story explores Nickelodeon’s recent 2015 Nick Jr. Beyond the Backpack campaign, a multi-channel initiative provided to help parents prepare their children for school. The SMS component of the campaign involved a call-to-action prompting parents to opt-in and receive weekly advice and special activities for students in preparation for their continued education. Head on over to the link provided and check it out!

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Mobile Powers Red Nose Day Fundraising

David Murphy

The British Invasion of the Friday Five continues with another U.K.-based story, this time by Mobile Marketing Co-founder and editorial director David Murphy. The charity organization Comic Relief has begun utilizing SMS for charity donations as a part of their annual Red Nose Day fundraising event. They’ve also been making use of a new mobile site. For more information on Comic Relief’s event, check out David’s in-depth report on Red Nose Day at the link.

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