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.

While much of the early event content focused on the magnitude of the mobile marketing opportunity, this session was all about what marketers should expect, in terms of hard results, based on real world experience.

The presenter is a consultant focusing mostly on the quick serve restaurant (QSR) and multi-location retail markets, but the insights presented here should provide valuable targets for anyone new to mobile or more experienced practitioners looking for something to compare their results to.

I’ve summarized the content I found most valuable, and suspect would be as well to any mobile marketer.

Start Simple

• Create and grow your mobile subscriber base FIRST: Use events, point of purchase incentives, email, and integrating calls to action into existing media buys.
• Understand your customer: Implement tracking, build analytics, poll your members, begin mining the database for trends.  Engage in creative ways to uncover more than just a mobile phone number, such as short surveys.  A maximum of 4 questions is about what the average consumer will answer via SMS text message interaction.  Good survey oriented campaigns yield 43 percent response rates, and of those who do opt to participate, completion rates exceed 90 percent.
• Market One-to-One: Marketers make the mistake of focusing here initially. The benefits of one to one marketing accrue based on establishing solid practices around the preceding two activities.  Sending individually targeted offers, creating profiles of customers to deliver content they want is what happens here.

Mobile Ads are Hype/Lack Reach

• The mobile ad ecosystem is too complex for the average marketer.  All display advertising, the kind that is very engaging, is all happening on the iPhone and Android, both of which pale in comparison with the market share of phones capable of sending and receiving text messages.

Advice to Mobile Marketing Services Providers

• Talk to the market thru SMS, lead with it, because all marketers are drawn immediately to promises of expansive reach for reasonable cost.  If alternative mobile marketing approaches are desired, such as applications or mobile web, so be it, but these offer far less reach than SMS.

5 Flavors of Engagement

• Banner and display ads
• Text messaging
• Mobile search
• Commercial Applications
• In Application/Games Ads

Engagement Metrics

• Member growth rates
• Opt in and opt out rates
• Viral growth rates per engagement
• Redemption rates
• Average sale per redemption
• Average engagements per month
• Cost per redemption
• Cost per engagement
• Cost per member
• True ROI for the overall program

Media Buy Effectiveness in Supporting Mobile Programs – From Worst to Best

• Billboards
• Radio
• Sports venues/events
• On site ambassadors
• TV
• Festival or parade
• Print
• In store signage (posters, table tents, etc.) – 90 percent success keeping subscribers opted in who are acquired in this manner

Use Email to Create Mobile Fans, Not the Other Way Around

• Use your email list to promote mobile campaigns, achieve a 20 percent join rate

What to Expect in terms of Results

• 250 members per location (retail/QSR) in 90 days is average
• 500 members per location in 90 days is exceptional
• 700 members per location in 12 months is average
• 1200 members per location in 12 months exceptional

And remember, even if the total universe of subscribers appears small, these represent your most loyal customers.

For context, consider that average QSRs generate approximately 20,000 unique customer visits per month, exceptional cases like McDonald’s obtain around 40,000.

Houston, We Have a Problem

If opt out rate exceeds 10 percent, you have a problem with the program.

Typical Offer Redemption Rates by Medium (i.e. coupons)

• Mobile 7 percent
• Email 1.12 percent
• Paper Coupons 1.18
• Direct Mail 1.12

With marketers more accountable that ever, many are drawn to the built-in measurability of mobile channel interactions – as illustrated in this recent post where we outline mobile metrics tracked by our Engagement Platform.  We state these in terms all marketers identify with because they are at the foundation of marketing measurement:

• Stickiness – A measure of retention
• Acquisition – Permission indicator
• Loyalty – Propensity to engage
• Response Intensity – Relative measure of engagement
• Reach – Indicator of scale
• Engagement Mix – Relative engagement contribution

Viewing mobile metrics in this way helps marketers relate the mobile channel to stakeholders in other aspects of business who don’t want (or need) to understand intricacies around opt in/opt out rules, keyword campaign segmentation or the differences between Mobile Terminated (MT) and Mobile Originated (MO) messages.  The Forrester Report includes a diagram — included in this post – into which these mobile metrics fit quite clearly.

Mobile marketing can be about text messaging or smartphone applications, but for mobile to take hold as a strategic component of business, marketers need to work diligently to relate channel-centric concepts to mainstream marketing metrics to communicate value.

Metric: Stickiness
Within the context of SMS text message mobile marketing, stickiness refers to the ability of a campaign to hold onto its opt in subscribers, such that customers may be targeted repeatedly over time.  The utility of a call to action has a great deal of influence over how many customers elect to opt out of your list.  Marketers want to see the trend in this analysis track positively over time as an indicator of stickiness.

Metric: Acquisition
Marketers need to view as a significant “win” the permission provided by customers to engage in text message interactions.  At-a-glance, marketers can instantly view the magnitude and trending for acquiring subscribers, by campaign.

Metric: Loyalty
Although referred to as “Retention,” this measure offers insight into the “mobile loyalty” of your customers.  Opting into communications is different from subscribing to receive messages proactively.  This view offers insight into the relative number of customers who have opted in that also elected to subscribe to a campaign.  Marketers can interpret this as an indicator of consumer receptiveness to mobile engagement, much as loyal customers engage in repeat purchase behavior.

Metric: Response Intensity
The ratio of messages a marketer sends versus those responded to by customers can be used to evaluate calls to action as contributing to mobile engagement.  MT, or Mobile Terminated messages, are those sent by the marketer.  MO, or Mobile Originated messages, are those sent by customers.  The greater the number of MOs for a given MT indicates superior engagement for a campaign.  Viewing MOs in isolation quickly across all Engagement Actions provides instant insight into the campaigns working best to pull customers into mobile interactions.

Metric: Reach
The value of SMS text message marketing is often described as offering universal access to consumers.  This is realized by analyzing the number of subscribers to a particular campaign, which is shown by keyword.  Keywords are how marketers connect their customers with mobile interactions and so viewing the aggregate number of subscribers per keyword illustrates the reach afforded by a campaign and its call to action.

Metric: Engagement Mix
Increasingly, mobile interactions are becoming “multi-mobile” in nature, inclusive of both SMS text messaging and the web (both mobile and desktop).  It is therefore crucial for marketers to have a single view into the interplay among these channels as part of mobile campaigns.  This analysis provides insight into the mix of distinct interactions stemming from text and web, which illustrates customer engagement channel preferences.

Dunkin Donuts’ Twitter efforts:

“…include tracking customers that sign up for the company’s rewards programs and sweepstakes offers via Twitter, and assigning a dollar value to those customers that can then be tied to an actual ROI.”

The ease by which this is possible using solutions such as Interactive Mediums’ Customer Engagement Platform across SMS text messaging and the web makes these practices an essential component of any social media strategy.  As shown in the attached recent “Tweet” from the Dunkin Donuts Twitter page, broadcasting a contest to followers which incents them to purchase can also be used to collect valuable information about followers otherwise unavailable to marketers.  The opportunity for engagement encompasses both action (purchase) and knowledge (follower demographics).

In case you doubt the mobile nature of Twitter users or the value of understanding the audience, consider research into the Twitter user base:

“Since Twitter is pushed as a service that can (and should) be used from mobile phones, it also comes as no surprise that Twitter users are more likely (by fairly significant margins) to use their cell phones to go online and send text messages than the overall online population. In fact, Twitter users tend to use and consume all sorts of media more than the rest of the population; they’re more likely to read a newspaper on a smartphone, regular cell phone, and even online than everyone else, while “regular” Internet users are more likely to read a print newspaper. Twitter users are more engaged in blogging and reading other people’s blogs as well.”

Research into Twitter users from mulitple sources is consolidated in a post here, where it’s noted that: “Twitter are notoriously guarded about user information and Twitter usage statistics,” placing the onus on social media pros to develop creative ways of understanding their fans.

One sign in every store pointing consumers to text their comments to a shortcode could act as a highly effective and efficient feedback collector – especially when paired with entry into a loyalty program.  Response rates for text message programs have commonly been reported as high as 30 percent.

According to the article Wendy’s staff will be able to:

“…analyze nearly half a million text-based customer comments per year collected from Wendy’s Web-based feedback form, call center notes, e-mail messages, receipt-based surveys, and social media sources. The chain’s customer satisfaction team currently uses the combination of spreadsheets and keyword searching to review comments in a slow, manual approach.”

Notably absent that list of collection points is text messaging.  Not only are barriers like 160 character limits broken with multi-question survey capabilities such as those offered by the Interactive Mediums Customer Engagement Platform, but data can be collected via web form and feed the same database as well.

Quick serve restaurants of all stripes should leverage once obscure analytic technologies like text mining, and would be wise to tap into the immediacy of text messaging as a key data source.

When you add to this mix that many businesses are reaping mobile marketing benefits, as shown every day on MobileMarketer.com and other sites, marketers in all industries sense urgency to at least try mobile marketing – be it developing a mobile optimized version of their website, an iPhone application or trying to employ SMS text messaging simply due to its reach.

I think this is the landscape documented in research covered today on eMarketer.com, in an article titled, “Mobile Marketers Demand ROI.”  Results of a survey suggest marketers will pursue mobile marketing efforts in 2010 – even allocating budget – but obstacles remain (as shown in the diagram included in this post).

“It appears that 2010 will be a year of experimentation and education on mobile marketing as marketers struggle to come to terms with its practicality and ROI.”

The greatest challenge – not surprisingly – is uncertainty around building the business case for mobile marketing, followed closely by a lack of ROI metrics and mobile not a part of the “strategic roadmap.”  I’d argue all of these issues fall under the heading of simply “I don’t know where to start, given my business, my product or service and customer base.”

For this reason, Interactive Mediums developed an exercise called “Mapping Mobile to Your Marketing Strategy,” that when complete identifies the best candidate projects that align with your existing marketing plans and channels.  This is based on our direct experience and observation of the ways leading companies are going to market with mobile as strategic elements of their business.

Taking time to experiment and educate is simply not an option for marketers given the pace of advancement among leading mobile marketers.  Even trialing various approaches will leave you behind the curve as competition for consumer mobile mindshare escalates.  Taking a thoughtful approach to mapping out a strategy can ensure your business plays a role in the mobile customer relationships that will surely separate the winners from losers.

On one hand you have this February 4, 2010 post on MobileMarketingWatch.com citing expert commentary from a recent event, where the consensus view was that mobile advertising was “harder than ever…citing extreme fragmentation and a plethora of new devices sporting varying technical aspects as the main culprits.”  The situation sounds intimidating to say the least, begging for a wait and see approach.

Juxtaposed with this is research cited in a February 5, 2010 article in MobileMarketer.com titled, “Mobile ad campaigns 5 times more effective than online: InsightExpress study.”  Based on the title alone, you can imagine the article describes how much more effective mobile advertising is today than its online counterpart.  And that is the case.

You can read about the differences in effectiveness but it all comes down to “engagement and context” according to the study, both of which we describe as central to mobile marketing’s value proposition, be it a focus on advertising or direct engagement via SMS text messaging, email and mobile web.

I think the disconnect between “experts” and the facts on the ground is due to control; advertising networks are the gateway to this value while many experts working on the boundaries are left struggling for relevance with end customers who have cash to spend.  Marketers would be wise to quickly discern the quality and subjectivity of viewpoints they consider when prioritizing mobile marketing efforts.

The pace of innovation in mobile and urgency to begin engaging customers in mobile interactions demands we pay attention to news of the day.  More importantly is that we have a relevant point of view.  Hello Mobile! is our forum for communicating these views.  Others are listening as well, such as MobileMarketer.com which today recognized our article “9 Steps for SMS Marketing” among the “Top 15 industry-expert columns of 2009.”

As 2010 begins, look for further insights, commentaries and directives from our blog.  Before we look forward though, here are the top 10 most popular posts of 2009 – I wonder what this list will look like next year, the key trends and topics?  Stay tuned.

