Posts Tagged "Mobile Customer Dialogues"

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.

The beauty of mobile marketing is that by definition, you have to approach the channel with the perspective of creating a relevant message, call to action or offer – a marketer has no choice.  Whether needing to obtain permission from customers to communicate via SMS text message or ensuring an investment in a mobile application pays off with thousands of downloads, relative to other marketing tactics such as email, relevance is a must in formulating any mobile marketing strategy that hopes to succeed.  You could argue the high response rates common with mobile promotions reflect the necessity to craft plans that focus on the customer (convenience, for example) more so than the marketer’s goal (such as selling more products).

I call out email specifically because of a few different things I’ve read over the past week which suggest certain marketing tactics make it too easy to be ineffective – or less relevant to consumer needs.

Although mobile email use is growing, email as an interactive channel by itself has hurdles to overcome in my view which hurts its ability to serve a marketer’s objectives.  Today, for example, on eMarketer.com an article titled, “Relevance Remains a Challenge for E-Mail Marketers” cites statistics which suggest email for many consumers is very much like traditional snail mail – for the bills:

“Promotional e-mails were the most common thing for respondents to find in their inbox, with 60% saying they received such e-mails most. E-newsletters were the next-most-common type of messages.

But it was the least common messages that were most likely to be opened—monthly bills and bank statements. Only about four in 10 recipients said they “always” opened promotional offers or newsletters.”

It’s the consequence of this mismatch between consumer preference and marketer practice that marketers need to be wary of:

“Web users also complained of receiving too many to manage and getting tired of all the clutter.  In many cases that clutter can have consequences for marketers: 22% of respondents have decided not to purchase from a company because of irrelevant promotions, either via e-mail or direct mail.  A further 41% said they would consider doing the same.”

Another article, a November 20, 2009 item titled, “Yesmail talks strategy behind mobile email, SMS features” quotes the email marketing firm’s leaders regarding their move to offer mobile marketing services to its clients:

“Yesmail is already starting to early stages of mobile marketing evolving from an acquisition channel to a retention channel.  We expect to see SMS campaigns being created with the same level of sophistication as many email marketing campaigns – both in terms of segmentation and in terms of staged triggering over the next two years.”

In fact, some mobile marketing providers are already offering the ability to create triggered campaigns based on customer segments – no need to wait two years.  It’s illustrative of an undercurrent of FUD (fear/uncertainty/doubt) from email marketing services companies scrambling to extend their offerings into mobile in order to hang on to their customers, many of whom increasingly view email as a commodity.  Wise marketers should recognize the difference and not get fixated on mobile as an add on to an email campaign.

When it comes time to creating a relevant message flow, offer or call to action, it’s logical to segment your customers into groupings which lend themselves to the task.  This was the topic of a great October 22 article on ChiefMarketer.com titled, “Lock and Load: The Basics of Triggered E-mail Campaigns.”  The article is all about email as a means of crafting an interactive dialogue with customers to achieve business goals – a task that email may be ill suited to given the recent statistics cited in this post.  It concludes with a quote that marketers should take to heart, but with a view toward mobile as the means – not email:

“The beauty of event-based triggered messaging is that you can make it extremely relevant to the person receiving the e-mail.”

Problem is, email may not be the right approach to delivering those messages.

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.

Ubiquitous, interactive text messaging is a key component of many business’ mobile marketing strategies, as are Smartphone applications. Among the reasons these technologies are succeeding is that they were born in the mobile arena, and therefore optimized for the way a consumer uses a mobile device. They were not scaled, adapted or otherwise fitted to the mobile experience, as is happening with the web and email. I was thinking about this in light of an article today on MobileMarketer.com titled, “Pivotal Veracity to help marketers optimize email campaigns for Android, Pre.” I have not used their product, but it seems like a good solution to developing email marketing campaigns that will render, function and be measurable across different types of Smartphones.

In past posts, I have characterized email as a communication tool best used “out of line” with a customer’s daily activities, and I think that still holds even if email can be delivered to a mobile device. Email is often more verbose and detailed than text messaging, and less interactive than text, mobile websites or applications. I would now add that in addition to thinking about email in the context of “out of line” versus “in line,” it should be viewed in terms of a marketer’s customer development objectives.

• Interactive Dialogue: text messaging, websites, applications
• Communication: email and phone

The former has greater relevance in real time as a customer shops, is driving somewhere, approaching a restaurant or browsing a car dealership. The latter are activities which require sudden and dedicated attention to speak and/or interpret information, which do not lend themselves well to calling customers to action. We have also said that the Mobile Customer Experience may soon be the most relevant interaction channel, underscored in the article with respect to email:

“The day when more people read and respond to email via their handhelds than any other platform is approaching, underscoring how critical it to build email campaigns that are optimized for mobile devices.”

“The bottom line is that all handhelds are growing in importance, and more and more consumers will be accessing marketers’ email on the small screen while they’re on the go, not just the big one while they’re sitting at their desks.”

I think the real bottom line is that email has its role in the Mobile Customer Experience alongside other communication and interactive approaches, but marketers must let objectives drive the choice and scope of technologies used to achieve them.

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.”

The beauty of a product like TextMe (among many) is that marketers can quickly sign-up to use the service to begin engaging their customers in Mobile Dialogues.  There is no software to buy, implement, or maintain, and the product is designed from the marketer’s point of view so it’s intuitive, requiring little to no training.

