Archive for August, 2009

I have written in past posts that mobile is an interaction channel like others (call center, web, point of sale), and therefore should be viewed more strategically than an advertising delivery platform.  In this recent post, I describe how mobile commerce is possible without a connection between transaction systems and mobile marketing communications, via the “connected customer.”

While this advances the discussion toward connecting mobile marketing to sales, it doesn’t address the need to optimize the mobile customer experience across the various ways mobile permits marketers to reach their customers.  It is for this reason I am starting to think it’s datable whether mobile is completely distinct from both traditional channels and advertising methods.

In a call center, the measurable focus is the call itself, the time of day, duration, reason/topic and outcome.  Likewise, on the web it is about visit duration, path, terminating link, etc.  And at point of sale, it’s the transaction, the contents of the market basket, etc.  In mobile, the measurable unit is less identifiable as it depends on the form of interaction (text, mobile web, smartphone application or even interactive voice response).

As a “swiss army knife” of sorts, I think mobile will eventually require the concept of a “mobile session,” such that users will be identifiable units tracked either anonymously or authenticated across text interactions, mobile website browsing and smartphone application usage (or car navigation systems).  Disparate mobile technologies will need to talk to each other, at a minimum exchange “mobile session” data in such a way that the movement and activities of users are tracked among them.

This capability would surely be a powerful tool toward developing richer, higher value mobile interactions.  To create the most relevant and cohesive mobile experiences, content providers should desire this depth of insight.

You can imagine a mobile consumer interaction across text messaging/mobile email, mobile web and smartphone application as follows in a simple retail clothier example:

• BaggyPants develops a loyalty program aimed at retaining its highest value customers while also growing this base, via targeted and relevant offers.
• A multi-channel marketing campaign is initiated, directing customers to sign up for the program via text message or website.
• Those opting in are directed to redeem a discount online, then download the “SmartSizer” application.  This application allows customers to take a picture of themselves and have potential wardrobes in their probable size overlaid on their likeness.
• A mobile enabled e-commerce site is auto populated with a market basket full of their “customized” clothing order, based on current catalog item availability and pricing.
• Discounts based on customer value are redeemed at checkout.

Analyzing the activity around the individual elements can be useful, but overlaying mobile sessions across this entire mobile experience should be as much, if not more valuable.  For example:

• See conversion from text message, application downloads and basket purchases – the buy pipeline.
• Combine data gathered from application usage and product purchases to design higher yield product combinations – the “best next action.”
• Observe behavior on the mobile website, including deviances from the instant market basket purchase – market basket abandonment.

Or perhaps more interestingly, observe a real or near real-time visualization of the ideal process, with variance from the norm highlighted to see what’s happening – and make corrections to affect the outcome as the program executes.

As mobile marketing technologies advance, there is a danger of mobile suffering the fate of pre-CRM marketing; fragmented customer data and widely varying concepts of “customer.”  No doubt you will soon be hearing more about “customer centricity,” “the 360 degree customer view,” and “one version of the truth,” but within the context of mobile.

While recently attending a meeting of the local Chicago Chapter of mobile professional networking group Mobile Monday, I learned about the existence of the Heartland Mobile Council.  The organization is driven by its mission:

“Chicago, the heart of America, is the best place to prove mobile technologies with the average consumer because we bring Real Knowledge, Real Experience, to Real People.”

My colleague Jeff Judge is a founding member of the Council, and today I posted (“Where Mobile Marketing is Headed is Now…“) to their blog about the challenges facing mobile marketers as they seek to grow the “whole pie,” so to speak.  I plan to periodically post on the Council blog and suggest you visit as well to follow developments.

The Council appears to be trying to align the interests of providers in the mobile arena such as technology firms, agencies and marketers, with those of the very consumers they all hope to serve.  With that collective vision in mind and a focus on proving it out with real people, the entire mobile industry looks to benefit, not just within Chicago.

The other day I saw this article on MobileMarketer.com with some tips for budgeting a mobile marketing program as well as the timing considerations involved.

The article makes some good points about the differences between buy and build approaches, making it appear all but a foregone conclusion that a marketer new to mobile would use a third party expert to execute the program (probably the author’s intent).