• Is Apple the Mobile Walmart?
• The Key to Mobile Customer Data
• Acxiom Clients Seeking a Differentiated Mobile Offering Should Look Elsewhere
• Advice to Marketers: Don’t Confuse Mobile Advertising with Mobile Marketing (or Active Customer Engagement)
• Establishment Converges on Active Customer Engagement
• Lessons From Less Than Successful Mobile Apps
• Thankfully, More about Active Customer Engagement
• Vendor Lines Blurring but One Thing is Clear: Active Customer Engagement
• Insight into Apple’s App Store approval process
• Best in Class Marketers to Focus on Customer Engagement in 2010

While that sounds like a terrific step or opportunity for consulting firms, as I point out in a comment on the post I don’t see many marketers taking advantage of APIs to this end.  Instead, I see:

• Marketers partaking in mobile advertising across multiple networks without any expectation at resolving the metrics across them, at least not at first.  All forecasts predict that mobile advertising will explode in the next few years, suggesting marketers are either unconcerned or unaware of the issues described in the blog post.
• Because marketers generally are drawn to mobile because it is among the most trackable and accountable channels, they soon may bump into the metrics integration issue.  Those marketers who do will fall into two camps: those who lack the resources or business case for integration regardless of API availability and those who will integrate because mobile advertising directly supports sales.

Let me explain: Many businesses utilize mobile advertising for awareness, branding and demand generation.  If resolving metrics across networks becomes an issue, I expect many marketers to narrow their network partners to one or two that offer access to the most targeted group of potential customers – to undertake an integration exercise is simply not worth the effort.  Other businesses that can drive sales via mobile transactions, however, will find it imperative to integrate metrics and tie these back to sales since the advertising directly supports the business.

With awareness/branding and demand generation representing arguably the largest mobile ad market opportunity, it suggests that mobile networks as a segment will narrow to 1-3 leaders with others either acquired or rendered irrelevant.  Thus, pretty quickly a consistent view of mobile ad metrics should happen almost automatically.

When it comes to engaging customers in the mobile channel, there is a strong analogy.  A single system which allows marketing objectives to be tailored to the mobile channel, executed and tracked, should be high on marketers’ priority lists in 2010.

Technology-wise, I am talking about SMS text messaging, mobile optimized websites, mobile applications, mobile email and social media.  In practice, marketers enabled with a solution that stitches each of these together will have a significant advantage over those who don’t.

For example, imagine engaging your customers via SMS text messaging, let them forward the invitation response to their Twitter followers, send text responders a thank you email, point them to a mobile website to redeem a coupon or to download a mobile application designed for their handset to enhance the shopping experience.  And, track this activity across all these mobile channels in a single system that easily integrates with the only system that matters — the one registering sales.

Notable was a reference similar to one made this past week during MobileMarketer.com’s webinar, “Mobile Marketing in 2010: Up, Down or Flat? Experts Offer Strategic Advice for Campaign Planning and Management.”  During this live discussion one of the panelists mentioned a practical application of SMS text messaging was as both a call to action and media buy effectiveness measurement tool.  The very same is described in the analyst report this way:

“Beyond customer acquisition short codes allow marketers to ‘close the loop’ between ads, media and the point of sale.  Given these advantages, we expect short codes begin to replace (or supplement) URLs in most traditional media ads.”

Such applications are a great way to prove the value of SMS text messaging as a step toward taking greater advantage of the channel to develop customer relationships.  Segmenting media buys by text keyword allows responses to be tracked by dollars invested in different mediums.  ROI — as a function of response rate and cost — thus can be calculated and the results should inform a more efficiently allocated media spend in the future.

Ironically, the report also cites the example of Wetseal using a text promotion as a means of building a loyalty program database.  We highlighted the retailer in this recent post due to its expanded mobile strategy inclusive of text messaging, mobile applications and mobile web – the mobile customer experience.

If not already, marketers and their trusted agency partners should have plans for taking advantage of mobile in 2010.  Getting started by proving the value of text as a media buy measurement device is a logical way toward realizing the even greater benefits of targeting customers at the point of device.

Similar to what we described in our Point of View on Active Customer Engagement and this actual customer example, email, web and mobile communications work together as part of a larger effort consisting of media buys supporting a promotion.  It isn’t apparent that the retailer had access to a system encapsulating all the components required to configure, execute and measure the program, but you can be certain if it did, ROI would have been greater.

A tidal wave of buzz is building around Active Customer Engagement, as illustrated by another recent article outlining the solution here on the Illinois Technology Association website.  Today as well, we were featured in a brief article titled, “Time to market with mobile” at brand-e.biz in which we say the following that gets to the heart of what Active Customer Engagement’s value is all about:

“What should drive mobile marketing investments is a strategy which focuses on the customer experience, what you want to achieve with your customers.  Developing ideal mobile paths for your customers to follow to achieve your goals should yield the best results…And in practice this will almost always mean some combination of text message interactions, mobile applications, mobile optimized web and even e-mail.”

More interesting than the recommendations were references to an earlier November 24, 2009 article on MarketingVox.com citing Direct Marketing Association (DMA) ROI research for email and search marketing:

“…commercial email now returns $43.62 for every dollar spent on it in 2009…”

“…search advertising..is the next most effective channel with an ROI of $21.85 for every dollar spent.”

A simple conclusion would be that email’s return is about 100 percent that of search.  Consider as well that, with respect to email, “41% of consumers find that promotional offers are irrelevant, according to a study by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO).”  That means despite nearly half of those subject to email marketing rejecting those offers, ROI is greater than 4,000 percent!  It isn’t clear if ROI was calculated based on direct sales driven by email promotions.

Even so, you could argue that relevance is a key determinant of return for email and search marketing investments.  Paid search may help connect consumers with relevant results, yet search by its nature is rather broad, pointing consumers to some destination rather than calling them to action.  An email communication pushed to a consumer by a business should be more targeted, relevant and contain a compelling call to action.

Considering mobile — especially SMS text message interactions – by its nature must be relevant, ROI should exceed both email and search.  Extrapolating figures cited in the article, ROI for mobile marketing could be another 100 percent greater than email, offering upwards of $80 for every dollar spent.  Even if it’s no better than email, mobile’s ROI is highly relevant to marketer’s interested in making the most of their budgets.

Before reading about something like that I expected to see Acxiom instead enter the mobile marketing fray like its cousin in the marketing services market, Experian.  So it was not surprising to see this headline today: “Acxiom, Partnership Infuses Consumer Intelligence in Mobile Channel.”  What was surprising is that the company is partnering with a third party to provide mobile marketing capabilities to its clients as opposed to developing something itself.  Moreover, Acxiom is partnering with the exact same firm as Experian to provide the service.  Sadly for their clients, even the benefit is the same, down to the quote in the announcement: mobile as an enabler of effective “customer life cycle management (CLM).”

That bit of déjà vu was not in the announcement, no doubt because Experian and Acxiom often compete for business.  While the news highlights the importance of the mobile channel to large, established marketing services companies, it also shows they don’t exactly know what to do with mobile (other than tack it onto their services as a means of ensuring their clients don’t look elsewhere).

Marketers who use these companies for services need not be locked into using a commodity third party for mobile messaging.  The beauty of many offerings in the marketplace are their openness and ease of integration with third party data sources to help segment mobile customers and inform more relevant dialogues.  Firms like Interactive Mediums also offer services encompassing the entire mobile customer experience, which is fundamentally the focus of marketers looking to achieve real business results at the point of device.

“Mobile may be the killer tool for testing the effectiveness of marketing messages and various media before a full scale rollout. Text message interactions are often used to this end, and also serve to measure return on investment for advertising across media such as print, billboards, radio and television.”

An article today on MobileMarketer.com brought this to mind, with a list of tips for testing your mobile strategy before executing holiday marketing plans.  I thought the tips were excellent, but marketers should not view testing as a single threaded activity; take the opportunity to test multiple approaches simultaneously against similar populations of targeted customers to see which one represents the greatest potential return.

Strictly speaking, champion/challenger testing is about comparing results of new ideas with those already in production.  So, in a marketing context, this would be akin to testing different discount offers as incentives for signing up for a mobile loyalty program, and comparing the effectiveness of different discount levels at attracting sign ups with those associated with a pre-existing non-mobile program.  The net result offers two benefits: a focused effort you can be more certain will meet your objectives and a direct comparison with non-mobile marketing efforts which should help align marketing budget more wisely.

So when reading the article’s suggested steps to creating a test plan, do so with an eye toward multiple scenarios and comparing results at the conclusion.  For reference, I have paraphrased the prescribed 10 step process:

• Identify the testable “entity” – For example, an SMS text message offer for joining a holiday discount club, the attractiveness of a dedicated holiday shopping application or new e-commerce enabled mobile website.
• What is the metric you are trying to measure?  # of responses, # of new sign ups, conversions between text message interaction and receipt of a discount?  Identify one or multiple attributes which can be measured and compared.
• How will you determine success?  If you are relatively new to mobile, it may be difficult to establish a target for your metrics beyond “finger in the air” guessing.  This is why the champion/challenger concept is especially suited to mobile given you will be able to compare results — ideally with past programs — to use as inputs into creating realistic targets.
• What criteria is necessary to identify when a test should be stopped?  If your test runs several weeks, you may want to cease testing if you observe little to no material difference in measures, or if one idea is simply generating far greater results than the others.
• What measures will you want to monitor for your targeted segments, independent of success metrics?  Migration among value segments/tiers would be one example.
• What other factors could affect the test, such as concurrently running marketing campaigns/promotions or those of your competitors?
• What resources are required, both technical and creative, to execute the test?  Consider both your internal staff and their potentially competing priorities as well as agency and technical third party partners.
• Be sure the proper stakeholders are aware of your plans; sales in the event demand generation is affected, brand marketing in case new messaging, visuals or brand-attributes are components of the test.
• Who is the “test sponsor” – basically the most senior person who signs off on the program.  Have this person identified – be it you or someone else – so you can quickly address any escalations that may occur.
• Time horizon for having the results: have this in mind from the beginning and back off this date to create a testing plan.  With Black Friday just a few days away it’s too late to implement these ideas now but keep them in mind to start off strong in 2010.

In what can only be described as implicit acknowledgement of the mobile channel as a pervasive bridge between business and consumer, an article on OnlineMediaDaily.com titled “Nielsen To Refract Digital Media Planning, Brings PRIZM To Online Consumer Targeting” describes how PRIZM clusters can now be related to online users.  Applications are numerous and include better targeted interactive media buys to more relevant and higher performing online campaigns.

As the mobile channel becomes the preferred one over all others, distinctions between on and offline behavior blur.  Unlike state-based channels like a desktop PC or the point of sale, mobile can be at once an offline and online channel simply based on what a consumer is doing at any point in time; for example, sitting on the couch watching television or walking through the mall.  In either case, mobile provides a connection between the marketer and consumer.

Marketers should look at PRIZM as a great opportunity to develop more relevant mobile dialogues with their customers; it can act as a surrogate for an even clearer picture of customer behavior that emerges over time as mobile interactions feed new insights into a Mobile Customer Data Asset.  As I said here:

“It’s like adding a mobile attribute to your existing customer understanding, but it is a multidimensional view inclusive of demographic, attitudinal and transactional data all collected as part of mobile interactions.”

Many marketers are entering the mobile arena with a similar view on text messaging.  As has been widely reported, investments in SMS marketing campaigns are often driven by curiosity with a focus on trial.  The same could be argued around the market for mobile applications.  A hard monetary return is often thus not considered as important in a buy decision as the price of the product or service — just like commodities, yet unlike household products, you could say mobile is a “hot commodity” right now with plenty of demand to go around the ecosystem of suppliers.

Once the unbridled enthusiasm around mobile begins to ebb and is replaced by more rational, measured decision making, how will this affect the market for mobile marketing technology products and services?
 
