In light of the new industry regulations about gainful employment and increased requirements for disclosure and transparency in the for profit career colleges sector, many schools are taking or have taken positive steps towards establishing new compliance marketing guidelines, but is SMS, or text message, marketing being overlooked?

In an effort to help create an effective and compliant mobile marketing ecosystem for higher education, CUnet has created a Quick Guide for SMS Advertising and Compliance based on the Mobile Marketing Association’s best practices, specifically designed for colleges and universities.

Many schools are already using SMS campaigns to communicate with prospective and current students in a variety of ways, including following up with information inquiries via text and text alerts sent directly to mobile phones. Conducting any text messaging campaign without following the required U.S. wireless carriers requirements and The Mobile Marketing Association(MMA) Best Practices Guidelines can put both the schools and owners of a short code at considerable legal and financial risk. Additionally, not following the guidelines can result in ineffective marketing campaigns that may result in frustrated prospects or students.

As much as the MMA’s best practices and guidelines document is a great way to start understating what is needed when conducting text messaging campaigns, the document is also lengthy and can be difficult to decipher for industry outsiders.

CUnet’s SMS Quick Guide to SMS Advertising is a brief, focused summary that includes language, copy and call-to-action examples with disclaimers that can be adapted as needed. The document is divided into three main portions:

1. The required rules and necessary disclaimers needed to conduct any SMS text messaging campaign.

2. Examples of call-to-action language and text messaging content.

3. Terms and definition for new explorers in mobile marketing.

For more information, questions, feedback, or methods to use SMS for higher education, please contact info (at) cunet.com.

About Akeel Haider

Akeel Haider is the Mobile Media Strategist at CUnet. Akeel brings over seven years of performance mobile marketing and advertising experience, having worked on both agency and publisher sides of the business since the early days of premium SMS in the United States. Akeel holds a master’s degree in information systems from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. In his spare time, Akeel enjoys playing squash, watching European soccer, and occasionally working for a United Nations non-profit organization.

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Tags: best practices, compliance, mobile marketing, mobile marketing association, sms, text messaging

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 13th, 2011 at 11:00 am and is filed under Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.