Mobile News - Mobile Marketing Blog

The ubiquity of the cell phone is resulting in an increasing number of traditionally paper based services turning to text. The magazine industry is just one of many who are using text based mobile marketing to grow their customer base. Many magazine’s are offering their customers the opportunity to subscribe via SMS, making the process quick and easy for customers and less paper form processing for publishers.

Magazines offering subscription sign up’s via SMS are advertising the option on their subscriptions page inside the magazine where consumers are encouraged to text their desire to subscribe to an SMS short code. The SMS subscription process will generally take the customer through a series of steps via text, requesting basic information like name and address. The subscription payment is either made via a traditional method like post or phone, or alternatively online or via the cell phone itself where the subscription fee is simply deducted from the subscribers bill.

Mobile subscriptions via SMS aren’t entirely new, the service was first offered by Bluff Europe, a magazine for poker enthusiasts, back in 2007. It now seems with the continued growth in cell phone ownership and consumers love of texting that more and more magazine publishers are jumping on board.

Hearst Magazines, publisher of popular titles including Cosmopolitan, Seventeen and Marie Claire are using SMS based subscriptions to reach a younger demographic. The younger demographic, including the teen market, have been consistently found to be big texters. A recent Nielsen study has found American teens send over 3000 texts a month! With an opportunity that big it may be hard for other magazine publishers to resist.