Why Mobile Email Marketing Does Matter

People are using their mobile devices to talk to their friends and family, browse the Internet, to watch video and live TV, to take pictures and movies, to communicate with their peeps on social networks, to find out where the heck they are and where they are going, to play games, to buy things online, to broadcast the banalities of their lives in 160 characters or less, and much more. If people are using their mobile devices for so many things integral to their lifestyle, then how could it be possible that they would *NOT* be using their mobile devices to read and send email? I'm just asking a rhetorical question, actually. The truth is that email is the Number One data activity that people use their mobile devices for.

Why, then, are mobile marketers ignoring mobile email? Why are email marketers ignoring mobile email?

I subscribe to six of seven email newletters all tracking the mobile marketing industry. I have my Tweetdeck configured to display all tweets relating to mobile marketing and email marketing. No discussion at all about mobile email marketing. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Bupkis.

Mobile email marketing has as much to do with traditional email marketing as mobile web sites have with traditional web sites. Savvy interactive marketers know that mobile web sites are not simply traditional web sites shrunk down to a teeny tiny screen. Likewise email marketers should regard mobile email as a totally different animal complete with a totally different strategy and totally different call to action. Mobile marketers need to realize that SMS and ad banners are not the be all and end all for the mobile channel.

Email marketers need to understand something about the medium that their message exists within. Computers are used to display the emails that they send by the billions to their subscribers. (I'm talking about legitimate retention email marketers; I'm purposely ignoring all those spammers out there.) Computers are not portable. They are tethered to either a phone line or an ethernet cable. Because of the immobility of computers, people are reading emails only at certain times of any given day. Laptops and netbooks? Wifi and Wimax? Oh puh-lease! Try using your laptop while standing in the subway. You get my drift...

People use their mobile devices to read their email anytime and anywhere; and I do mean anywhere. As an email marketer, I should know this. And further more, I should craft messaging specific to these on-the-go people. What message should I have for them? Perhaps an email displaying pictures of products at my retail outlets that -oh by the way, since they are out and about, why not drop by for an exclusive time-limited discount? Perhaps a news article with pictures and link to online video for late-breaking events? Perhaps pictures of my late night menu with driving (or staggering) directions to the nearest diner?

Mobile marketers likewise need to understand the medium that their messaging exists within. Text messaging enjoys the immediacy of response because people are more likely to quickly respond to a text message than check their email. But this advantage is short lived. I spoke with someone from Spain recently who said that he receives so many text messages that he ignores them now. Also, just how rich of a customer experience can you have in just 160 characters? Text-to-vote, text-for-coupon, etc. is nice, but it's not enough.

As a mobile marketer, I should think beyond 160 text characters. Have I really counted the cost of SMS messaging? How much to provision a short code? Do I really have $500 to $1000 to blow each month just on the short code alone? How spontaneous can my campaigns be with 6 to 8 weeks for every single wireless carrier to review my campaign brief and approve it to run on their network? How much longer can I keep paying for the cost of sending and receiving text messages? How much longer can I afford to ignore the fact that text messaging costs me 10 times per message compared to email messaging? Also, not every one has an all-you-can-eat text messaging plan. In fact, 45% of mobile device owners don't. This means that more than 4 out of every 10 persons I send a text message to actually pays to receive that message when at the same time, email is free. How about triggering the sending of an SMS message based on the response or non-response of an email message? That will greatly cut down on my costs and add some smarts to my SMS messaging program. What about mobile email to add to my mobile marketing mix?

Mobile email marketing does matter. It's time to break down the barriers between these two channels in the minds of the marketers. It's time for creative thought. Both text and email messaging can be highly complimentary on the mobile device. Enterprise marketing platforms should enable marketers to construct effective integrated cross-channel campaigns in which subscriber data is available for targeting, personalization, and reporting across both communication channels. Responses or non-responses to messages in one channel should be used to trigger follow-ups in the other channel. Give your customers options in how they want to receive communications from you, and what types of communications they want to receive depending upon each channel.