One aspect I think the article overlooks, even for newbies, is the customer knowledge to be gained in executing mobile marketing programs. I think too much of mobile marketing today is focused on advertising and the ease by which ad messages can be delivered to mobile devices. Mobile should be viewed as another customer interaction channel, such as the point of sale, a call center or even more simply a website. It seems much more value is to be gained by such a view.

Too often I think marketers associate mobile with email as a message transit service, which is just one application of mobile marketing technologies; mobile can and often is a real time, bi-directional marketing channel, even when utilizing SMS, and therefore is fundamentally more interactive than email.

While there may be no explicit costs involved in planning for the types of information about your customers you can and wish to gather, it certainly should be a top of mind consideration at the onset of any mobile marketing program. I would add as well that in selecting a third party to work with, marketers should be sure that data generated is portable and owned by them, not the provider, and can be easily extracted for additional analysis.

As I blogged about yesterday, TextMe recently extended its already strong data capture feature set to facilitate marketers’ thinking this way. So even if drawn to mobile because of low cost and high response rate (as pointed out in the article), marketers in all industries should plan ahead and consider the new customer knowledge they can gather from the outset. Stay tuned for examples illustrating just how.

Having just blogged about a scenario blending elements of customer analysis-driven mobile marketing programs, I found it timely that my colleague John Wood the same day posted to the Interactive Mediums product blog about several new features in TextMe that have a similar intent.

The first is a new capability called “Contact List.” Although it’s useful to view customers associated with specific campaigns or that are part of existing opt-in message lists (features already in TextMe), a level of abstraction higher inclusive of all your customers can potentially have greater value. Especially over time, marketers can identify patterns of behavior across all activities which can inform the “best next action” to take with particular customer segments.

Continuing this theme of “more is better” when it comes to customer insight, another new capability within Contacts called “User Data” allows marketers to configure TextMe to gather whatever data is fundamentally a part of executing a successful mobile marketing program (beyond basic, lowest common denominator demographic data). Such configurability allows Marketers to fit TextMe to their needs, not the other way around as can be the case with some mobile marketing services providers. It also allows Marketers to build the foundation for a Mobile Customer Data asset specific to their business, which by its nature holds greater value than a fixed, prescribed list of attributes available for collection.

Perhaps just as important is that this new capability includes validation so that data written to a marketer’s Mobile Customer Data Asset conforms and does not require additional cleansing to be analyzed or re-used.

The last of John’s posts describes a significantly enhanced Survey Campaign, which has become more of a customer intelligence and research tool. Past limitations such as single question surveys and no data validation have been removed, making this now a viable customer intelligence solution for brand managers, market research firms and others needing to reach out to customers using the convenience of mobile.

If you are not already subscribed to the TextMe Product Blog, I suggest you do to follow additional developments in this direction.

I have been thinking about the holy grail of any marketing technology – generating measurable improvements in sales – but within the context of the mobile channel.  Technologies and services have long since been established of varying complexities which enable such tracking in channels like the web and call center, but mobile seems like virgin territory in this respect.

With many marketers just beginning to dip their toes into the mobile arena, and many sitting on the fence waiting to see how things shake out, anything which helps draw the critical connection between mobile marketing activity and business results should accelerate adoption of the underlying technologies.

Short of developing their own solution tightly integrated with internal systems, or purchasing potentially costly third party software and similarly stitching it into transactional systems, marketers would seem to have little choice but to rely on channel centric metrics, such as reach, open rates, and click throughs to measure and justify mobile marketing efforts.

Leveraging the Integrated Customer

This led me to imagine using customers as the glue between mobile marketing activities and logging business results.  What I call the “Integrated Customer.”

For example, many businesses rely on frequent and repeat purchases by their customers.  Be it a product with a limited lifespan that requires replenishment or a routine service, many businesses continuously market to their customers to maintain demand and stay top of mind.

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that these businesses may find mobile more appealing than email given the Epsilon survey’s email response data I referred to yesterday on the blog.  Mobile has the capacity to connect in a more relevant and timely fashion than email to influence consumers to purchase.

I see two keys to creating an Integrated Customer to enable the tracking of mobile marketing activity from message delivery through purchase:

• Provide incentive to customers to notify you upon redeeming an offer at the point of sale, ideally within a short time window, via text messaging.
• Assigning some dollar value to that transaction, like an expected average price or average market basket value, that can later be matched to inbound purchase notifications, to derive value and return on investment calculations.

