Episode Spotlight

StartupNation’s Rich Sloan walks discusses text messaging and how you can put it to work for your small business. It’s effective, economical and immediate (read: “efficient”). This communications channel may just be perfect for you as you try to find new and better ways to reach out to your customers.

It’s a permission marketing tool, without a lot of the downsides of email, which these days, goes hand in hand with “spam.” The guest is Jordan Gilman who is co-founder of Texthub, another hot-to-trot company that grew up in the ranks of the StartupNation community and was launched earlier in 2008.

Gilman provides these pointers for business owners considering deploying text messaging solution:

• All messages should have a personalized greeting in front of it like, “Hi, Rich,…”
• Ability to break your users into groups to select who gets what
• Ability to schedule messages for a later time
• Unlimited sending
• Ability for users to reply
• Smart logic on replies so they can reply to various keywords and sentences
• Ability for a response to be sent via email, forwarded or posted to a web site/web service

Gilman’s bottom line

Your solution should do more than just send text messages - otherwise you might as well use your phone.