Mobile Marketing has sidled into the mainstream of direct communications without incredibly much fanfare over the last few years, and has only more recently been mechanized for professional mass campaigning that can be married to other channels. Barbara Ulmi, GraphicMail Head of Marketing and digital yogi, speaks about the relevance of mobile marketing in today’s commercial setting and expounds on how to get started.
Let’s get straight to the point. Should all businesses go mobile, and why?
Well, we can also ask: should all businesses be online, have a website, a blog and a social profile? It all depends on the nature of your business. If you run a yoga school or manage a bakery in a small village, it may suffice to let good gossip bring you customers; if you have a guest house and you can solely rely on return visitors and word of mouth recommendations, great for you. However, if you need to attract customers over a distance or if you need to build your customer base constantly, which most of the businesses have to, then the digital space is your solution. Considering that 77% of the world’s population are on a mobile subscription (granted, without necessarily everyone able to access the net), and that the mobile web is growing four times faster than the traditional internet, I think businesses should definitely warm up to the possibilities and potential of mobile marketing and communications.
What are the various options available in the typical mobile marketing campaign?
There is no such thing as a typical marketing campaign; a campaign is very brand-specific and depends on the campaign goals that were set by a business, their target market and considerations regarding their target market’ s knowledge of mobile tools and type of devices and connections used. Text messages (SMS) work very well for both low and high-end markets, especially in combination with promotional shared codes, while USSD may be a good option for any campaigns that target customer relations and easy credit top-up such as prepaid electricity. MMS has not proven to be as successful an option as initially anticipated, since MMS first has to be enabled by the customers and response/ engagement rates are fairly low. However, real engagement can best be reached by sending campaigns that provide an SMS plus link to a more graphic-rich experience such as GraphicMail’s mobile marketing tools, or by creating an app that makes life both fun and easier for the user; or even by setting up an augmented reality campaign. No matter what you opt for, don’t forget to integrate your mobile activities into your other marketing communication channels such as your website, email marketing and social communications.
Once your campaign is underway, how do you keep the ball rolling and progressively build up momentum and drive viewer-traffic?
As mentioned earlier, it’s important to shout about your mobile campaign on as many channels as possible, not just to increase your reach, but also to create some momentum. It’s also important to keep a firm eye on your campaign goals and adjust your campaign when you deviate from them (or adjust your goals if you see some surprising effects of your campaign that you haven’t thought to consider when you drew up your campaign plan). Also, not every one of your (potential) client is on a mobile phone or wants to receive brand information via a mobile phone. Make sure you find out beforehand who wants to opt in to this communication channel, or at least give them clear unsubscribe options. If you drive a campaign in an integrated approach on various channels, from email to social to events and mobile, you are more likely to reach more people via their preferred channels. And since mobile phones are becoming more and more of a substitute for PCs, you want to be heard and seen on the mobile platform. Viewer traffic is driven by engaging your market and by unique content, a positive can-do brand attitude and a real benefit to the recipient (every consumer will always ask: what is in it for me?).
Are there any mobile potholes? Where can a campaign go wrong and what brand-harming practices should be avoided?
Sure, things can go wrong. Mobile marketing has few standards, and mobile phones particularly are less standard than desktop devices. If you think it's difficult to design a newsletter that renders well over a multitude of email clients from Outlook 2008 to Gmail, think about how difficult it is to make sure your mobile news also displays well on thousands of different handsets with different screen sizes and coding issues. We can help you build mobile news, campaigns and mini mobile sites that render well over 5000 handsets, as we provide you with a mobile editor that has mobile phones "in mind". If you design an entire mobile site for your brand, there are quite a few pitfalls to keep in mind when coding your site. I’m sure businesses are painfully aware of the fact that the first impression they make on a client is paramount – and you don’t want to send them to a mobile newsletter or mobisite that takes forever to download, can’t be navigated, and requests them to scroll back and forth, left right and centre.
Could it be that all this mobile mumbo-jumbo is just a fad?
No, I think both the signs and facts are solid – we are moving into a “mobile” space. Not only does this move reflect constant technological advancements , but it also reflects a global change from “thoughtful decision-making” to “instant information and impulse (group) buying” And a mobile device, with its geo-tagging, QR barcode-decoding and instant communication and sharing facilities is certainly complementing that change (then again, maybe its development has been initiated by the change of consumer behavior).
How can GraphicMail help one get set up in mobile and how much of an investment in start-up capital and time does this require?
At GraphicMail we believe in keeping things simple, user-friendly and low cost. Yes, we do offer a lot of advanced email features, but our core offering is to help you get your newsletter campaign out fast, efficient and in an affordable way. The same applies to our approach to mobile marketing. We are offering you tools that make it easy to not only send a personalized, tracked SMS, but an SMS with a link to a mobile page or an entire mobile site which can contain graphics, images, videos, polls, forms, buttons, you name it - helping you get messages out that are not constrained by 160 characters! We do not charge you for setting up your mobile campaign with us; our mobile editor is free to use. We do charge you when you send your campaign to your subscribers – see prices here. Time? A mobile page and SMS is quick to put together, you don’t need design or HTML skills – as long as you know what content you want to push out. The creative phase probably takes more time than the implementation phase!
