As we have come to find, agencies are often at the mercy of the whims of their clients when it comes to mobile marketing. Because of the perception – right or wrong – that a mobile campaign such as one featuring an SMS text message call to action is a single project with a limited life, the ultimate benefits of mobile never have a chance to accrue. Those benefits include the ability to collect interaction data, often across both SMS text message interactions as well as email and web, and create essentially a mobile datamart containing a goldmine of customer data that agencies often NEVER have access to.
As I blogged about recently, mobile technology firms have the potential to cut agencies out of the loop as more businesses become comfortable and able to work direct with point solution providers to execute their mobile marketing plans.
Why more agencies don’t adopt the viewpoint of mobile as a means of collecting data about their client’s customers, and use that insight as a basis to pitch new business, is beyond me. Without much thought, imagine:
- Client wishes to employ a mobile sweepstakes as a novel means of driving interest in their products during a slow period. Client measures an improvement in sales correlated to the client’s locations by virtue of collecting customer zip codes as part of the process. This data could be obtained easily via SMS text message interaction or via a web form which feeds the same datamart.
- Result? Value proven, but apparently many agency clients stop there. Instead, imagine:
- Agency strategists analyze information captured during the promotion in the datamart and discover distinct segments of customers. Entry into the promotion required customers to provide some very simple demographic and preference details such as gender, marital status, and product affinity. The agency’s client is constantly striving to increase same store sales by creating offers and promotions that align with their targeted customer but these tend to be very broad brush efforts which often take the form of a mass media effort.
- Agency strategists pitch the idea to re-target the identifiable segments with “buy one/get one free” offers aligned with insights from the datamart. Client wonders how redemption will happen at the point of sale, how value will be tracked. Unable to currently capture these offer codes at the point of sale due to technical and operational limitations, the agency prescribes a novel solution – simply inform store managers to expect the offers to be presented and instruct cashiers to honor them. Post promotion, month over month sales per location can be analyzed related to the distribution of the offers by zip code. In this way, an indirect yet very strong correlation between the promotion and sale can be established.
- Result? Value indirectly proven yet the client must certainly be happy having taken a data driven approach to marketing as opposed to a “pray and spray” mass media method. The client also now has a good sense for its most engaged customers. Having seen the power of mobile centric marketing, the client decides next to implement a loyalty rewards program:
- The client, now on board with the notion of mobile marketing, calls the agency team to create a loyalty program that initially targets customers by zip code where sales increased the most during the “buy one/get one free” promotion. These customers are invited to join via SMS text message, and do so by visiting an online web form on the client’s website where more details about their preferences and interests are captured. These in turn trigger unique initial offers designed to drive more frequent visits and greater market basket value based on business rules established (e.g. mother with two children gets offered product X, single guy age 25 gets offered product Y). Wouldn’t you know it, but the client recently upgraded its POS systems and the field operations team is no longer averse to extending the checkout process with mobile offer code redemption. Now, redemption by these very loyal customers can be tracked directly.
- The client advertises membership into the club on its website for anyone to join at a cost – the free offer was only extended to those who participated in the earlier promotion. These new customers who pay to join, are similarly presented with offers aligned to their interests.
I could go on, but hopefully agency readers and their clients get the point. Mobile marketing is not about a one-time campaign – it’s a unique opportunity to reach your customers with their personal devices in ways that drive sales and loyalty. To take any other approach is wasteful, shortsighted, and spells death for any agency hoping to compete for mobile budgets.
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