This blog is for marketing novices to demonstrate how effective is mobile marketing with some numbers.
Best rate one can get for sending SMS in India – 8 paise per SMS for minimum of 1 lakh SMS. In this case database of phone numbers is provided by the service provider. We did our tie up with Cell Next and they have further tie ups with Airtel, Tata, etc. to send SMS. They promised to send 1 lakh SMS and provide us reports that they were sent. We were told to verify this by calling random 10 numbers in the list and verify.
Time for facts:
- Total cost for SMS campaign = 8000 + 10.3% tax = 9000 INR
- Approx calls expected from SMS receivers when the offer sent to them (my ad, or creative) is
- V. Good = 200 (for e.g. when my ad is say: “trip to Rishikesh in 80% discount”)
- Good = 100 (for e.g. when my ad is say: “go to Rishikesh for a fabulous trip. Get great deals!”)
- ok = 50 (for e.g. when my ad is say: “go to Rishikesh for a fabulous trip.”)
- Remaining statistics in a tabular format (Google adwords vs Mobile marketing)
-
Creative Quality Cool Good ok 1. Expected Calls 200 100 50 2. Approx Website Hits 50 30 10 3. Cost per Lead(INR) (1+2/total Cost) 50 90 180 Google Adword Costs per Hit 40 50 70 - Google adwords turn out to be a clear winner against mobile marketing for online websites. Mobile marketing may be useful in following circumstances
- You need to target offline customers
- Target them in a day or very quickly want to spread word among the masses
- Your business can run on phone and you do not need website hits
- Targeting possibilities that mobile marketing provides
- Demographic (you can target one particular city)
- Income group (This group you can not target in google adwords) Not sure how effective this is in mobile marketing, but they claim it to be effective
- Service Provider based
Conclusion: Whereas Google provides you much more flexibility and various other options and is a clear winner against mobile marketing, unless you have specific requirements as mentioned above.
Sphinx is open source search server used for full text search, we have used it with Rails and MySql database.
Why Sphinx:
- Blazingly fast indexing and searching
- Variety of Text Processing features which are easy to adapt as per Application.
- Scalling: It can scale up to millions of queries per day.
- Performance: Sphinx indexes up to 10-15 MB of text per second per single CPU core.
- Easy to write Sql Style Queries
- Grouping and Clustering
- Distrubuted Searching
Thinking Sphinx: Thinking Sphinx is a Ruby gem which helps us to connect Sphinx with Rails Active Record.
We can attach our models to sphinx through Thinking Sphinx
Example:
Suppose we have Model Country with fields: id, name, about, continent_id, capital, rating_no
class Country < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :places_to_visits
end
PlacesToVisit
field: name, country_id
class PlacesToVisit < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :country
end
We want to have full text search on all fields of Country except id and its places to visit (has many association)
How to Use:
We will write in Country model
has_many :places_to_visits
define_index do
indexes name, :sortable => true
indexes about
indexes rating_no
indexes capital
indexes places_to_visits(:name), :as => :place, :sortable => true
has continent_id
end
end
you can read more about indexing here
http://freelancing-god.github.com/ts/en/indexing.html
Searching example
Suppose we want to search countries with rating between 5 and 10.
Country.search params[:search], :with => {:rating_no => 5..10}
Here with is used for filtering, it accepts ruby array and ranges
A typical example with some advanced options
:match_mode => :all,
:field_weights => {:name => 20, :about => 10},
:with => {:rating_no => 5..10 },
:conditions => { :continent_id => 1},
:page => params[:page], :per_page => 3)
- We have provided field weights here so that while searching is applied name will have more priority than about
- conditions is for full text searching specific attributes, :with is for filtering search results.
- We use pagination with incorporating :page and :per_page parameters
- match mode: How the key words will match to the fields
- :all – all records that has the complete key word will be returned
- :any – means all records that has any of the keyword will be returned
- :boolean – we can also use boolean operators with keywords
- example: Country.search ‘India | USA’, :match_mode => :boolean