There are two probable outcomes in my view: buyers will gravitate toward the big “brands” from which they source marketing products and services — the well known, long established multi-disciplinary providers who have tacked on a mobile capability to their offerings. Why?  Simply because it will represent a low cost, safe choice from a trusted company.

AdMob is not an example of what I’m talking about.  Advertising, especially online advertising, has established metrics for valuing such services (CTR, CPM).  Once significant scale is achieved, as happened with AdMob, the blend of metrics with scale makes for a highly valued prize.

The other outcome should offer buyers a better, higher value choice, independent of price.  Providers which combine scale, metrics and more, will enable marketers to leverage the mobile channel in ways that a commodity choice never can match — via Active Customer Engagement.  I’m of course talking about the Mobile Customer Experience, inclusive of all means of targeting customers at the point of device and calling them to action based on marketing objectives which are measurable.

Marketers able to see the distinction, and not fixate on mobile as an adjunct to email or a novel handset application, will be more successful than their peers.

For relatively little money, this service offers access to nearly 25 million mobile phone subscribers who supposedly have opted into text message communications.  Not only that, but the list can be acquired based on useful segmentation variables such as age, marital status, occupation and many others.  When coming across this, along with assurances of compliance with Direct Marketing Association standards and examples of widespread use, I thought, “this could be the holy grail” for the mobile marketer interested in achieving the broad reach promised by text message ubiquity.

My friend at the MMA, Brooke (Locke) Morse, brought me back to Earth.  According to her, anyone who purchases and uses such lists are free to do so but risk penalties at the carrier level.  What this means practically speaking is that if a marketer wishes to use such lists with a mobile marketing services provider, they need to find one willing to itself risk penalties which could essentially put it out of business.  Or, figure out how to go direct through carriers themselves, which simply isn’t practical for most organizations.  In the event a list like this is used, it takes just one unhappy recipient to send an email to csca@ctia.org and raise a red flag.

All is not black and white, however.  Marketers who follow the “letter of the law” and develop their own opted in list of mobile subscribers could immediately append their initial data with segmentation variables available in third party lists to begin creating more relevant and personalized interactions.  The mobile phone number acts as a key between the two sources.  Marketers may find they obtain such data over time but this represents a fast path to realizing benefits associated with building a Mobile Customer Data Asset.

In practice, SMS can power highly effective customer relationship and development strategies.  The key is working with firms which have developed technology around SMS that masks the complexity of initiating mobile interactions (or Dialogues).  Firms that address this properly will:

• Advise you that mobile marketing best practices, as prescribed by the Mobile Marketing Association, dictate your initial foray into mobile requires creation of a new class of customers – your mobile subscribers.  It is not sufficient to possess or buy customer or prospect mobile phone numbers without also having their expressed consent to communicate with them via text messaging.  Marketers are free to do so but at their own peril, as mobile device users have come to expect this opt in step and are likely to punish those who do not.

• What this means is that you must create a mobile marketing strategy in line with your overall customer retention and acquisition plans.  Engagement with the mobile audience requires thoughtful, relevant and ongoing communications so that your business, product or brand remains top of mind.   Without such a programmatic approach, you risk wasting the effort.  Thoughtful providers may prescribe a trial to determine what works/does not, but as part of a longer term plan for leveraging mobile strategically.

• This step can take many forms, but some businesses will drive opt in email contacts to a web form where they are incented to opt into mobile communications.  Others may advertise a new loyalty program in traditional media like billboard, signage or print that encourages an opt in text message interaction.  And remember, you can embed pointers to mobile websites or even application downloads in text messages, so you need to think more holistically about what actions you hope to drive based on your objectives.

• To do so requires use of something called a short code, which is simply a short form (more easily entered without errors) phone number that people use to send and receive text message communications.  Good providers will mask the complexity of obtaining short codes, and successful firms already possess multiple “shared” codes which can be used by any business almost immediately.  These numbers are able to be shared by different businesses because text communications are segmented by keyword — the phrase that people send via short code to a text message marketing system.  This is cost and time effective, but many businesses are moving toward obtaining a “dedicated” short code which aligns with their brand, and is then placed everywhere customers engage the business.  Providers should be able to help you obtain these vanity numbers without exposing the details around acquiring them.  Today this process can take up to a couple of months (it is NOT instantaneous like domain name registration), so if mobile is even remotely on your radar for 2010 and branding your short code may be important, securing it now via a knowledgeable provider may make sense.

• With a baseline group of customers and prospects interested in receiving messages, now you have the opportunity to call them to action, based on your marketing objectives.  To do this most intelligently — like you would with any other marketing channel — you want to segment your audience based on what you know about them, but also what you would like to know about them and how you want them to act.

• Providers with flexible solutions allow you to append opt in subscriber data with internal and third party data to create groupings of customers and prospects for targeting with relevant messages – for example, unique offers tiered by expected lifetime value, geographic segments for regional promotions, and many others.

• Good providers will also advise you to take the opportunity to learn more about your prospects and customers within the mobile channel.  Stitching data capture requirements into marketing programs is an effective approach to gaining valuable insights into consumers who are willing to engage in mobile interactions.  It’s like adding a mobile attribute to your existing customer understanding, but it is a multidimensional view inclusive of demographic, attitudinal and transactional data all collected as part of mobile interactions.

• Providers should also alleviate any concerns over limited reach given the diverse carrier networks which provide access to mobile device users.   The good ones work with third parties, or aggregators, that in turn offer turnkey access to virtually all mobile phone users.  There is no need to work with these third parties yourselves; providers should have these integrations pre-built in their offerings.

• Speaking of “offerings,” text message interactions have become highly sophisticated thanks to the creation of “mobile campaign management” platforms.  Like similar technologies used to develop web, email, snail mail, call center, or point of sale marketing programs, these dedicated systems should provide a variety of methods for taking an interaction idea, and rolling it out to the mobile channel.  Better providers make this easy to do, and the majority are offered as a service (Software-as-a-Service) so there is no software or hardware to buy.

Time is winding down on 2009, and all signs point to mobile as a key channel to drive business across many industries in 2010.  Marketing leaders should seize on this new opportunity to help their businesses compete more effectively for scarce consumer dollars by partnering with the right provider.

• Active Customer Engagement Comes to Life for Mobile Marketers
• Retail and Consumer Products Companies Must Confront the Mobile Challenge
• What’s up next for Hooters? Reality “Augmentation”?
• The Death of Email…Long Live Email!
• The question of branded versus syndicated mobile applications for retailers
• A definitely not “wet behind the ears” retail example of Mobile Marketing Strategy
• Retailers Focused on Customer Experience Need to Consider Mobile

I thought it would be useful to view this capability within the context of the initiatives facing marketers and which have strong applications for mobile, as we talk about in Mapping Mobile to Your Marketing Strategy.

Loyalty Programs: Registering customers for loyalty programs and having them use text interactions to log activity (e.g. via product codes for points) are useful, largely “one way” communication strategies.  Newly supported capabilities can add value to loyalty programs by enabling marketers to identify targeted “best next actions” for customers, based on richer profiles and interaction history.  For example, rather than simply registering customers via SMS, marketers can now, in real time, prompt customers for additional information, such as product affinity, consumption frequency, and channel preferences.  Whereas in the past, such details may be obtained over time and from other data sources, they can now be captured at the initial point of contact.  In cases where a marketer has already developed an opted in list of mobile customers, they can alter the “points redemption” process at the point of mobile interaction to include capturing more details of customer behavior.  Once captured, profiles and consumption data can be used to develop offers for logical product bundles or product bridges.  Blending speed to market with customer knowledge is an enormous benefit of these new capabilities for loyalty programs.

Demand Generation: To increase floor traffic and close more business, marketers will offer subscriptions to discount, sales or other promotional message programs.  Whereas in the past, this registration was limited to a homogenous list of existing and potential customers, now within a single system marketers can develop immediate, and more detailed profiles of interested consumers for serving more relevant offers.  For example, marketers can now offer these programs and at the same time request details such as age, sex, marital status, product interest and others which can then be used to segment responders into groups to be matched up with appropriate offers designed to drive purchases.

Brand Awareness: Brand marketers are gated from their customers via the built in separation between manufacturers and their sales channels.  And while couponing can offer insight into consumption behavior, text messaging can connect brand marketers directly with their customers in ways which are mutually beneficial.  For example, a food company might offer recipes with their products as key ingredients in exchange for a text interaction whereby the marketer obtains insight into consumers’ perception of their brand.  A measure of brand engagement may be derived by how willing consumer segments are to engage in multi-question interactions.

Champion/Challenger Testing: If understanding customers “on the go” is an objective but there is uncertainty around how much information can be obtained via text message interactions, these new capabilities allow marketers greater flexibility in testing their strategies before a full roll out.  Question threads of different depth and/or length can be tested to see in advance which approach will yield the desired results.

Customer/Market Research: A survey instrument may not always be the best approach to gaining insight into customer preferences and behavior for use in creating new products, packages or services.  A marketer interested in obtaining this type of information can use the new capabilities to identify segments of opted in customers to ask increasingly more specific questions.  This process of closing the loop only serves to inform better decision making.  Key to success is ensuring customers are incented to engage in these dialogues, and offering registration in trial product programs is one such approach.

Is mobile marketing today where it should be? Why/why not?
It is getting there.  Some top companies, such as Coca Cola, are ahead of the curve and view mobile as part of its overall marketing and customer relationship efforts.  Less visionary marketers are slowly adopting a similar approach, but many are still looking at mobile as a novel interaction opportunity or are trying it out to “see what happens.”  As the success stories continue to accumulate and metrics emerge that allow all marketers to clearly align mobile marketing to their business problems, market uptake and investments will escalate.

Will mobile ever fulfill its promise? If so, what has to change for it to happen?
Absolutely, it already is in many forward thinking companies.  Mobile isn’t really the same thing as email or the web, as Mobile itself can be the platform on top of which consumers access email and browse the web.  It can also be an interaction channel in real time, like it’s being used today for text message marketing.  So it is really a transformative medium, in that it is both a channel itself and a platform for technologies more typically associated with a desktop computer experience.  Once businesses recognize the Mobile Customer Experience should be the right perspective and then map their business objectives to it, change will happen in heaping spoonfuls.

Where will mobile evolve to?
It clearly has moved from a novel text message communication platform to an experience based approach to engaging consumers while they are “on the go.”  Ultimately, for some businesses it will supplant any other current day channels of interaction, including the desktop web experience.  Papa John’s Pizza has already realized this to a certain degree with its mobile marketing efforts.  Sophisticated devices driven by mobile-centric user interfaces and connected to high bandwidth networks, along with equally sophisticated connections on the business side, is where everything is converging.

Tell us about a good case…bad case study
A good case everyone hears about is Coca Cola with its loyalty program.  A recent one we saw was a clothing retailer called Wet Seal which is taking a holistic view of mobile and developing a business strategy using appropriate mobile marketing methods to achieve its goals.  We blogged about them here.  Many of our clients are also experiencing great success.  Bad cases are those where a marketer conducts a single campaign, doesn’t collect data or learn much about their customers, and fails to leverage mobile as part of their overall plans.

What advantages does mobile have over other direct marketing channels? What disadvantages?
Much publicized and higher response rates.  Hooters, of all businesses, recently was written about in MobileMarketer.com about some really breakthrough response they received with a text message based promotion – we blogged about it here.  It’s the immediacy of response that is possible which makes mobile an ideal direct marketing tactic.  Disadvantages relative to others is that marketers have yet to embrace mobile as an investment which needs to be built into yearly plans and budgeted for upfront.  Just like you budget for email marketing or online advertising, marketers need to allocate dollars to leverage mobile throughout the year to meet their objectives, be they brand awareness, demand generation, loyalty or any of a number of important marketing initiatives.