Have you experienced any effective campaigns combining email and SMS? Leave me your comments. I'd like to hear from you.

How To Build Your Worldwide Customer Base

The industry trends are indicating that mobile broadband is on pace to become the Number One means of accessing the Internet worldwide. A recent publication from the International Telecommunications Union (as reported by the Associated Press) says that six in ten people worldwide now have cell phone subscriptions, indicating that mobile phones are the communication technology of choice - especially among developing nations. One of the fastest growing areas is in mobile broadband subscriptions.

There are two reports - both published by Forrester Research - that I find interesting as well. A mail survey fielded in February and March 2008 of 61,033 US and Canadian households and individuals ages 18 and older reported that about 7% of these individuals used their mobile devices for Search. Another survey of 5,400 US and Canadian individuals ages 18 to 88 in August 2008 reported that 75% of these individuals used their mobile devices for Search. What would account for this huge difference? A different sampled population? Perhaps. But even so, these two surveys taken at different dates do indicate that Search has risen to be one of the top activities that people do with their mobile devices.

Oh by the way...did you also read that the iPhone is the Number One mobile browsing platform commanding a huge 66% marketshare?

So what does this all mean? It means that a substantial population of customers have their first contact with your brand via a mobile device. So, Mr. and Ms. Marketer: do you have a mobile strategy? Do you have plans in place to welcome these mobile first-contact people to your brand?

Here's some ideas for you:

(1) A really simple mobile-friendly web home page
Don't mess with WAP - just use HTML that is formatted for the small screen. Starting with the iPhone and every mobile device thereafter, mobile web browsers are now standard.

(2) Get yourself listed in Google Maps for mobile devices
You'd be surprised how many people would benefit from knowing about your services just because you're close by to where they are or where they want to be. Also, include the URL to your mobile-friendly home page, not the URL to your main site's home page.

(3) Invite visitors to your mobile site to sign up for email newsletters
Opt-in email marketing is the most effective means of customer relationship management. After they've given you their subscription permission, send them mobile-friendly emails. These are just HTML-formatted emails that are right sized for the smaller screen. Give them timely and relevant offers. Mobile emails are THE perfect vehicle for coupons, for example.

The nice thing about opt-in emails is that you now have plenty of opportunity to engage in a meaningful communication with these people and gradually acquaint them with your products and services.

And speaking of email, I'm disappointed that most of the blog posts I've read on Mobile Marketing are predominantly written by folks with backgrounds in brand marketing and in direct marketing. I've not (yet) read anything written by anyone with a background in email marketing. This dearth of information is a shame since email marketing is still the best real-time direct-response marketing channel.

(4) While you're at it, invite visitors to your mobile site to sign up for text messaging alerts
There's a reason why these people found you via their mobile devices. Engage with them the way that they naturally engage with their world.


There ya go. It's all about maximizing the experience at point of first contact. Very simple, very easy to do and best of all, it won't cost you a lot in terms of time or money.

Email Marketers: I want to hear from you! How are you integrating mobile and email into your marketing mix?

Voice-Enabled Gift Cards?

Gift cards - we all get 'em and love 'em. Gift cards have sure taken the stress out of finding the perfect gift for Aunt Edna. They have also taken the stress out of receiving the perfect gift from Aunt Edna. "Gee, thanks for the coffee mug with matching sweater!" Can you ever imagine the day that gift cards will have the technology that enables you use them as a phone to call your Aunt Edna and thank her personally? Sound far-fetched? Perhaps. But let's turn it around a bit. Can you imagine the day that your mobile phone can be used as a gift card to make in-store purchases? Imagine no more. It's real and it's already being tested around the world. But what does this have to do with email? Lots - about $36 billion dollars' worth.

