We recently blogged about a paper from email provider ExactTarget regarding its view on the mobile channel. Curious to see what other email providers might offer, today I checked out YesMail. They too offer a white paper about email and mobile marketing, which I found quite good.
Many of the paper’s conclusions are consistent with views we have blogged about, but I was curious if and how YesMail offers mobile capabilities, if at all. Searching, I came across this October 19, 2009 announcement that I think was missed by the mobile marketing press. In it, YesMail announces additional capabilities to its Enterprise edition service encompassing both mobile email and SMS messaging.
For SMS, they have partnered with VeriSign as an aggregator to offer single point messaging access across many network carriers – not unlike other SMS text messaging marketing providers. Not clear was how actual campaigns are created, deployed, and measured, and even their website provides sparse details. It’s as if there’s a gap between prescriptions in their white paper and their new mobile capabilities.
It appears that like other email providers, text messaging is being viewed as a complement or alternative message delivery medium to email, designed to ensure email marketers don’t look elsewhere when the topic of mobile comes up within their organizations. Wise marketers, be they aligned to email or not, would be well served by looking at the mobile customer experience to guide their initial forays into mobile.