Ok, I get that I should do mobile, what should I do first?
Great question.  Answer is: it fully depends on a business and its objectives.  If branding is a key objective, a rich Smartphone application may be in order, as is the case for many businesses.  If direct response is key, then text messaging may be most appropriate.  So the first order of business is establishing objectives then looking at how the mobile customer experience is best served to address them – text message marketing, mobile optimized website or application.

What are the coupon options through mobile?
Couponing could be a killer mobile application, the problem with it though is a function of technology and integration.  Traditional bar codes may only render on Smartphones, limiting their reach.  Moreover, sometimes point of sale systems will need to be upgraded to scan codes on device displays.  Codes sent via text can be ubiquitous, but requires some lookup and integration at the point of sale.  The less a cashier has to do to read and redeem the coupon, the better, as you don’t want hourly workers fumbling around with code books or trying to figure out how to enter a code into the register.  Coupons as part of efforts to build a store of mobile customer knowledge are a great approach for businesses to interact with customers directly.  Another popular option is to partner with coupon aggregators who offer access to a large, diverse or potentially more targeted group of consumers.  These make sense when the objective is primarily traffic based, more so than relationship development.

• “…by the end of the second quarter only about 7% of U.S. consumers bought goods or conducted financial transactions via cell phone, according to a Nielsen Mobile survey of more than 90,000 people,” but this is growing rapidly.  “In January, consultant ABI Research projected North American sales of physical goods ordered via cell phone would reach $544 million this year, up from $346 million in 2008.  Now, Mark Beccue, senior analyst at ABI, is considering updating his 2009 forecast to $800 million.”  What is interesting about this figure is that investments in mobile marketing in 2009 were forecasted at about $400M by Forrester in a July 2009 report titled “U.S. Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2009 to 2014.”  Do the math and that reflects a super high return on investment, given that the $400M figure is inclusive of all mobile marketing investment, not just that associated with commerce applications.
• Ebay and Amazon.com accounted for 70 percent of physical goods sales conducted via mobile in 2008.  If nothing else, this illustrates consumer adoption of m-commerce as a viable transaction platform, and concerns over data/credit card privacy should wane as Visa and other companies provide secure solutions optimized for mobile, as pointed out in the article.
• “By the end of 2009, about half of established retailers may have mobile Web sites, up from less than 20%.”  Given escalating adoption of Smartphones capable of providing a rich mobile web experience, retailers should reap considerable benefits.  “In the second quarter, 28% of all handsets sold in the U.S. were smartphones, up from 19% a year earlier, according to consultant NPD Group.  And more Americans will be able to gain access to the mobile Web soon.  One-third of consumers without a Web-enabled phone plan to purchase such a device within the next year, according to a survey of 3,305 U.S. consumers conducted in March…”
• Mobile is becoming the only channel that matters, in some cases replacing the traditional desktop PC.  “A large portion of the customer base is totally replacing their online experience with mobile, says Ensign of Papa John’s.  We think a lot of the times they were customers of Papa John’s [before] but ordered from other restaurants, too.  But now there’s a new convenience with Papa John’s, and we are getting a greater percentage of their purchases.”

The article concludes astutely that the development of this picture is entirely dependent on the network which connects consumers with businesses.  The “iPhone is morphing into a kind of predator parasite on the wireless network, sucking out the value and leaving networks gasping for air,” which means more than the risk of slow networks stalling m-commerce.

In the event networks play catch up mode with Smartphone adoption and usage, mobile marketers with strong ties to their on the go customers will more likely benefit from a greater share of consumer spending simply for the sake of convenience and prior experience.  For that reason, retailers and businesses of all kinds need to begin engaging their customers now in mobile dialogues based on business objectives mapped to the Mobile Customer Experience.

Positive results for programs like this are increasingly commonplace, but if this is true, then it goes without saying that return on investment based on a 32 percent increase in sales is phenomenal.  What is most interesting is how Hooters approached the project with an eye on confidently determining its effectiveness.  For example:

• Business Objective: “..the overall strategy was to increase Hooters’ store traffic.”
• Targeted Mobile Experience: “The aim of the promotion was to make it more convenient for viewers to learn how to join the Hooters Mobile Text Club.”
• Measurability: “..Hooters wanted a way to track the number of responses to the VOD (video on demand) and the number of people choosing to opt-in to the program.”

This is an approach similar to our view of targeting the Mobile Customer Experince based on business objectives.  In this case Demand Generation was the marketing initiative.  We also prescibe a focus on data collection and reuse via a Mobile Customer Data Asset.  While the article doesn’t state as such, you might imagine Hooters interested in understanding the quanity and velocity of customers going through the process, not unlike how salespeople gauge the movement of prospects through a sales cycle.  Like this:

• (Suspects) Top of funnel: “…the number of customers clicking the remote to see the longer Hooters VOD, as well as the time spent watching it.”
• (Prospects) Middle of funnel: “…the increase in the number of people added to the mobile database. State of Text provided tracking consistent with TV day-parts.”
• (Sales) Bottom of funnel: “State of Text compared the data with the TV schedule to determine the effectiveness of individual programs. Hooters tracked redemption rates at the store.”

This is yet another great example of a retail/restaurant taking a strategic view of mobile and leveraging it to achieve real business value.  It suggests that should Hooters at some point utilize reality augmentation you can be sure it targets a business problem and isn’t just a clever novelty associated with its somewhat offbeat brand.

In fact, the Mobile Customer Data Asset should improve upon these other data sources and itself be enriched with them to inform more relevant Mobile Dialogues.  Mobile interactions are unique among static or state based ones like email, point of sales transactions, or even the web.  Moreover, mobile is not just a channel, it provides a conduit for other channels to reach on the go consumers via its unique form factor and network access capabilities (such as mobile email or mobile web).  This duality represents an opportunity and challenge for marketers.

Marketing efforts targeting on the go consumers creates a store of insight into behavior within the mobile channel – just like similar approaches for capturing and analyzing interaction data in other channels.  Customer interactions spawn a variety of different types of data, either passively via the system or actively via data submitted by consumers as part of interactions.

The Marketing Sherpa article describes four types of data used to segment customers to develop more effective email communications, not dissimilar to this recent blog post about the questions a Mobile Customer Data Asset might answer.

• Endemic Data – Data about a particular record, or person, obtained at the opt-in step, via web pages/forms following opt-in, from ongoing online interactions, and from third party data.
• Transactional Data – The metadata about an interaction, such as the time or location of opt in.
• Behavioral Data – Data describing the actions taken during an interaction, such as products purchased or pages viewed.
• Computed Data – Exactly as it sounds; data generated based on the prior three, for example ratios, predictive models, and other metrics.

The article describes these types of data being used to segment customers to target them with more relevant email communications.  Customer attributes from a Mobile Data Asset could be appended to inform more targeted emails, and more generally marketing across a variety of channels.  Conversely, a customer database might help inform better decision making around mobile marketing efforts.

The key to making this happen is a literal “key” among databases which uniquely identifies the concept of a customer across different sources.  Because this concept tends to vary by business, it’s important that marketers consider this factor upfront as they begin implementing a mobile marketing strategy.  It’s an oversight many are making today which may cause difficulties later as mobile becomes a more prevalent – and preferred – interaction channel.  For the same reasons a person is not an email address, neither are they a mobile telephone number, as underscored by this quote from the article (by an email marketer):

“We would not bring into our datamart an email address by itself without a birth year or zip code.  Our datamart is based on the individual customer.  Without certain pieces, you’re not person — you’re just an email address.”

• The Mobile Imperative
  Marketers need to embrace mobile as a means of engaging their customers in more profitable, insightful and engaged relationships.  Read about Interactive Mediums’ unique perspective on how this can be accomplished with a focus on iterative Mobile Dialogues, capturing and reusing interaction data in a Mobile Data Asset, and developing a strategy considering the entire Mobile Experience.
• The State of Mobile and Email Metrics
  Marketers employ both mobile and email marketing techniques to target their customers and often use similar metrics to measure these efforts.  This may lead marketers to compare mobile and email for the purpose of prioritizing one over the other.  In practice, the two methods are complementary.  Read about how Interactive Mediums views mobile and email from the customer’s point of view, and using this perspective to drive measurable, more effective marketing programs.
• Mapping Mobile to Your Marketing Strategy
  Mobile is increasingly finding its way into the strategies of marketers at the onset of their planning process.  Read about a structured approach Interactive Mediums prescribes for marketers to identify ways mobile can enhance and build upon marketing plans to maximize return on investment.

“The shift from traditional advertising or marketing to direct branding will help you confidently point to measurable marketing milestones and outcomes. Whereas branding and the classic direct marketing used to be separate disciplines, the two have discovered that they need to merge. Marketing accountability becomes the norm and is absolutely necessary to compete and survive in this day.”

The article contains interesting examples by Consumer Packaged Goods makers using digital media to launch new products and capture interaction data to evaluate the effectiveness and return on their investments.   It’s a brilliant idea, but the article makes no mention of mobile as an interaction channel actually preferred by many consumers, especially in and around the point of sale.

Brand marketers would be wise to embrace Direct Branding as a strategy but should build mobile channel considerations into their plans to reach consumers on the go – especially given the generally higher response rates for mobile programs and the need to continually justify marketing investments to top executives.

“Today, branding and measurement are not mutually exclusive. Great branders understand that they need to add the measurement metric of direct marketing to their work in order to prove ROI. The C-suite expects marketing to show a positive impact to the bottom line, and those marketers that can will not only survive, but thrive.”

Some clients prefer to have a dedicated code potentially reflecting their name or a brand attribute when translated from numbers to a word, but obtaining one requires additional time be built into a mobile program.  Power users of these codes have embedded mobile into the very foundation of their brands.

We recently came across a simple and effective example of how one of our clients uses a short code to engage their target customers and learn more about them.  The Lake Forest Graduate School of Management is a Chicago area MBA program designed for working and/or experienced professionals.  They use text message marketing as a call to action in their recruitment efforts, as seen in this photograph of signage located in a commuter elevated train station waiting area.  Some of the lessons to be learned by this program include:

• Targeting: Mobile is a key ingredient in this program but it is not the focal point; rather, the emphasis is on communicating with a target audience by reaching them most effectively.  In this case, locatoins where busy commuters congregate is a great spot to promote an education program intended to help elevate careers.
• Multi-Channel: Signs like this are not high tech but the call to action is, and everyone with a mobile phone is a potential responder.  Texting MBA to this shortcode begins a Mobile Dialogue designed to inform and persuade; responders are greeted with a brief message requesting an email address for learning more about their program.  A mobile device is not often the right medium for reviewing information and this approach recognizes that.  Those opting in again receive a real time email response with more information, including pointers to areas of the school’s website with even greater details.
• Knowledge: Mobile is the perfect medium for reaching the type of customer the school seeks given its emphasis on busy professionals who are always near a potential call to action (billboard, signs on objects like buses or commuter stations, taxi cabs and others).  Mobile also provides the means by which the school can learn more about its target customer to sharpen its recruiting efforts.  Data captured during the course of Mobile Dialogues combined with information about which mediums drive the most qualified interest informs the creation of more relevant messages and a higher return on marketing investments.

All of these thoughts suggest a tidal wave of business will be flowing into mobile in the coming months, as underscored by this excellent article on MobileMarketer.com today.  Frankly, it’s the best thing I’ve read in two months and I read a lot of mobile news and views every day.  Every marketer, be they in a brand or agency or b-to-b in orientation, needs to read this article and prepare to get out in front of the mobile wave.  If you don’t, your peers in competitive organizations will, leaving you struggling just to keep your head above water.

This article points at that with mobile, marketers don’t have such a luxury when getting started. If marketers start with the premise of appending existing customer profiles with customer mobile phone numbers, they risk the entire future mobile customer relationship.