First I will tackle the incentive part.  For example, a multi-site retailer could promote a loyalty program in its catalogs, on billboards and on its website, whereby customers opt in to receive limited life offers for redemption in their stores (such as a discount on certain items or a coupon).  These offers are periodically broadcast to opted-in customer mobile devices, containing unique codes which each store knows are associated with the discount program.

This retailer is really smart, and so has identified segments of its customers by lifetime value, allowing it to tier its loyalty program so that highly valued customer receive greater incentives than those of lesser value.  The discount codes are similarly aligned.

The retailer is also smart when it comes to having a strategy behind its loyalty program.  It knows the average value of a typical market basket, the purchase migration behaviors of customers among different lines of products, and has designed its incentive offers to grow basket size and encourage logical product bundle purchases.  There is a planned sequence of offers to be delivered to each segment, essentially a “best next action” the retailer is proposing to its customers.

Customers are told upon signing up for the program that this is not a one-time affair; it is part of the retailer’s ongoing efforts to serve its customers better.  To that end, customers are incented to text in their discount codes to a short code, along with the keyword RewardMe when making an eligible purchase.  Why would customers do this?  Not out of the kindness of their hearts.  Because it pays.

The loyalty program’s offers have a limited shelf life, say two weeks, and expire only to be replenished when a discount code is submitted as part of the above process.  A customer always wants to be sure to have an eligible reward handy to make a purchase and therefore will have just one reason to redeem their discount codes for “fresh” ones – when transacting at the point of sale.  There may be outliers, but the majority are likely to behave in this fashion.

The transaction is registered by the mobile marketing services provider when redeemed, then aligned with the expected value of the interaction, which was configured by the marketer at the onset of the program.  The marketer knows what offers were redeemed successfully, by product and customer segment, and can draw instant value and return on investment calculations.  The utility of the proposed “best next action” can also be assessed and refined based on the results.

Sounds like an application will killer potential value, and it didn’t require integration between mobile channel marketing execution and internal transactional systems.

We have recently made some major enhancements to our existing survey campaign to take advantage of the data collection capabilities described in the previous two blog posts.  Previously, the survey campaign was only capable of collecting a single piece of information, and there was no validation performed on the data submitted by the customer.

The newly-enhanced survey campaign addresses these shortcomings, and provides you with additional capabilities to manage the data that is collected.  Let’s quickly walk through the creation of a survey campaign to see how easy it is to setup.

The first step in creating a survey campaign is to select the start and end dates and times for your campaign.

Next, you simply need to provide a description for your campaign, and the keyword that you would like to use (what your participants will text to initiate the survey).

The third step is where the magic happens.  In the initial message to your participants, you ask them for the first piece of information.  Below the message box, you will see a check box with the description “This message requests data from the participant”, which is checked by default.  In the section below that check box, you specify the data attribute that you are collecting from the initial message, the message to send the participant if they reply with data that is invalid for the specified data attribute, and the message to send to the participant when they send a valid response.  The valid response message could be another question.  If it is, simply check the box below the message to expand another area asking you for the data attribute, invalid data response, and valid data response (which could be yet another question) to handle the reply from that message.  You can configure the survey to ask as many questions as you wish.  There is no limit.

Finally, review the details of your survey campaign, and click “Activate Campaign” to finish.

After creating your survey, you will be brought to the campaign details page.  The survey campaign details page has been enhanced to provide a simple rundown of the questions you are asking your survey participants, and the data the respective questions are collecting.

After your survey starts, and your customers begin participating, you will begin to see up-to-the-minute stats on the participation.  These stats include the number of participants who initiated the survey, the number of participants who completed the survey, and the number of participants who have answered each of the questions.

In addition to the completion statistics, you are also able to see a complete timeline of participants interacting with your survey, which can be exported as a comma separated value (CSV) file.

Also new is the ability to export all of the data you have collected via the survey.  On the side navigation menu, you will see a new option to export the survey data.  Clicking this will bring you to a form asking you for your name and email address.  Filling out the form and clicking “Submit” starts a process on our server that will export all of your survey data.  When the export is complete, you will receive an email containing a link you can use to download a CSV file containing all of the data collected from your survey participants.  You can then import that CSV file into your favorite spreadsheet program for some good, old-fashioned number crunching.

