Simplified SMS Marketing, Part II: A Conversation With Convergent Mobile

Last week, I had the chance to catch up with Convergent Mobile, a company we profiled here about a year ago. According to company President Mickey Breen, it’s making progress in working with local reseller partners and also building out the product offering.

The partnering part was off the record, but there is an equal amount of meat to the other half of the discussion. As we’ve written, the company continues to have appeal in its SMS short code (US411), its simple value proposition to merchants, and its mobile landing pages.

This makes for a good combo for both SMBs and reseller partners, particularly print publishers. One reason is the degree to which publishers can cross promote mobile opt-ins by filling their print inventory with SMS calls to action.

The white-label nature of the product also adds appeal, letting publishers brand the SMS marketing tool and mobile Web site offering as their own. They can also offer their advertisers a unique keyword such as the name of the business.

When texted to the easy to remember “US411″ short code, messages can be returned to users including links to the business’ mobile landing pages. These landing pages are customized on the back end to show whatever the business wants to communicate.

Depending on the business or the category it’s in, this can range from business details to menus to dynamically generated promotions. The latter is an area that continues to grow with both interest and awareness among merchants.

But one of the key points is utilizing a higher distribution media to generate usage around a less exposed but more targeted one. The targeting part comes from the self-selected nature of the opted-in user and the geographic, contextual and behavioral relevance of the offer itself.

From there, subscriber lists are build, upon which ongoing promotions can be generated and iterated — a concept we explored in a recent report on mobile marketing for traditional media. It’s also vital to not just build mobile sites but actually generate traffic via cross-promotion.

Convergent is working all these angles and boosting other functionality like making all of the mobile Web sites searchable by end of Q2. It’s also close to a few deals to get the tool better exposed and distributed — none of which I can talk about yet, but expect to hear more soon.