Thanks to the technology called Near Field Communication (NFC), financial transactions such as mobile couponing and gift card redemption can be done simply by touching your mobile phone to an NFC-enabled point of sale device and providing some type of security input. Simply put, NFC is one of the many varieties of "contactless technologies" being explored today. NFC is designed to operate over very short distances, typically less than 4cm, and is being seriously looked at in the world of mobile commerce - mainly because customers worldwide have confirmed that the mobile phone is the preferred form factor for contactless services.

Research firm Strategy Analytics estimates that mobile commerce conducted via NFC will facilitate over $36 billion of worldwide consumer spending by 2011. Nineteen of the world's largest mobile network operators (MNOs) have been working together in a Global System for Mobile (GSM) Association initiative to create and define a global approach to enable NFC services on mobile phones. Together, these nineteen MNOs represent about 45% of the worldwide GSM market, which addresses over 800 million customers.

So what does mobile NFC have to do with email? The fact that more and more consumers worldwide are reaching for their mobile phones for data services (including email) is already yesterday's news. Some consumers, in fact, are starting to use their mobile phones as their only means of viewing their emails. Emails viewed on mobile phones will be around for a long time. SMS messaging is very expensive for the marketer to do thanks to the market-killing practices of mobile carriers in the US.

Opt-in email marketing is the most cost effective channel today and will continue to be so tomorrow. Coupon promotions are well known to drive sales. But email is a digital medium hence coupon redemption is restricted to either digital transactions (e.g. a coupon code entered at time of purchase on an e-commerce web site) or it must be transformed into something physical (e.g. printing an email with the coupon to be redeemed at an outlet). New entrants to mobile marketing are experimenting with barcode images embedded within emails that are scanned by the point of sale reader. The details of this capability are still being worked out.

Mobile NFC will extend the power of email marketing to new heights. Brands - especially those having physical outlets - can extend all kinds of incentives and rewords to their customers. In the not-too-distant future, when you're reading your emails on your mobile phone, you'll see one from your favorite brand with a special offer to you. You click on the link where you go to a mobile site which will download the coupon or gift card which is now stored on your phone's SIM card. You go to the store, try on the size, style and color of the outfit you want, wave your mobile phone over the point of sale NFC reader and the coupon/gift card amount is automatically applied to your purchase. Security? Not a problem. Provide your thumbprint on your mobile phone's screen to verify the transaction and away you go.

Mobile NFC is still a tad in the future - at least here in the US. But don't wait! If you are a mobile marketer, start thinking now of how you can reach your customers with email campaigns tailor-made for your customers' increasingly mobile lifestyle.

Have you ever used your mobile phone to make a payment? How would you rate your experience? Leave me a comment!

Vis, Estee Lauder, Lancome, Clinique, Revlon...What Do You Recommend?

Customer reviews technology vendor, Bazaarvoice, got a recent write-up in Internet Retailer. They've introduced a new social commerce application, MobileVoice, that creates a mobile web site for a retailer, and populates it with customer reviews listed by product category. This mobile web site lets shoppers search by keyword or by SKU number. Having this information handy really enhances the buyer's choice at a critical point of decision: in the retail store.

One of the first retailers to launch mobile reviews from Bazaarvoice is Sephora USA, Inc. "In-store shoppers can simply read the reviews on any product, or use top-rated products as a guide," so says Julie Bornstein, Sr. VP of Sephora Direct.

Once again, this new site shows that two of the hottest topics these days, mobile marketing and social networking, combine in a powerfully complimentary manner. There are so many cool ways to promote these types of social m-commerce applications - the least of which should include campaigns to their customers who subscribe to their email marketing promotions. It's already been proven that including customer product reviews, buyer recommendations, and Top Rated products in promotional emails increases sales.

So with Sephora, there's a high probability that many of their customers are reading those emails on their mobile phones. Put a link to the social m-commerce site in the email, then. Even better, put a shortened URL generated by tinyurl, bit.ly, is.gd, hex.io, or any others. This makes the URL more mobile-friendly.