The survey campaign was the first to get these capabilities, but it is not the last.  We are hard at work integrating data collection into our other campaigns as well.  We are also working on exciting ways for you to analyze and act on the data you have collected from your participants.  Stay tuned for more details!

In the previous post, I showed how you can manage your contacts via the Contact List.  The Contact List makes it easy to display and update information for a contact who has participated in one or more of your mobile marketing campaigns.  While a customer’s name, mailing address, email address, gender, and home phone can be very valuable to have, it is extremely likely that you will need to collect information that is more specific to your business.  We understand this need, which is why we have added the capability to define custom attributes to meet the specific needs of your business.

The User Data tab, available under the Contacts tab, lists the data attributes that you can collect from your contacts.  Out of the box, TextMe users are able to collect common data attributes such as name, address, and home phone.  These attributes are listed in the Default Attributes section of the User Data page.

But, the real power of this feature is the ability for you to define your own set of attributes, and doing so couldn’t be easier.  Clicking the “Add data attribute” button will reveal a small form asking you for information about the data you would like to collect.  Simply provide a name, description, and data type for your attribute, and click Save.  Your attribute is now ready to be used!

If we navigate back to the page where we can edit the details for a contact, we will see that we can now specify a customer number of each of our contacts.

After entering a customer number and clicking “Update”, we will now see the customer number listed in the details for that contact.

The data type of your attribute has an important role.  It is responsible for validating data submitted for that attribute.  For example, numeric attributes will only accept numbers, zip code attributes will only accept data that looks like a valid zip code, state attributes will only accept valid state names or abbreviations, etc.  If you attempt to enter invalid data for a given attribute, you will receive an error.  This data validation is also performed on data submitted via a SMS message (again, more on this in future blog posts).

There is no limit to the number of user data attributes you can define.  And, the following data types are supported: Text, Numeric, Date, Time, Date and Time, Currency, Email Address, Phone Number, Zip Code, Gender, Boolean (true/false, yes/no), and State.

Using the User Data tab, you can lay the foundation to start collecting data that matters to you and your business.  In the next post, we’ll see how we can collect data via SMS messages using the new, Multi-question Survey campaign.

Mobile marketing is special.  It provides the rare capability of putting you in direct contact with your target audience.

We’ve been very busy the past several weeks adding new features to TextMe to help you collect and manage data about your customers.  The first of these new features I’d like to introduce is the Contact List.

The Contact List, accessible under the all new Contacts tab, provides you with the list of everyone who has participated in any of your mobile marketing campaigns.  In addition to simply listing your contacts by their mobile number, you can also search for a contact by whole or partial mobile number.

Clicking on the mobile number will bring you to a screen where you can see all sorts of interesting data about that contact.  This information includes data you have collected about the contact via web forms or SMS (more on this in future blog posts), messages the contact has sent in the past 48 hours, subscription lists the contact is subscribed to, and campaigns the contact has participated in.  This information can be extremely valuable in determining which contacts are your most loyal, and which contacts you should be trying to engage more.

From this screen (and also from the Contact List screen), you can edit the contact’s data by clicking the Edit button by the contact details or Edit Attributes item in the side navigation bar.  Changes will be saved to the database for use at a later time.

This is just the beginning.  In future blog posts, I will discuss how to collect data from your contacts, what types of data you can collect, and what you can do with this data.

This question came to mind today as I read two separate items about the growth of mobile marketing.  One was an article on MobileMarketer.com citing a study suggesting the market will grow to $50 Billion by 2014, the other a Chief Marketer report  on a benchmarking study of similar investments over a nearer horizon (up to $2.16 Billion through 2010).  A third piece of information I will reference in a minute.

As the dollars invested in mobile by marketers escalates, I would expect them to cast a more careful eye on the return these investments offer.  What is interesting is that the firms subject to the Chief Marketer study cite metrics that appear identical to ones used to measure the effectiveness of email.  Consider the following grab from the report:

Email is measured along similar dimensions: response rate, opt ins, click throughs, etc., leading many marketers I expect to compare mobile to email for the purpose of allocating budget dollars.  I’d like to suggest that the two approaches are complementary, not competitive, and that they should be measured differently.