As many experienced mobile marketers know, you must first acquire permission from customers to contact them via mobile, meaning that the classical marketer’s point of view still applies. It’s just that they need to consider the opt in step as a call to action as part of a marketing program communicated via some other means – email, web, point of sale, direct mail, etc. In other words, think “marketing program to acquire opt in as I would to acquire a product purchase or sales lead” rather than “mobile marketing program.”

In this recent blog post, I highlight a comment by a mobile technology investor that some large and powerful brands seem to be sitting on the fence with respect to mobile, given a shortsighted perspective that their brand strength is of little advantage entering a crowded space where they haven’t had a presence in the past. This article infers a similar observation:

“The good news is that everybody starts at zero. Fortune 500 companies and small businesses alike all start with no one in their mobile marketing database.”

Good for small business, less good for larger businesses who may feel their brand lacks the power to successfully leverage the mobile channel. Nothing could be further from the truth of course, and it is that brand strength which can help acquire permission from customers and begin building out an understanding of customer behavior in the mobile channel, via a Mobile Customer Data Asset. Mobile marketing is not counterintuitive; it just requires marketers to view it as an interaction channel as opposed to another attribute in their database. The article concludes with some sage advice:

“Waiting to start mobile marketing until you have a mobile database is impossible. You cannot build a mobile marketing database without doing mobile marketing.”

By the same token, the author acknowledges that mobile can help brands engage their customers in revenue producing activities; he just laments the lack of success stories in the marketplace.

“…social and mobile channels are part of a firm’s overall multichannel strategy. They are not stand-alone channels responsible or capable of generating bottom and top-line growth.”

To help marketers narrow in on results producing applications of mobile technology, Forrester prescribes a simple process called POST, or People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology.  Interestingly, the technology component is the LEAST important factor to consider in making a mobile tech purchase decision among these four:

• People:  Fairly basic, simply be certain that your choice of mobile technology be based upon the characteristics of your target; if an insignificant proportion of your customers lack iPhones, developing an application makes no sense.
• Objectives: “Decide on your goals. Make sure they align with your enterprise business objectives. It gets easier after you solve the People question. The objectives must be measurable, complimentary and should focus on growth for the company; efficiency to improve profitability or have the potential to positively impact your target customers (e.g. improve customer experience, satisfaction or retention).”
• Strategy: Another simple directive, develop a plan to meet the objectives; how much budget is required and what internal resources or external partners may be needed.  I would add that this step be fundamental to the yearly marketing planning process, not an afterthought.
• Technology: Base your technology choice on the objectives and strategy; for example, what combination of text, mobile application and mobile web would best meet the goals?  Forrester believes this is the least important decision, as it is based entirely on outcomes from steps P.O.S.

While this article is consistent with our view at Interactive Mediums, I would suggest that technology is actually a fairly critical piece of the puzzle; if a provider lacks the breadth and depth of capabilities required by the objectives and strategy, marketers can be left without a long term partner for a channel rapidly emerging as the only one that matters.

This will become even more critical as marketers begin building Mobile Customer Data Assets, storing historical performance data about customers which can be used to drive more effective interactions across all available mobile technologies.

The most striking aspect of the article, which is a snippet of an interview with an agency executive, is the following quote:

“An eight-week campaign for mobile media…we’re probably talking about $250,000 to $300,000.”

There are no details provided about the scope of such a project, and in fairness I could not access the entire contents of the interview, but such a statistic runs counter to what I’ve seen on a daily basis in terms of marketer adoption of mobile marketing methods relatively easily and without committing a significant amount of dollars.

For this amount of increasingly precious marketing budget, the article cites fairly high level and common metrics for measuring mobile campaigns, and only refers to one piece of information that could initiate the process of building a high value Mobile Customer Data Asset.

“Marketers want to know, how many acquisitions of consumer phone numbers or e-mails did a mobile campaign drive? How many messages did we deliver? How many page views did we get at the WAP page? What were the most popular products viewed at the WAP level? How many clicks did the mobile banners get?”

Regardless of how much a mobile marketing campaign costs, I think it’s important for marketers to remember that building mobile into the fabric of marketing plans at the onset of the year is most critical to leveraging mobile strategically and to achieve the greatest value.  The article characterizes mobile in a similar manner, as “connective tissue,” which stitches together multi-channel advertising and marketing.  This is absolutely true, but marketers might want to think about mobile as more an organ they cannot live without, to use another medical analogy.

In terms of actual return, the article describes “Return on Innovation” as more important than assigning a dollar value.  “Innovation” in this context is some measure, subjective or otherwise, that describes how well an organization embraces the mobile channel.

I think this is a good idea, but as I implied, the mobile channel is ultimately about engaging customers and learning more about them over time, to serve them better and ultimately sell more products or services to them.  For that reason, I’d like to suggest that Return on Knowledge be a focal point for marketers as they go about justifying investments in mobile marketing.

A panel this week at the digiday: Mobile conference in New York discussed the notion of brands focusing on “several different mobile ad units” in their marketing efforts, from SMS to rich media.  While the focus was on advertising, the panel recognized that the mobile customer experience was critial in targeting  the “on go consumer” effectively.  This is a viewpoint we espouse at Interactive Mediums.

The article is peppered with comments that speak to a focus on the mobile customer experience:

“Brands need to get into the flow of consumers’ lives.”

“…brands need to incorporate all channels and platforms into their mix to reach campaign objectives.”

“Brands should not overlook the power of SMS…the trajectory of text from the past 12-18 months shows incredible growth for a sector some brands have moved away from in favor of applications or the mobile Web.”

“Brands should look beyond applications to market themselves, as more rich media is being brought to mobile browsers and wireless networks improve.”

“The panelists agreed that brands need to embrace all aspects of the mobile platform, including SMS, mobile sites and applications.”

“…to woo a chief marketing officer, a shift needs to occur away from pitting SMS and rich display against each other.  There should not be an emphasis on novelty, only results.”

That last quote is similar to what I wrote about in this recent blog post; that although much of the publicity today in mobile marketing is around creative applications, focusing on that aspect more so than developing customer relationships via the mobile channel is shortsighted.

The article also raises the issue of customer knowledge as foundational in proving the utlity of mobile marketing, the heart of which is a Mobile Customer Data Asset:

“…marketers need to learn everything they can about consumer behavior and that means listening to consumers on all levels of communication including email, Twitter and mobile usage…brands must look beyond rich media and banner ads to get chief marketing officers excited about mobile as an efficient medium to interact with consumers.”

As I mentioned, the article shares similarities to a prior post.  The following quote nicely summarizes both our points of view, and is why many forward thinking marketers are increasingly coming to Interactive Mediums for our counsel and capabilities.

“Mobile is not about devices, carriers or subscriptions.  It is about consumers…mobile marketing consists of consumers allowing brands to have a personal relationship with them via their handsets.”

The blending of online content management and delivery with deep analytic and user tracking capabilities promises to be a killer combination. The coverage on DM News includes:

• A Forrester analyst: “We’ve been saying for years that we believe analytics is destined to become an integrated service that’s built in to marketing applications so marketers can fully measure and monitor what works and what doesn’t.”
• A representative from Omniture competitor Coremetrics: “Lots of marketing dollars are coming online even though advertising as a whole is down…Online is one of the few media where we can measure every single action, so metrics really are the center point of online marketing…there’s going to be more cooperation and integration between software companies and analytics…This is a sign of the maturity of the space and how the online channel is really the power channel right now.”

The article also cites a good example of how embedded analytics in Adobe delivered media will create the opportunity for more creative and targeted advertising:

”Advertisers in particular may benefit from the deal because Omniture’s analytics technology will be layered throughout the Adobe infrastructure. For example, Omniture’s metadata can be added to a streaming online video, including the location of the video and its contents.”

Coverage on Intelligent Enterprise went a bit further on the technology side, particularly with respect to mobile applications.

“…the cumulative distribution of Adobe Flash Lite, which is licensed by mobile handset and consumer electronic device manufacturers, hit nearly one billion devices as of the Fall of 2008.”

“So, by moving in with Adobe, Omniture may actually have latitude to expand into growth areas of web analytics: video, mobile and Rich Internet Applications (RIA).”

Mobile marketers have a lot to look forward to as best of breed web and other analytic technologies filter into the mobile space, particularly as “write once, deploy everywhere” digital content becomes increasingly common.

Just be aware that the mobile customer experience is unique from “out of line” interaction channels, making it unlikely that multi-modal content analytics rule the day when it comes to measuring and managing mobile marketing efforts.

The company first compiled usage data across its various digital media properties (search, visits in the Microsoft network, and perhaps most interestingly, profile data from Windows Live) then built segments of consumers that brands and marketers can use to more finely target their customers. And it only promises to get better, as Microsoft can anonymously track consumers across its properties, feeding activity from different mediums into the database. This will increase the accuracy and relevancy of the segments over time.

It reminds me of the cooperative database structure used by retailers and other catalog marketers, except here due to its “super size/super reach” status, Microsoft can develop something useful without participation from outsiders.

It also reminds me that just like in offline marketing channels, third party segments are not a replacement for understanding your customers. Most often, they are used as a value added complement to help shape a clearer understanding of customers or augment internally developed customer profiles for use in predictive modeling (to study response probability or offer relevance).

For this reason, Mobile Marketers would be wise to ensure that while pursuing useful targeting offerings like that provided by Microsoft, they begin building their own understanding of customer behavior via the mobile channel. It can also guard against a dependency on a potentially regulated aspect of the mobile marketing industry.

As you can see in this blog post about the Mobile Customer Data Asset, there are many useful and high value ways collecting mobile customer interaction data can drive smarter marketing decisions. Offerings like behavioral segments can only enhance that understanding.

Ideas in the adage.com article include: mobile reservations, ordering and payments for restaurants, augmented reality, and interesting applications using product photo recognition linked to fulfillment. While there were no conflicting messages in the interviews, I think marketers need to remember that these ideas come largely from the agency/creative side of the mobile marketing value chain.

Tactical considerations are important, but more so are the plans marketers make around the use of mobile in their broader marketing efforts, which is the subject of Aberdeen’s August 2009 Research Study, “Mobile Marketing: Why it Pays to Reach Consumers on the Go.”  Some of the highlights include:

“When the right strategic and creative approach combines with the right analytic capabilities, the mobile channel can be a highly effective way to cut through the clutter and elicit positive consumer responses to a company’s call to action.”

“The ability to more effectively manage the three stages of the customer lifecycle – customer acquisition, customer retention and customer profitability – speak not only to some of the most compelling benefits that can be realized through mobile marketing activities but also to the core value drivers of practically any company competing in today’s business environment.”

“For Best-in-Class companies, the incessant need to increase customer acquisition ranks as the most important factor for deploying a mobile marketing solution.”

“Underlying the vision of a unified view of the customer relationship across all channels and touch points are a number of requisite components. First and foremost is a centralized data repository. Ideally, the repository should enable a company to continuously enhance individual customer profiles, based not only on geo-demographic data but also behavioral and attitudinal data, and also marry the mobile marketing data with transaction, CRM and other data.”

“…for many companies, mobile marketing data still resides in a separate silo or even worse, is not being captured and stored at all.”

“The value of programs that entail SMS discount codes or bar code coupons redeemed at the point of sale can be easily calculated based on incremental sales lift.” Or if scanning isn’t possible, the concept of the Integrated Customer can facilitate this tracking to close the loop on coupon or discount-driven marketing activities.

“…when hiring an outside agency or partner, ensure that the vendor’s overall strategic and tactical approach to mobile marketing, as well as the specific performance metrics it uses to track and measure success, are well aligned with those of the business.”

Marketers who focus on the tactical side of mobile risk making mistakes outlined in this September 11, 2009 eMarketer.com article titled “Mobile Marketing Done Right.” Mobile can be an advertising vehicle or platform for unique applications, but smart marketers will leverage mobile for the interaction channel it is, and develop strategies for engaging customers in dialogues as part of their broader marketing and customer relationship management plans.

