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.
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