Posts Tagged "Mobile Customer Data Asset"

Earlier this month I came across an article about a consumer segmentation method launched by Acxiom for telcos to understand loyalty patterns among mobile subscribers.  It was notable simply due to the fact a large marketing services company was launching a mobile marketing data service not for marketers generally, but for marketers of mobile services specifically.

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.

Nielsen has long offered marketers a powerful tool to inform marketing decisions called PRIZM – 66 segments of American households based on lifestyles, media usage and purchasing patterns which can be as granular as zip codes or household level.

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.”

Among many advantages mobile has over email as a marketing method is that from its inception it has been an opt-in channel.  Spam is not the issue it was historically for email and is not likely to be in the future.  It is so important that the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) publishes guidelines for marketers designed to ensure the channel remains one free of spam and ultimately a highly effective marketing channel.  Yet, what are guidelines without consequences to breaking the rules?  I pondered this question after stumbling upon a third party marketing data provider.

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.

Chief marketers familiar with text messaging as a real time alternative to talking with someone on a mobile phone may not fully grasp the power of these interactions as part of their broader charter.  At first glance, text messaging — or technically Short Message Service (SMS) — is a gimmick used by television talent shows to collect votes or a registration tactic advertised on store signs or billboards.  At best, it is like email, another avenue to broadcast messages and calls to action, except worse because you are limited to sending and receiving only 160 characters.

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.

Recent additions to Interactive Mediums’ mobile marketing platform make possible never before seen engagement strategies to be played out over text messaging.  On our product blog, my colleague John Wood made several recent posts about newly supported abilities to orchestrate multi-step, real time interactions, segment customers based on response data then re-target the entire group or segments of the group with more relevant messaging.  In the abstract, this is a powerful combination which allows mobile marketers the ability to “close the loop” on customer interactions and not simply use text messaging as a mechanism for broadcasting short messages to the masses.

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.

Sorry for the bad pun but today’s lead story at MobileMarketer.com jumped out at me, not for that reason, but because the restaurant chain claims sales increased 32 percent due to a hybrid video on demand/text messaging promotion offering discounted food items in exchange for a mobile interaction.

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.

The Mobile Customer Data Asset is a concept we talk about at Interactive Mediums to describe the store of intelligence gleaned from engaging customers via the mobile channel.  It is not redundant with existing customer databases and/or analytical data marts, such as those the subject of a Marketing Sherpa article titled, “How to Refine Your Database: 4 Important Variables to Track for Ultimate Segmentation Strategy” (registration required).

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.”

This question came to mind today when I came across an August 20, 2009 article titled “Everybody Starts at Zero.” In traditional marketing, be it direct, email or web, marketers smartly consider their audience and its characteristics in developing strategies for reaching them in the most relevant way. They typically have a database or purchase compiled demographic data to build out a better understanding of customers and their probable behaviors.

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.”

This article on Information Management yesterday describes a method espoused by Forrester Research for evaluating investments in mobile or social media technology.  It was prompted by the author’s observation that much of the publicity surrounding mobile and social media is more fluff than based on real business value.  In his words, “the Lindsay Lohan of the media – all glamour and no substance.”

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.

Current economic conditions and a low barrier to entry are making mobile a central and growing tactic used by marketers to engage their customers.  This, in spite of the relatively less established ways of measuring the effectiveness of mobile marketing campaigns.  So, it was with keen interest that I came across a September 18, 2009 eMarketer article titled “Cost and ROI for Mobile Campaigns.”

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.