At the center of a Mobile Data Asset is the unique identity of someone who has opted into mobile dialogues, around which different types of data are collected over time.  This data includes:

• Demographics: Data which describes customer characteristics; name, age, zip code, marital status, and any other similar attributes.  Customers will volunteer this data about themselves over time and in many cases marketers have access to data already stored in internal databases and/or be able to purchase it from third parties.
• Campaign History and Business Rules: Data established by the marketer and associated with one or many customers to engage them in mobile dialogues.  A subscription campaign targeting some selected group of customers, and featuring a triggered message series, would be one example. This could even include mobile web, email and other elements.
• Interaction History: Data generated by the mobile marketing campaign management system in the course of executing a campaign.  Successful receipt of a message or message series, responses aligned to different media sources like billboards or magazines, or the rapidity of viewing/responding to a message are potential data points collected in the course of executing a mobile dialogue. Click throughs to and interactions at a mobile website might also be captured.
• Psychographics: Data provided by customers which helps shape a greater appreciation for their preferences.  Examples would include product affinity, opt in communications preferences from email to phone to text, and in general customer attitudes toward a marketer’s products or services.

The sum of these data types provides a level of insight into mobile consumer behavior not possible if considering them in isolation.  This view also underscores the value of engaging with the on the go consumer over time, for growing the Mobile Data Asset via ongoing dialogues builds actionable insights marketers can leverage to maximize their budget dollars.  Answers that a marketer seek from their Mobile Customer Data Asset include:

• For a product launch, isolate a segment of highly engaged mobile customers by finding rapid responders in the target geographic market and who have identified themselves as interested in this type of product.  See what kinds of dialogues/campaigns drove these types of interactions and develop similar ones for the launch.
• As a key input into designing a loyalty program with relevant rewards, see what types of customers have shown interest in a specific product or service in past mobile dialogues/campaigns.  Use this insight to create an effective multi-channel loyalty program, and for developing the mobile component see what types of campaigns were most effective in driving results with these customers historically.
• To research ways in which customers are called to action to engage in mobile dialogues, investigate the most common media identified by customers in their interactions.  Use this data, in combination with trends in the demographics, psychographics and campaign history to create more relevant multi channel marketing messages.

These are just three simple examples of the potential decision support offered by a Mobile Customer Data Asset.  In practice and when applied to a marketer’s specific business problem or industry, this rich source of on the go consumer insights should power high value interactions that drive real results.

To me it’s a question of relevance to the many lesser known brands that may be interested in exploring how mobile can help maintain and grow their businesses. Firstly, Coke adopted mobile after experiencing quite a bit of success with its loyalty program via web, email and other media, and so had a ready-base of registered participants to rather easily obtain mobile opt-in status. Secondly, as arguably the world’s strongest brand, you would expect Coke to achieve this level of mobile success with a product geared toward youthful consumers.

I think the lesson for brands competing for mindshare with large established players is that mobile is a tactic – albeit an important one – that should be considered part of a broader program to engage with consumers on the go. In other words, let the goal (customer loyalty) dictate the tactics (mobile), not the other way around.

There is an element of “guerilla marketing” involved with mobile today, given the low cost of entry and ease by which marketers can get started. I would suggest lesser-known brands avoid this low value approach and consider how best to develop an interaction strategy around customers, and use knowledge capture as the foundation for evolving such a strategy.

A different flavor of location intelligence came to light today as I read an article titled “Loyalty Card Marketing Meets Location Intelligence” on IntelligentEnterprise.com.  In this case, location intelligence was all about giving managers geographic based insight into loyalty-based marketing.  It immediately brought to mind how such insight could add value to mobile marketing.

Mobile marketers are accustomed to looking at metrics like opt in rate or reach, but imagine looking past these bird’s eye measures to see what’s happening on the ground – of those opted in, who were they, are they valuable customers, should I invest in retaining them?  The classic funnel view.

An initial foray into mobile marketing would make such answers difficult to answer.  Yet, taking an iterative approach, and building a Mobile Customer Data Asset, then using both data collected from mobile dialogues and internal transactional data, marketers could use these insights to develop more effective programs.  Or, if drawing the connection between transactions and mobile interactions were technically or fiscally challenging, using the “integrated customer” approach could be an option.

The following quotes from the article would seem to apply as much to a marketer engaged in mobile as in any channel (somewhat validating the notion of mobile as an interaction channel not just an advertising vehicle).

“…I can zoom in and do a population-by-county overlay…The software also automatically geocodes locations by zip code, and in markets such as New York City, where there might be five locations within one zip code, I can geocode and color code each individual location.”

“One of the things we’re trying to do is tie loyalty card penetration to a higher-than-average year-over-year sales lift…So I might color code sales by loyalty program penetration or by which stores ran the most promotions.”

The visualization I posted here from the article shows a cluster analysis of student home towns for a university, but it could just as easily show distribution of opt ins to a mobile marketing program designed to drive store traffic and sales.  Color might also be used to indicate proximity to a store location or the potential value of a customer.  It’s this kind of thinking which will drive mobile increasingly into the mainstream of marketing.

I won’t repeat all the recommendations, but needless to say the author focuses on the mobile customer experience in describing how device appropriate websites facilitate reservations much better than sites not optimized for the small screen.   Also covered are the strategic use of opt in text marketing interactions and clever uses for mobile applications.

While the author mentions CRM, the paper does not delve into the customer knowledge to be captured as part of these interactions, and how it can be repurposed to drive more relevant higher value mobile dialogues with customers.  So in addition to recommending this paper to any hotel marketer, I would add that focusing on customer knowledge objectives at the onset of any mobile marketing plan be top of mind.

“Not only is the scanning equipment and point of sale integration a black hole of challenges and issues, the consumer usability issues are numerous.”

He is referring to a number of variables in this statement, including low adoption of mobile devices capable of displaying digital bar codes, limited scanning capabilities at the point of sale (POS), to say nothing of the integration between the couponing campaign and sales transactions necessary to determine ROI.  Perhaps most importantly for any such program to succeed is the customer experience, which is not enhanced by customers fumbling with their devices at the POS, a point also raised.

In this recent blog post , I raise the concept of the “integrated customer” to facilitate effective and measurable customer engagement programs such as coupons or loyalty.  The approach I describe gets to the very heart of the author’s prescription:

• Focus on SMS text because it’s most widely used, as opposed to iPhone which has a loyal but currently smaller following.
• Make the goal engagement, so that customers remain “opted in” to your program over time.
• Focus on closing the loop to understand effectiveness and ROI:   “A well developed mobile solution should provide information on member growth, redemption rates, purchasing behaviors, predictive purchasing patterns and ROI – down to the store location and individual member level.“

The author notes as well that “the devil is in the details.”  To that end, it isn’t readily apparent how a marketer could implement a measurable program in the absence of POS/transaction integration.  That is why I proposed creating an “integrated customer” to serve as that glue, by incenting them to play this role and by doing so remaining engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the marketer’s firm. In this way, marketers can accelerate the deployment of effective loyalty and couponing programs which are measurable and long lived.

A Hot Sauce brand utilized a mobile sweepstakes contest in order to develop an opt-in database of targeted customers (sports fans) for use in future marketing efforts.  Creating a Mobile Data Asset as a business objective at the onset of engaging customers via mobile is increasingly becoming a best practice.

“We had an overwhelming response to our text sweepstakes and look forward to engaging with our customers, new and old, via this new marketing outlet.”

The brand also took advantage of the rapidity of making adjustments to mobile programs almost “on the fly” and in so doing created a higher value interaction with its customers.  Response to the sweepstakes was monitored in real time and when it appeared that participation was especially strong, the brand decided to incorporate a trivia component into the program.

This is a terrific example of planning ahead when engaging customers via mobile: focus on data/learning objectives at the onset and prepare to engage customers in an iterative dialogue to provide the highest value interactions possible.

While this advances the discussion toward connecting mobile marketing to sales, it doesn’t address the need to optimize the mobile customer experience across the various ways mobile permits marketers to reach their customers.  It is for this reason I am starting to think it’s datable whether mobile is completely distinct from both traditional channels and advertising methods.

In a call center, the measurable focus is the call itself, the time of day, duration, reason/topic and outcome.  Likewise, on the web it is about visit duration, path, terminating link, etc.  And at point of sale, it’s the transaction, the contents of the market basket, etc.  In mobile, the measurable unit is less identifiable as it depends on the form of interaction (text, mobile web, smartphone application or even interactive voice response).

As a “swiss army knife” of sorts, I think mobile will eventually require the concept of a “mobile session,” such that users will be identifiable units tracked either anonymously or authenticated across text interactions, mobile website browsing and smartphone application usage (or car navigation systems).  Disparate mobile technologies will need to talk to each other, at a minimum exchange “mobile session” data in such a way that the movement and activities of users are tracked among them.

This capability would surely be a powerful tool toward developing richer, higher value mobile interactions.  To create the most relevant and cohesive mobile experiences, content providers should desire this depth of insight.

You can imagine a mobile consumer interaction across text messaging/mobile email, mobile web and smartphone application as follows in a simple retail clothier example:

• BaggyPants develops a loyalty program aimed at retaining its highest value customers while also growing this base, via targeted and relevant offers.
• A multi-channel marketing campaign is initiated, directing customers to sign up for the program via text message or website.
• Those opting in are directed to redeem a discount online, then download the “SmartSizer” application.  This application allows customers to take a picture of themselves and have potential wardrobes in their probable size overlaid on their likeness.
• A mobile enabled e-commerce site is auto populated with a market basket full of their “customized” clothing order, based on current catalog item availability and pricing.
• Discounts based on customer value are redeemed at checkout.

Analyzing the activity around the individual elements can be useful, but overlaying mobile sessions across this entire mobile experience should be as much, if not more valuable.  For example:

• See conversion from text message, application downloads and basket purchases – the buy pipeline.
• Combine data gathered from application usage and product purchases to design higher yield product combinations – the “best next action.”
• Observe behavior on the mobile website, including deviances from the instant market basket purchase – market basket abandonment.

Or perhaps more interestingly, observe a real or near real-time visualization of the ideal process, with variance from the norm highlighted to see what’s happening – and make corrections to affect the outcome as the program executes.

As mobile marketing technologies advance, there is a danger of mobile suffering the fate of pre-CRM marketing; fragmented customer data and widely varying concepts of “customer.”  No doubt you will soon be hearing more about “customer centricity,” “the 360 degree customer view,” and “one version of the truth,” but within the context of mobile.

The article makes some good points about the differences between buy and build approaches, making it appear all but a foregone conclusion that a marketer new to mobile would use a third party expert to execute the program (probably the author’s intent).

One aspect I think the article overlooks, even for newbies, is the customer knowledge to be gained in executing mobile marketing programs. I think too much of mobile marketing today is focused on advertising and the ease by which ad messages can be delivered to mobile devices. Mobile should be viewed as another customer interaction channel, such as the point of sale, a call center or even more simply a website. It seems much more value is to be gained by such a view.

Too often I think marketers associate mobile with email as a message transit service, which is just one application of mobile marketing technologies; mobile can and often is a real time, bi-directional marketing channel, even when utilizing SMS, and therefore is fundamentally more interactive than email.

While there may be no explicit costs involved in planning for the types of information about your customers you can and wish to gather, it certainly should be a top of mind consideration at the onset of any mobile marketing program. I would add as well that in selecting a third party to work with, marketers should be sure that data generated is portable and owned by them, not the provider, and can be easily extracted for additional analysis.

As I blogged about yesterday, TextMe recently extended its already strong data capture feature set to facilitate marketers’ thinking this way. So even if drawn to mobile because of low cost and high response rate (as pointed out in the article), marketers in all industries should plan ahead and consider the new customer knowledge they can gather from the outset. Stay tuned for examples illustrating just how.

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.

