Vodafone's marketing SMS leaves me clueless

So last week I was having a good time with Vodafone. This morning I got this comparatively useless text to let me know that ‘prices are changing’.

This is really good — a text update, I will obviously read it — but the call-to-action? Visit some site that isn’t even linkable from my phone browser? Who composed this text? Don’t you think I’m likely to want to click-through? And when I do click-through, by actually arsing around with selecting/cutting/pasting the address into the browser, will the page render for a mobile browser? Probably not.

Let me see.

I’ll have a look.

Are you a betting reader?

😉

I looked. I typed the URL into the BlackBerry browser and got a glorious, ‘Sorry, the page you are looking for has not been found.’

Oh dear.

I tried it just now on the desktop browser: I get the same error.

So that’s not very useful at all. You’d think that these things get triple-checked before they go out. You know, serious people wearing serious suits, frowning a lot, repeatedly testing stuff? Lots of checklists and perhaps even some kind of user-testing firm on speed-dial to do a quick series of external tests? All to make sure that when the customer gets the message, they actually understand it. And can act upon it.

It does seem to me that Vodafone’s text message marketing is a bit strange — check out this rather cryptic roaming data billing notification I got a little while ago.

For all I know right now, this text might have been notification that Vodafone is increasing their prices by 400%.

Posted via email from MIR Live