The best analogy I can think of is the relationship between email and instant messaging on a desktop computer.  While at work, I often have both applications open at the same time yet use them for entirely different, yet valuable purposes.  Email tends to be an activity that falls “out of line” with the flow of my work, whereas instant messaging is an enabler “in line” with my work.  For example, I may communicate a status via email that could be read by the recipient any time, but use instant messaging to ask a question in real time of a remote colleague that needs answering immediately.

I see this “out of line” as opposed to “in line” distinction as key in understanding email relative to mobile.  Although virtually everyone has a text enabled phone, the most successful programs rarely target all people, everywhere.  The beauty of mobile is the ability to create instant, relevant and often localized marketing programs.  By their nature, the potential audience subject to a mobile communication may be small, but collective individual actions can have tremendous value (as in driving consumers into a store to make a purchase).  Email conversely almost always targets a larger audience.

The fact that only consumers opting into mobile communications receive them reinforces this focused approach.  Email on the other hand has the reputation for being a spam medium.  Although this has calmed down in recent years, it remains a communication for contacting people “out of line.”

The third article I referred to earlier I saw today on eMarketer.com regarding email marketing response rates.

In light of my observations, it was interesting that eMarketer found that the smaller the list of email targets the greater the open rate (much as I would expect for a similarly targeted mobile communication).

“Messages delivered to small and medium lists had higher open and click-through rates than messages delivered to lists of 1,000 or more subscribers.”

and

“A smaller list does not directly affect open and click rates, but mailings to smaller lists may be targeted better, contain more relevant content or have more recent subscribers.”

Part two of this eMarketer.com article goes on to highlight results of a similar study from Epsilon, which found open rates for its survey subjects to be higher.

Perhaps more interesting than the raw figures was that Epsilon found email effectiveness varied by industry:

“General financial services e-mails were opened most frequently, followed by general business products and services, and credit cards and banks.”

and

“The least popular categories were apparel, publishing and media, consumer packaged goods and electronics.”

It goes without saying that many top firms using mobile marketing tactics fall into the “least popular” email response category above, due I expect to the fact these products and services lend themselves to communications in line with a consumer’s “out and about” activities.  Email, it appears, seems a better fit with consumers’ “out of line” mindset, such as balancing their checkbooks or undertaking other personal finance activities best done at home.

From all of this information, I would conclude  that mobile marketing has its role alongside email as an effective marketing medium.  Yet, the data suggest that when viewed separately, mobile may be a better choice for retailers, content providers such as publishers, CPG companies and electronics companies if open rate is the key metric.

Since I tend to blog most often using my own netbook computer, I took notice of this article today on MobileMarketer.com about Nokia’s launch of a 3G-enabled netbook (“Is Nokia Booklet 3G the future of mobile marketing?”).

The portability of netbooks combined with a PC operating system and applications, plus almost ubiquitous wifi access makes my mini-laptop a “must have” wherever I go.  Yet, the abilty to use it as my phone and be able to connect to the web wirelessly no matter where I am makes Nokia’s proposition no doubt attractive.  Ok, maybe not to use as my phone, but if you can imagine an earpiece device used in tandem with a 3G netbook, the phone scenario is plausible if not a killer application.

While not as fashionable a device as an iPhone or other smart phone, nor as portable, the low cost and increasing utility of netbooks may present a challenge to mobile marketers fixated on form factor.  As I read the Nokia article, I was reminded of this recent blog post in which I posit that “the medium becomes the message” in effective mobile communications, when you boil it down:

“The way a customer perceives the delivery of a message via mobile medium, as well as the contents of the message itself, work in concert to achieve a desired outcome.  For this reason, I think it’s key for marketers to remember that when considering mobile as a marketing channel they also plan the message accordingly, for both its content and form.”

In the end it doesn’t matter if someone has an iPhone or wireless-enabled netbook.  What does matter, is the relevancy of a marketing message, so that consumers are exposed to the right information given their circumstances at any given time (on the go, sitting in coffee shop, driving their car or at work).  What real impact netbooks have on the mobile marketing landscape remains to be seen but marketers can prepare themselves by focusing on the mobile customer experience more so than a particular device or message format.