With many marketers just beginning to dip their toes into the mobile arena, and many sitting on the fence waiting to see how things shake out, anything which helps draw the critical connection between mobile marketing activity and business results should accelerate adoption of the underlying technologies.

Short of developing their own solution tightly integrated with internal systems, or purchasing potentially costly third party software and similarly stitching it into transactional systems, marketers would seem to have little choice but to rely on channel centric metrics, such as reach, open rates, and click throughs to measure and justify mobile marketing efforts.

Leveraging the Integrated Customer

This led me to imagine using customers as the glue between mobile marketing activities and logging business results.  What I call the “Integrated Customer.”

For example, many businesses rely on frequent and repeat purchases by their customers.  Be it a product with a limited lifespan that requires replenishment or a routine service, many businesses continuously market to their customers to maintain demand and stay top of mind.

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that these businesses may find mobile more appealing than email given the Epsilon survey’s email response data I referred to yesterday on the blog.  Mobile has the capacity to connect in a more relevant and timely fashion than email to influence consumers to purchase.

I see two keys to creating an Integrated Customer to enable the tracking of mobile marketing activity from message delivery through purchase:

• Provide incentive to customers to notify you upon redeeming an offer at the point of sale, ideally within a short time window, via text messaging.
• Assigning some dollar value to that transaction, like an expected average price or average market basket value, that can later be matched to inbound purchase notifications, to derive value and return on investment calculations.

First I will tackle the incentive part.  For example, a multi-site retailer could promote a loyalty program in its catalogs, on billboards and on its website, whereby customers opt in to receive limited life offers for redemption in their stores (such as a discount on certain items or a coupon).  These offers are periodically broadcast to opted-in customer mobile devices, containing unique codes which each store knows are associated with the discount program.

This retailer is really smart, and so has identified segments of its customers by lifetime value, allowing it to tier its loyalty program so that highly valued customer receive greater incentives than those of lesser value.  The discount codes are similarly aligned.

The retailer is also smart when it comes to having a strategy behind its loyalty program.  It knows the average value of a typical market basket, the purchase migration behaviors of customers among different lines of products, and has designed its incentive offers to grow basket size and encourage logical product bundle purchases.  There is a planned sequence of offers to be delivered to each segment, essentially a “best next action” the retailer is proposing to its customers.

Customers are told upon signing up for the program that this is not a one-time affair; it is part of the retailer’s ongoing efforts to serve its customers better.  To that end, customers are incented to text in their discount codes to a short code, along with the keyword RewardMe when making an eligible purchase.  Why would customers do this?  Not out of the kindness of their hearts.  Because it pays.

The loyalty program’s offers have a limited shelf life, say two weeks, and expire only to be replenished when a discount code is submitted as part of the above process.  A customer always wants to be sure to have an eligible reward handy to make a purchase and therefore will have just one reason to redeem their discount codes for “fresh” ones – when transacting at the point of sale.  There may be outliers, but the majority are likely to behave in this fashion.

The transaction is registered by the mobile marketing services provider when redeemed, then aligned with the expected value of the interaction, which was configured by the marketer at the onset of the program.  The marketer knows what offers were redeemed successfully, by product and customer segment, and can draw instant value and return on investment calculations.  The utility of the proposed “best next action” can also be assessed and refined based on the results.

Sounds like an application will killer potential value, and it didn’t require integration between mobile channel marketing execution and internal transactional systems.

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.

“Quick-service restaurant Pizza Hut used mobile to generate buzz about its new Hershey’s Dunkers offering and built a mobile database of consumers to remarket to.”

 and

“The results were outstanding, and more than enabled the client to build a vast mobile database which they could use for future marketing.”

The pizza chain’s creative application of a text message sweepstakes was driven by another strategic imperative around using mobile — cutting through the clutter of competitors and other messages:

“Pizza Hut was faced with the challenge of trying to find a way to make its new product launch stand-out from all of the other offerings being launched by competitors in the same market.”

Not only is Pizza Hut building a foundation on top of which it can craft new mobile programs, it is also considering the entire mobile experience as part of its plans.  The above quotes refer to their recent text messaging promotion for Hershey’s Dunkers, yet Pizza Hut has been viewing the mobile channel more holistically for some time.

The article points to Pizza Hut’s recent launch of an iPhone-based order placing application, and a Chinese-only market promotion whereby customers snapped photos of ad materials with mobile devices that could be redeemed for discounts and other prizes.

Driven by the launch of a new product amid an environment of competing messages, Pizza Hut is applying mobile marketing best practices by taking a data-centric approach emphasizing an iterative, ongoing dialogue with its customers considering the entire mobile experience.  Other marketers should take note.

The title of the article says it all really; “Survey: CMOs Unhappy With Digital.”  A recruiting firm conducted a survey of 100+ chief marketers at firms with revenues greater than $1 Billion, and found that overall the group views digital media as the channel of choice for marketing their products and services in a down economy, but are frustrated by the divide between the amount and diversity of data available on consumers and the ability to use this information effectively to drive their businesses forward.

Simply stated, CMOs don’t know how to measure digital marketing ROI nor understand the right metrics to track.  And it’s not as simple as relying on third parties such as their ad and digital agencies – CMOs subject to this survey expressed dissatisfaction with their partners’ supposed expertise in these areas.

For mobile marketing providers down the adoption curve from other digital mediums like search engines, blogs, social networking sites, Twitter and online advertising, this situation places a premium on quickly establishing success metrics and real ROI approaches to ensure continued growth in mobile marketing, beyond the current economic times.

The foundation for proving the efficacy of mobile marketing has got to be an understanding of customers, and be based on high value ongoing dialogues with them.  A Mobile Customer Data Asset should be at the heart of any marketer’s plans to approach mobile with an eye toward proving the value of this powerful interaction channel.

For many reasons, mobile marketing may see its most widespread application ever during the upcoming holiday shopping season.  A low cost of entry along with the potential for a big pay back makes mobile a good fit with the current economic climate.  Regardless of what forecasters say of holiday spending levels relative to last year, consumers WILL spend.  Marketers have a great chance of capturing those dollars with the help of mobile campaigns.  Consider this quote from the article:

“Recent studies from Universal McCann have shown that 80 percent of mobile Internet users browse the mobile Web while shopping.”

This means marketers have a chance to engage with and influence consumers when in close proximity to their stores.  It also means smart marketers will start RIGHT NOW developing ways of ensuring customers end up spending money in their stores by building lists of opt in customers, thus establishing a Mobile Customer Data Asset that captures preferences and other information to direct relevant offers and communications aimed at shopper wallets.

Personally, I am excited to read post-Holiday season about all the creative and effective ways marketers used mobile to engage their customers.  Good luck!

• Consider mobile in combination with other channels (like is mentioned in this blog post).
• Use SMS to understand the reach of your multichannel efforts (also like is mentioned here).
• Remember that not all potential customers have iPhones or even a smart phone, and develop content accordingly.
• Base your message on the audience’s behavioral traits, not the type of phone they use (sort of contradicts the above point but you get the idea).
• Leverage the know-how of third parties who research consumer behavior with mobile devices to use in crafting more effective programs – a terrific idea I think.

One tip I would add is to view mobile as another channel of your business, not just an advertising medium.  Businesses don’t use their websites, call centers, points of sale or other interaction points to simply promote a message – they transact with their customers, gathering data that becomes the foundation of CRM and other marketing strategies.

Marketers should consider each mobile interaction similarly, and be collecting information about their customers in a Mobile Customer Data Asset.  This rich source of data can then be used to inform successive projects aimed at driving greater purchases, loyalty or whatever metrics are important to growing the business.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, a Hype Cycle is a graphical representation of how technologies are “taken up” by markets according to different phases of adoption.  You can see it here.  The closest Gartner comes to calling out the mobile channel is something termed “Wireless Power,” which I interpret as the applications of wireless technologies to a variety of problems, including marketing and customer relationships.  Gartner places Wireless Power at a point in the curve somewhat discouragingly labeled “Peak of Inflated Expectations,” which is defined as follows:

“In the next phase (after te first one), a frenzy of publicity typically generates over-enthusiasm and unrealistic expectations. There may be some successful applications of a technology, but there are typically more failures.”

“Failure” is a bit strong a term to describe early adoption of mobile technologies to marketing and customer relationship problems, but other aspects of the description seem to hold true.  Gartner sees the market shaking out in 5-10 years with mainstream adoption of Mobile Power coming with the advent of adjusted expectations, which will surely be based upon proven, concretete value offered by mobile technologies.

The time is coming when mobile will be evaluated like other channels and technology investments.  Only providers that deliver tangible and considerable value will be called upon to deliver these capabilities in the future.

The lesson for marketers is likewise as clear – work with suppliers that will help you leverage mobile strategically today with an eye toward this future state.  Do so and you will have both a Mobile Customer Data Asset and partner to maximize the power of mobile in your marketing efforts.

The most interesting conclusion I found was the future switch from a “many-to-one” to “one-to-many” relationship between advertisers and consumers.  Today, consumers are engaged by multiple devices and channels whereas in the future there will be mode/medium transparency between advertisers and consumers; the device or channel won’t matter and today’s barriers between delivering a consistent experience for consumers across all interaction channels will be broken.  The consumer’s preferences and message relevancy will rule, with technology relegated to the background.

Whether or not this happens in the future, it goes without saying that consumers today would benefit from this kind of experience.  All players in the mobile ecosystem are working hard to deliver as close to this ideal as possible and Interactive Mediums is no different in this regard.

Where Interactive Mediums does differ, is that we are working today toward many of the capabilities described in the report:

• Metrics and Value: As we have blogged about, marketers need to focus on the value of the mobile interaction as much as the cost to reach the largest audience possible.  The report similarly states “With the establishment of industry agreed metrics, the next development along the way to 2020 will be that Reach will be overtaken in terms of Value for advertising measurement.”
  - Marketers Drawn to Interactive by Low Cost Must Remember that it’s about Value per Interaction as Much as Cost to Reach
  - Value per Interaction, Not Cost per Message, Should be Litmus Test When Evaluating Mobile Marketing Providers
• It’s all about the Data: We have also described the creation of a Mobile Consumer Data Asset that should be at the core of any marketer’s foray into mobile marketing, as it serves as the foundation for understanding customer behavior to inform more targeted, relevant and ongoing interactions.  The report likewise states “In order to achieve this transition from Reach to Value it is essential that more is known about the audience.  Here we will see a greater reliance on preferences.  Profiles will be garnered through a wider dialogue with the end users.”
  - The Mobile Data Asset and the Channel Agnostic Customer View
  - Forrester Reports Increased Mobile Marketing Adoption; Strategy for Success Grounded in Understanding Customer Preferences

The future of mobile marketing will no doubt be exciting, especially as bandwidth escalates and no longer becomes a limiting factor on mobile devices, as the report states.  Yet, brands, stores, agencies and others have options today to begin taking advantage of the mobile channel with an eye toward the one-to-many relationships between consumers and marketers of the future.

Heretofore, my thought process around mobile couponing as an application involved digital renditions of paper coupons represented on a mobile device, which were then scanned at the point of purchase.  Or, more realistically, some collection of mobile coupons represented on a mobile device that are scanned en masse at check out, since that is how shoppers usually redeem coupons.

The beauty of this new offering, however, is that the shopper redeems their coupons as they would a loyalty card discount – they  supply the cashier with their card and coupons are processed as products are scanned.

Participating shoppers now have a digital coupon account associated with their loyalty card, and this couponing bin serves as a repository for offers accepted by shoppers via interactive media such as online banner ads and mobile messages.

Perhaps the real beauty of this solution is that it offers value to both consumers and their suppliers and marketers.  Consumers save time by no longer clipping coupons, while brand managers receive real time data about coupon redemption and retailers gain equally fast insight into shopper behavior.

