The beauty of mobile marketing is that by definition, you have to approach the channel with the perspective of creating a relevant message, call to action or offer – a marketer has no choice. Whether needing to obtain permission from customers to communicate via SMS text message or ensuring an investment in a mobile application pays off with thousands of downloads, relative to other marketing tactics such as email, relevance is a must in formulating any mobile marketing strategy that hopes to succeed. You could argue the high response rates common with mobile promotions reflect the necessity to craft plans that focus on the customer (convenience, for example) more so than the marketer’s goal (such as selling more products).
I call out email specifically because of a few different things I’ve read over the past week which suggest certain marketing tactics make it too easy to be ineffective – or less relevant to consumer needs.
Although mobile email use is growing, email as an interactive channel by itself has hurdles to overcome in my view 
which hurts its ability to serve a marketer’s objectives. Today, for example, on eMarketer.com an article titled, “Relevance Remains a Challenge for E-Mail Marketers” cites statistics which suggest email for many consumers is very much like traditional snail mail – for the bills:
“Promotional e-mails were the most common thing for respondents to find in their inbox, with 60% saying they received such e-mails most. E-newsletters were the next-most-common type of messages.
But it was the least common messages that were most likely to be opened—monthly bills and bank statements. Only about four in 10 recipients said they “always” opened promotional offers or newsletters.”
It’s the consequence of this mismatch between consumer preference and marketer practice that marketers need to be wary of:
“Web users also complained of receiving too many to manage and getting tired of all the clutter. In many cases that clutter can have consequences for marketers: 22% of respondents have decided not to purchase from a company because of irrelevant promotions, either via e-mail or direct mail. A further 41% said they would consider doing the same.”
Another article, a November 20, 2009 item titled, “Yesmail talks strategy behind mobile email, SMS features” quotes the email marketing firm’s leaders regarding their move to offer mobile marketing services to its clients:
“Yesmail is already starting to early stages of mobile marketing evolving from an acquisition channel to a retention channel. We expect to see SMS campaigns being created with the same level of sophistication as many email marketing campaigns – both in terms of segmentation and in terms of staged triggering over the next two years.”
In fact, some mobile marketing providers are already offering the ability to create triggered campaigns based on customer segments – no need to wait two years. It’s illustrative of an undercurrent of FUD (fear/uncertainty/doubt) from email marketing services companies scrambling to extend their offerings into mobile in order to hang on to their customers, many of whom increasingly view email as a commodity. Wise marketers should recognize the difference and not get fixated on mobile as an add on to an email campaign.
When it comes time to creating a relevant message flow, offer or call to action, it’s logical to segment your customers into groupings which lend themselves to the task. This was the topic of a great October 22 article on ChiefMarketer.com titled, “Lock and Load: The Basics of Triggered E-mail Campaigns.” The article is all about email as a means of crafting an interactive dialogue with customers to achieve business goals – a task that email may be ill suited to given the recent statistics cited in this post. It concludes with a quote that marketers should take to heart, but with a view toward mobile as the means – not email:
“The beauty of event-based triggered messaging is that you can make it extremely relevant to the person receiving the e-mail.”
Problem is, email may not be the right approach to delivering those messages.
