With increasingly amazing advances in the technology of mobile devices, the marketing world is beginning turned to mobile devices as a heavy weight opponent to the traditional methods of business marketing. Cellit truly takes mobile marketing to its highest level with plenty of the bells-and-whistles to satisfy heavy duty marketing. Cellit boasts familiar companies that use their product such as Taco Bell, Subway and the Chicago Tribune, each with its own individual case study of success with their product. The Cellit website offers information about several platforms that the company has developed for different uses. This review is going to focus on 2 of the platforms they provide, Cellit Studio and Cellit Spark. The other 3 platforms they offer are:
- Cellit Classifieds – Spending a fortune on printed classified ads? Cellit classifieds offers tools to help you take your printed classifieds to the mobile world.
- Cellit Climate – This is an interesting service they provide. It gives you the ability to send weather alerts, from the National Weather Service, that are relevant to your customers.
- House4Cell – If your in the real estate business and are looking to enter the mobile world of real estate, House4Cell is definitely something to check out. It provides powerful functionality allowing you to create your listings, manage them, and watch the leads grow.
If any of these sound like a solution to your business needs, it is suggested that you research the Cellit platforms.
Now, to focus on Cellit Studio and Cellit Spark. Both of these platforms are intended to be used by businesses, large and small, to meet their marketing needs. Cellit Studio contains a full array of features for your SMS marketing campaigns, while Cellit Spark is the lighter-weight version focusing more on small business.
Cellit Studio exhibits several premium messaging options including:
- text-for-information – simply providing information about your product or business
- text-for-content – such as ringtones, pictures, video, interactive quizzes
- text-to-win – set up your own contests or promotions over text
- text-to-vote – allows for interactive polling by providing real time opinions, good way to provide customer satisfaction surveys
- Appointment reminders
- Real-time updating analytics – shows real-time information through graphs and charts about your growing text messaging campaign
- Interactive maps down to area code – track the activity of your campaign down to the area code level
With all these features available, one has to ask the question: “How much does a service like this cost?” Unfortunately, the Cellit website doesn’t offer pricing information for the Studio platform. You can contact Cellit for a demonstration of their platform and a price quote. Also, by visiting the Cellit website, you can find more details about what the Studio package offers. A suggestion is made to view the PDF file of specs for the Studio platform located on the bottom of the Studio webpage.
While Cellit Spark doesn’t boast as many features as Cellit Studio does, it is still a powerful option for you and your business. The Spark platform, as mentioned above, is catered to smaller businesses and their needs. The features that Cellit Spark lack are:
- Scheduler – the ability to schedule future messages and auto-responders for delivery
- Categories – grouping subscribers by defined categories
- Dedicated account manager – the managing of your campaign is left up to you.
- Multiple user access to account – only 1 user has permission to use Spark
- Interactivity with the end-user – polls, instant wins, interactive messages, surveys
- Event triggering – setting triggers to send messages to users who perform a certain action
- Web API – allows you to interact your back-end system with Cellit
Even though Spark lacks these features, it still has plenty of goodies to help you successfully market your business. Cellit, fortunately, provides pricing information about the Spark platform on the web. Their Basic package of 1500 messages per month and 1 keyword runs $49, leaving messages prices at a little over $.03. The Pro packages gives you 3000 messages per month and 2 keywords for $89 bringing the cost per message down a little to just under $.03 per message. The “best value” Premium package offers 7000 messages per month and 3 keywords for $179 leaving prices at around $.025 per message. If you need higher volume than this, they make mention of the Cellit Studio packages which offers as high as 1,000,000 messages per month with 1,000 keywords. Again, no pricing options are available for this, you must first call to get a price quote. Make good judgement as to how many messages you think you may need per month when signing up with Cellit, they do charge for overage use.
Ease-of-use for the Studio platform is only determine by requesting a demonstration from Cellit. Cellit Spark has videos, as part of a virtual tour, available for determining the ease-of-use with that platform but you must provide your contact information before they will allow you to view them.
The support options from Cellit are a toll-free line as well as email to their sales department or support team. Cellit Spark has its own website with its own contact information, although it’s safe to say that contacting Cellit from their main page will give you the support you need, whether for the Studio or the Spark platform. Although they have these options, they lack an FAQ page. If you don’t know much about text message marketing, the lack of an FAQ page could turn you away from them in search of someone who will explain the basic questions of this growing form of communication.
Overall, if you are looking for a powerful system with plenty of features to market your business with, look in to Cellit to see if it fits your needs.