This is yet another example of data centric value taking hold in the mobile space.  Brand managers can create and execute coupon programs direct to web and mobile much faster without need for the typical print/distribution cycle, accelerating their test/trial efforts toward developing stronger brands, while retailers stand to gain from increased shopping basket value due to better targeted and more effective coupon programs.

For mobile marketers the lesson is apparent; when crafting a program incorporating the mobile channel, take on the viewpoint of your target customer and how they want to interact with you.

I was reminded of this when forwarded this article from the User Interface Engineering website, titled “Five Usability Challenges of Web-Based Applications.”

The five challenges and how they map to mobile marketing applications is readily apparent, and should be considered by marketers when evaluating services providers.

1. Scalability: The article points out that the number of potential users and the amount of data collected are key to ensuring a web application can meet your needs.  In the mobile marketing world, this means ensuring multiple users can access an application, but also means different users have unique requirements and the application needs to reflect that (some may want high level information, others need to get their hands dirty).  A strong data-collection component is especially key, as the mobile channel represents a new and rich source of customer insights.
2. Visual Design: Poor design not reflecting the marketer’s task can distract from their work, slowing them down and making them more likely to require help.  In the worst case, when an application becomes a part of an organization’s revenue generation efforts, poor design hurts the bottom line.  Mobile marketing is rapidly evolving in this direction.  Applications designed from the end user’s point of view, and that are well documented and adaptive to the ongoing requests of marketers, should be top of mind.
3. Comprehension: Ensuring an application makes clear how a mobile campaign will be executed is key for marketer’s to be confident their idea will play out as expected.  The analysis of post-campaign data is equally key, as it needs to be presented in an easily understood manner so proper insights can be gleaned.
4. Interactivity: The article states that users don’t always follow the “happy path” intended by an application’s designers.  Users may need to enter a process at multiple points, be able to undo their actions and interact with an application in multiple, yet structured ways.  Attractive mobile marketing applications are those that attempt to account for such actions, and/or make clear how application functions are accessed (like using the browser back button versus a “back” button on a page).
5. Change Management: Once marketers are accustomed to using an application, changes need to be presented in such a way as to minimize the impact on their work, while maximizing the value of the new capabilities to the user.  As new features and capabilities are added to an application, marketers need a heads up to know if and how any such changes affect the application’s workflow or execution.  Mobile application providers that take this approach, but also pay attention to how user’s adopt changes and incorporate their behavior into the rollout of successive improvements, should be shortlisted.

User Interface Engineering sees these five attributes as unique to web-based applications.  Mobile marketing software available via this channel has the advantage of being easy to buy, if not try, and enables marketers to quickly begin developing expertise and success targeting customers through the mobile channel.  Just be sure to choose one designed around the way you work.

“Over the course of the next five years, Forrester goes on to further break down specific channel spend within the overall U.S. marketing landscape (dollar figures in millions of dollars):
• Search marketing spend will increase from $15,393 in 2009 to $31,588 in 2014;
• Display advertising spend will increase from $7,829 to $16,900;
• Email marketing spend will increase from $1,248 to $2,081;
• Social media spend will increase from $716 to $3,113; and
• Mobile marketing spend will increase from $391 to $1,274.”

The article goes on to describe the drivers for growth in the market today and they are less strategic than you might think.  The low cost of entry is drawing marketers to the interactive medium given constrained budgets, greater accountability and the data-centric nature of interactive.  The latter point Forrester suggests is most key, as actionable data analysis expertise is lacking among many of the marketers today engaging in interactive programs.

“Media decisions are so data driven…It’s less about what feels right and much more about data and understanding who’s consuming which media at what time, what offers they’re responding to, and where they are in the buying process. All the data marketers need in order to plan creatives, media channels, specific offers, and even placement strategy is available today. The skills marketers need now are around how to create the highly-coveted customer-centric strategy given this information…the world is moving toward data, technology, and analytics.”

Forrester’s research points to the continuing emergence of a data and analysis driven approach to effective mobile marketing.  This starts with developing a Mobile Consumer Data Asset based on best practice marketing methods, and taking a programmatic, iterative approach to engaging customers in high value interactions.

“Given that the user’s actual identity has no value for this purpose, it would be prudent for Palm to remove all personal information, anonymizing the collected data and treating it strictly in aggregate.”

Even were Palm to take this step, what the company is ultimately doing is creating a rich database of consumer behavior data at the mobile interaction channel.  And even when scrubbed of user identities, this asset can have tremendous value to any firm doing business with Palm.

Developers, advertisers, and marketers alike may all wish to access this data to create more relevant and targeted content based in part on anonymous user segments.  And Palm surely cannot ignore the value this would have.

Marketers should watch developments in this area closely and prepare to act quickly if they hope to connect with consumers effectively via the mobile channel.  Starting to build a Mobile Consumer Data Asset, and analyze interaction data to develop higher value customer relationships, is a logical first step.

“I mean, the data’s there…it’s just a matter of digging through it.”

Leading up to this quote are other interesting comments from panel members at the event, such as:

“They’re (clients) looking to understand what is the ultimate ROI, the ultimate link to sales…these are hard things to measure in mobile.”

And also comments about the challenges involved:

“Each (mobile) channel has a lot of different metrics about that one channel, but it’s hard to tie it across…yes, there’s a problem here but it doesn’t mean you don’t do it.”

While it truly is challenging to get a handle on the right marketing metrics for various mobile channels like SMS, mobile web and mobile applications (in isolation and in combination), the first step must be collecting the right data and making it available in the right form for marketers to make smarter decisions.  Marketers should set their sights on providers with this level of focus.

The article focuses on the rising demand for mobile BI and the challenges to success, such as device variances and network latency or bandwidth.

It’s only a matter of time (sooner than later) before mobile BI tools make their way into the hands of on the go marketers to use on data collected as part of their mobile marketing efforts. To take advantage of such tools and their ability to lend actionable insight, marketers need to start building a mobile consumer data asset today. If not, savvy competitors surely will.

Enough market babble, but seriously, with demand strong, mobile marketing providers don’t appear to be working hard to differentiate themselves in tangible, value based ways for their customers. Instead, they are focused on presenting a price reflecting their own costs for serving messages through the mobile channel.

Long term, providers like this won’t survive as has been proven time and again. While cost is always an important factor in a buying decision, it should not be the primary one with mobile marketing services. Instead, marketers should focus on the value of interacting with customers through the mobile channel; the cost per message may be small, but the impact per customer can have enormous positive or even negative economic implications, depending on how a marketing program is executed.

It is for this reason, I believe, mobile marketing services firms that help customers achieve a high value per interaction are the ones that will be around to see the market move past its current, excited phase. Marketers can identify these firms as possessing the means to execute mobile communications, build a mobile consumer data asset and use an analysis driven approach to executing more targeted, higher performing programs over time.

While the focus of these offerings and the research is the mobile worker and their information needs, the results mirror applications within the mobile marketing space.  Consider that Aberdeen’s research investigated mobile BI technology adoption plans, specifically capabilities used today or planned for the future:

• Automated or broadcast alert messages delivered to mobile devices (35 percent current/65 percent planned)
• Existing reports and analytics delivered via email to mobile devices (29 percent current/53 percent planned/18 percent no plans)
• Static reports and/or spreadsheets delivered to mobile devices (24 percent current/53 percent planned/11 percent no plans)
• A software platform with the ability to deliver BI content to mobile devices (17 percent current/78 percent planned/5 percent no plans)
• Dashboard software on mobile device (12 percent current/82 percent planned/6 percent no plans)

These capabilities are not dissimilar to those sought by mobile marketers targeting their customers, albeit with a focus on decision support.

With many mobile workers also highly prized mobile consumers, their expectations for a positive mobile experience will be shaped by the technologies used both in and out of work life.  Marketers would be wise to watch developments in mobile BI as an input into creating more effective mobile marketing experiences.

Catalog/retail and B2B clients have long approached the marketing data asset as a multi-source entity consisting of results from marketing programs, customer transaction history and potentially third party demographic data – all designed in such a way to segment, execute, analyze and improve marketing activities across all possible interaction channels.

Mobile marketing is likely to move in this direction as well, in some cases with the mobile data asset becoming the basis for customer facing database development, while in other cases serving as an extension of a larger enterprise data warehouse.

Regardless, marketers with an eye on the future should look to providers that understand how to begin building the mobile data asset, and also have their solution architected in such a way as to fit with and add value to the channel agnostic view of the customer.

You can download the report here http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/lib/3504.pdf, but some of the highlights mentioned in the article include:

• Mobile can and should be a part of a company’s customer acquisition and retention activities, which are programmatic (not one time) in nature and have multi-channel implications (http://blog.interactivemediums.com/?p=97).
• Given the gateways and opt in steps in place to protect consumers, marketers should focus on the quality of their message, not just the quantity (http://blog.interactivemediums.com/?p=136).
• Marketers should begin building their database of mobile consumers (http://blog.interactivemediums.com/?p=126).
• Marketers should get on the bandwagon immediately lest they risk losing customers to more aggressive and mobile-savvy competitors (http://blog.interactivemediums.com/?p=97).

All of these trends point to the strategic use of the mobile channel to accentuate and strengthen a company’s marketing and customer relationship development efforts.

Brand marketing has thus focused on panel or other research and development of product attributes to be communicated en masse to an audience as targeted as media allows. What’s fascinating about the mobile channel, among many things, is how it can help brand marketers move closer to their customers than ever before, develop relationships with them, learn about their behavior and use this insight to drive increased consumption of the brand’s product.

This Customer Relationship Management (CRM) capability enjoyed by B2B marketers almost exclusively to date can now be extended to Business to Consumer (B2C) marketers. Unlike media that relies on consumers to observe advertisements on billboards or flyers, or even digital media like email and web which requires access to a computer, mobile media allows brand marketers to initiate contact with and develop an ongoing dialog with their customers directly.

The “on the go” consumer, with their mobile device or phone turned on and ready to submit and receive messages or other content, has been shown responsive to incentives and messages designed to drive interaction with brands. The first step, ironically, is for the marketer to utilize traditional media to communicate a short code and keyword that enables consumers to opt into receiving communications from the brand. Thus begins a relationship which creates a data asset that builds over time, providing previously impossible actionable insight into a brand’s customers.

Forrester Research surveyed a number of mobile marketing providers, finding strong demand for their services but also pointing out best practices for marketers.  I inferred from their conclusions that just like in the online world, the most successful marketers not only identify and isolate their target customers but also tailor messages based on customer attributes and preferences (to ensure acceptance of said message).

Forrester states this in a slightly different way, advising that actions a marketer expects customers to take be based on their comfort level (text, downloading an application or interacting via mobile web).  Those are important considerations, yet without building an ongoing dialog with customers, and both capturing and maintaining such preferences over time, marketers can be challenged to execute effective mobile marketing campaigns.
 
Successful marketers will be those who start building their knowledge base of mobile consumers today, maintaining it, and using insights gleaned from it to inform ongoing dialogs, campaigns and programs.  This data asset (http://blog.interactivemediums.com/2009/08/10/mobile-marketing%e2%80%a6a-means-to-an-end/) will be key to overcoming a key challenge Forrester points out marketers face as mobile becomes more pervasive – the oversaturation of mobile communications, making only those messages both targeted and relevant stand out among the crowd.

It goes without saying that reaching your customers in near real time via a trusted device like a mobile phone is a key motivator.  Yet, I think it’s important for marketers to view the mobile channel also as an avenue for developing a genuine data asset for their organization; one that starts and builds an ongoing recorded dialog with the increasingly “always on consumer.”
 
Moreover, while marketers have the chance to begin creating a high value data source for all things marketing (from campaign and customer analysis to product research, almost regardless of channel), they also stand to get a head start on what may soon become the primary and preferred channel of interaction with their organization.
 
Marketers with the foresight to see this future will note their mobile marketing campaign today should become part of an ongoing plan for mobile interaction which begins by building the customer centric database of the future.