Tip: Spruce up your texts with Rich Media
Video and other rich media add visual pizzazz to your SMS messaging. They can also drive specific purposes: increase your brand’s credibility, convey purpose, or establish a personal relationship.
Use this guide to help ensure a smooth user experience (UX) by choosing where you host the video and what link to embed in the text content.
User Experience !Goals!
For a smooth user experience, you’ll want to achieve these three simple goals:
- Provide eye candy by making the video preview visually in the text stream. That will grab the viewer’s eye and engender trust—even if part of the video is scrolled off screen, as in the image to the right.
- Ensure that the video platform doesn’t distract your viewer with ads, especially from your competitors.
- Avoid getting your texts trapped in spam filters.
The rest of this page is an easy guide to how to achieve these three goals.
#1: Providing !Eye Candy!
Meeting this goal is easy! Most modern phones do this automatically if sent a link to the video itself (as opposed to a page that contains the video).
That’s usually true even if your prospect’s phone accepts only SMS, the lowest common denominator of texting; it works even for phones that lack MMS and RCS, which are the more recent evolutions.
Try it yourself!
Turn off WiFi and cellular data to ensure that you’re using SMS, the lowest common denominator for texting. Then send the link to a colleague. Double check that the video plays in a little bubble, as in the screenshot above.
#2: Avoiding !Distracting Content!
If you host your video on YouTube, it’ll likely end with a Brady Bunch grid of distracting videos. These may include kitten antics, content that’s loosely related but not helpful to your cause, and—of most concern—conquest ads paid for by your competitors.
To counter this, use an ad-free platform such as Vimeo. This will require a nominal paid subscription; but after all, that’s their business model, not advertising.
You can also do it yourself!
Depending on the flexibility of your website platform, you may also be able to host directly on your website. If you decide to go this direction, do double check the preview-thumbnail behavior described in the previous section.
#3: Skipping !Spam Filters!
The carriers such as AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have spam filters that tend to block links from generic media sites such as YouTube and Vimeo.
The solution is to use a link shortener with a custom subdomain owned by your brand. Options include bit.ly, short.io, and many others. The resulting links look like https://my.<yourcompany>.com or https://video.<yourcompany>.com.
Get help from your IT department
Your IT department can procure a custom subdomain and place it under control of your company’s account with bit.ly, short.io, or other provider. Just send them this help page and say whether you want to use "my", "video", or some other subdomain name.
Wield your new power for good.
You’re done! Armed with the ability to include video and image content in your text stream without tripping spam filters, you’ll find it easy to create brand credibility, convey a sense of purpose for contacting your prospects, and most importantly, establish a warm relationship before you even meet.