That’s a value proposition shared by many software applications offered as a service.  The knock against the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model has been that in the long run, companies are better off buying and implementing software internally – particularly anything which over time may have a greater dependency on or value when connected to internal systems (financial, CRM, etc.).  A recent Forrester report goes a long way toward debunking this viewpoint, which was the subject of this September 30, 2009 article on desinationCRM.com.

When selecting a mobile marketing partner like Interactive Mediums and its TextMe solution, marketers and their peers in IT simply need to balance the business needs driving mobile adoption with the desire to bring a new technology “in house.”  The time to market benefits associated with a SaaS solution balanced with views like those in this research suggest marketers and technology professionals not worry much about the “buy versus outsource decision.”

As a leading mobile marketing solutions provider, we offer clients flexible ways of engaging with their customers.  One of the ways we do this is by offering a fast path to doing so via the use of a shared short code – a shorthand of sorts for letting on-the-go consumers quickly participate in a text dialogue without entering a full length phone number.

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.

Perform a search on Google for “mobile marketing” and the number of results exceeds 2.6 million.  Among these are countless companies claiming to help marketers get started in mobile, yet only a small number of these will be around in a few years making it important for marketers to choose their partners carefully.

Interactive Mediums will of course be among the leaders, as it is today, but these thoughts came to mind when I saw a September 24, 2009 article on the Advertising Age website titled “How Kleiner Perkins’ iFund Can Help Marketers Navigate Mobile Apps.”

The article is about a Silicon Valley investment firm with a $100M fund focused on companies entering the mobile technology market.  So selective are they that among thousands of business ideas, they have only pursued seven to date.

“That’s because while there are a lot of fun, one-off ideas out there, very few have the combination of ingredients to become a long-term platform success, namely multiple revenue streams, the ability to go viral and wide appeal.”

The same point of view should be shared by marketers entering the mobile space.  The article contains a lot of ideas which marketers should consider:

• With regard to mobile applications, few companies sponsor or own applications that are relatable to their brand.  The article speaks to observations in the iPhone App Store.  I blogged recently about Starbucks not sponsoring an Android store finder application or being out in front of the application trend, a situation they recently remedied.  Brands need to look closely at applications which may have a logical connection to their identity as the percentage of Smartphones increases.
• The article also raises an interesting reason for the above situation.  Strong brands may hesitate to enter the fray due to the fact they immediately enter a crowded and hard to navigate arena.  They are unaccustomed to this level of competition for mindshare, which should not prevent brands from dipping their toes into the mobile waters.  There is greater risk associated with standing on the sidelines.

The following quote concludes the article and really drives home points brand and marketers generally need to recognize.  I would add as well that applications are one slice of the Mobile Customer Experience that marketers need to be aware of, with mobile web and text messaging also effective methods used to drive high value Mobile Dialogues with customers.

“It’s a mistake for brands or other companies to not think of mobile totally differently from the web … the apps need to take advantage of the inherent properties of the phone. It needs to not just have content, but take advantage of the mobile context. There needs to be instant utility and ideally something that creates high-frequency use. Virality is also important, building in features where you’re so invested in an app you e-mail it to other people and there are network effects, where the more people are on it the better it gets. It has to be a large market opportunity. Ideally it has the opportunity to have multiple revenue streams — maybe it’s virtual goods, mobile commerce, ad-supported models.”

My colleague Jeff Judge passed me this September 23, 2009 New York Times article prescribing ways that small business can take advantage of text message marketing.  Aside from the insightful content, the fact a newspaper such as the New York Times provides this level of coverage indicates just how mainstream mobile marketing has become.  The article is also notable because its suggestions actually apply to businesses of all sizes.  Here’s a summary of the article’s “rules for getting started”:

• “Don’t even think about doing it the illegal way” – Mobile marketers need permission to communicate with their customers via text and so that consideration needs to be built into any strategy.
• “You basically have three (legitimate) options” – This is about cost and capabilities.  Many low cost services are available that allow a marketer to “dip their toes” into the mobile waters which makes it an attractive option especially for budget constrained small businesses.  I would just add that balancing a focus on cost with the potential lifetime value of the interaction is important.  Taking a long term view that considers the potential impact of each mobile interaction on the customer relationship is a rapidly emerging best practice.
• “Text marketing can be supported by traditional marketing” – Absolutely!  Text interactions are most effective when used as calls to action in other media like television, print, store signage and billboards.
• “It is better to give than receive” – Creating a compelling call to action to engage in a Mobile Dialogue is key and that often means developing a unique mobile experience for customers, such as a sweepstakes or contest.  At Interactive Mediums, we call these Marketing Actions.
• “Don’t waste time with one-offs” – Just like long established marketing methods, the real payoff with mobile comes from developing customer relationships over time.
• “Show restraint (and don’t get too cute)” – Don’t let the current novelty factor surrounding mobile cloud your judgement when creating a mobile marketing program.  Focus on a business strategy and build mobile into it, not the other way around.

The title of the article implies a focus on small business, probably due to a low cost barrier to entry for text messaging.  I would add that this low entry point makes mobile marketing a “playing field leveler” for businesses of any size.  That means the most effective marketers will be those who approach the medium strategically, with a mulit-channel mindset focused on customer knowledge, and with an eye on measuring and improving effectiveness.  Small and large businesses alike can identify with that approach.