• by Erik Sass , February 3, 2009

ID Media, a direct and digital media company, is teaming up with ShopText to offer advertisers a cost-per-response mobile marketing service. Advertisers can set up mobile SMS marketing campaigns that encourage consumers to respond to offers of free samples, coupons, information and mobile shopping, paying only when the recipient actually responds. ID Media and ShopText said advertisers can opt for cost-per-response, cost-per-lead, or cost-per-redemption models.

The partners hope to lure more advertisers into mobile marketing with this rationalized fee structure, which resembles the "pay-per-click" model that is familiar from online advertising.

Josh Martin, ID Media's vice president and director of emerging media, emphasized the importance of "minimizing financial risk for testing new media" during a steep recession. Looking to the future, he added: "We think more and more consumers will opt to respond to advertising via texting rather than calling a toll-free number or going to a Web site." ShopText COO Adam Lichstein claimed the company's services "can improve response by five to 10 times over traditional direct response mechanisms."

Last April, ID Media announced a similar partnership with 4Info, which allows consumers to send short numeric codes to get ad-supported content from a variety of categories, including news, sports, entertainment, stocks and weather. 4INFO delivers a brief text ad that invites the user to click to call, email, send an SMS message, or access more information via wireless application protocol (WAP), which brings them to a mobile Internet site.

Even before the recession, mobile marketing was having a hard time getting off the ground.

Last year, Dag Olav Norem, a senior analyst with M:Metrics, noted that the United States lags far behind other parts of the world in terms of penetration by mobile marketing. In the first half of 2008, just 20% of U.S. mobile users received an SMS marketing message at least once a month, versus 75% in Europe.

But there is also an "opposite correlation between penetration and response rates." In Europe, among people who receive SMS marketing messages, 4.9% respond, compared with 12.4% in the U.S.