About

What is SMS VRM?

Customer Relationship Mamagement (CRM) systems have been used by the sales & marketing teams of for-profit businesses for over 25 years. Similarly, SMS VRM is a Voter Relationship Management system that aims to provide your NC poltical campaign with the tools to manage your marketing SMS and MMS messages to your voters.

Accurate & Current Data

SMS & MMS messaging is one of the most effective means of getting your message to potential voters. Direct mail is expensive and often gets thrown in the trash before it is even looked at. Email, while inexpensive, is often marked as spam by email providers and will never reach the voter's inbox. Meanwhile SMS and MMS text messages boast a 90% open rate, and cost very little to send out.

One of the most important aspects of a texting marketing campaign is to have accurate data. New voters register every day. Voters also move, die, change their political party affiliation, and are scrubbed from the voter rolls each and every day. Voters also change their mobile phone numbers from time to time. That's why our database of all NC registered voters is updated every evening with new data from the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE).

Once you sign-up to use SMS VRM, you will establish your own database of voters that is relevant to your race. You decide how big or small your database of voters is. Statewide candidates could use our entire database of voters, or may wish to narrow it down. For instance, if its a primary election then you may only want voters of your party affiliation and unaffilated voters. You might want to also narrow it down to voters who have voted in recent elections. Local candidates would start with a smaller database of voters who live in the relevant voting district, and they too can narrow down their audience like the Statewide candidates can. In either case, once your voter database is established, that database will be updated daily as soon as the processing of the NCSBE updates is completed.

Campaign Management

You may set up SMS Campaigns, and then set up multiple SMS Jobs that are related to the Campaign. For instance, you might want to split your target audience into halfs and set up one job to send one message, and another job to send a completely different message. Each of these messages can contain merged fields from your voter database, like firstname, lastname, county, etc, for a personalized effect. You can also add hyperlinks into your text messages, and using our tracking software, you will be able to see how many and which voters clicked through to those URLs. Using our reporting module, you could then compare the clickthrough rate of one job versus the other, and determine which messages are appealing to voters more.

Opt-Outs and Bad Data

SMS VRM will automatically process opt-out messages from your recipients, and mark these appropriately, so you don't have to worry about erroneously sending them another text message in the future. SMS VRM also tracks the status of each text message sent to ensure that it has been delivered to each of your intended recipients. Any delivery falures (due to a bad phone number, LAN Line, etc) are logged and your voter database will be marked appropriately, so you won't inadvertently try to send another message to that intended recipieint until their phone number has been updated.

Pay as You Go

With SMS VRM there are no monthly subscription fees for sending SMS and MMS messages. The debit or credit card you enter into the system will be charged a flat rate per message sent. The only monthly fees charged are for the rental of phone numbers you will be using to send your messages from.