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.