Could Sephora also promote this site through SMS messaging campaigns? Sure; why not. But as I said before - there's a higher cost to SMS messaging than there is to email messaging. In today's down economy, budgets everywhere are getting squeezed. Just remember: mobile marketing isn't just SMS; using email for mobile marketing is a powerful compliment.

Do you use a social m-commerce site to get buying advice when you're in the store? If so, share your experience. If not, why not? Leave me your comment. I want to hear from you.

The Death of Email is Greatly Exaggerated

I am often asked whether the popularity of text messaging means that email as a marketing channel will become passe. Gartner estimates that there were 1.9 trillion text messages sent across the major networks worldwide in 2007. But make no mistake about it - these messages were pretty much all peer-to-peer. Peer-to-peer communication always occurs on a vastly larger scale than does marketer-to-customer communication. Case in point: I can guarantee you that there are a heck of a lot more telephone conversations between friends and family on a Sunday night than there are between telemarketer and sales prospect.

The smart phone market is white hot right now. Devices from Nokia, Research in Motion, Apple, HTC, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, Palm, Samsung, and many others are in high demand. To no surprise, people are using their mobile devices to read their emails. Just as the cell phone enables me to talk to anyone, anytime, and anywhere, the smart phone enables people to read their emails anytime and anywhere. Most people read their email when they are sitting at their computers - which can only be done on certain days and at certain times of the day. Imagine when more and more become emancipated from the temporal and physical constraints on the desktop computer thanks to their smart phones. What new, different, engaging, and more enriching types of communications could email marketers have with these people?

Text messaging as a marketing channel will not supplant email. There. I said it. This is a fact founded in Old-School economics. Carriers don't see 1.9 trillion text messages flowing across their networks. Instead, they see dollar signs, euro signs, yen and peso signs. They've discovered that they have a captive audience hence an inelastic economic model. In fact, they've doubled their text messaging rates even though the number of text messages have increased. And by the way, I'm refusing to drink the mobile carriers' Kool-Aid . All-you-can-eat data plans have absolutely nothing to do with why they raised their rates.

Text messaging is still in expensive channel - both for the consumer and for the marketer. Because it's so expensive as a marketing channel, the high cost causes low adoption. Email on the other hand is cheap; it's free for the consumer and very inexpensive for the marketer. The global economy is contracting and marketers everywhere are being asked to take a hard look at their ROI. Email will continue to prove itself an extremely effective marketing channel especially in the mobile world.

There's a lot of spaghetti on the walls

Last year, Jupiter Research projected that firms would be spending up to $2.2 billion over the next four years on mobile marketing. So what's the big buzz? It's how to make mobile marketing messages relevant to the consumer and how to integrate it into the marketing mix. Seems to me that there's a lot of spaghetti being thrown on walls as marketers look for the few successful concepts that stick. Yogi Berra said it best, "This is like deja vu all over again."

Seems like there's a new agency specializing in mobile marketing springing up each week. But let's not forget about Email Service Providers - especially those providing agency services. (Full disclosure: yes, I do work for such a firm.) Email service providers have been providing insight into customer engagement for their clients over the past ten years. In my opinion, Marketing is a strategy, not a technology. Given the right strategy, the technology is irrelevant. And no technology - no matter how flashy - can rectify the wrong strategy.

I believe that email as a marketing communication channel will continue well through the next decade. Consider this: from its introduction in the summer of 2007 to the end of that year, the iPhone had captured a whopping 28% of the smartphone market by year's end. The numero-uno data function used by iPhone users? Reading email! And let's not lose site of the fact that reading email on mobile devices has been around for quite a long time thanks to the millions of devices running operating sytsems from RIM, Microsoft, Symbian, and Palm Source.

Mobile email is intriguing to me. No wait. It's REALLY intriguing to me. Consider this: people usually read their email being fettered by both a physical and a temporal constraint. The physical constraint is their computer - either tethered via a network/phone cable or at least within a Wi-fi hot spot. (Cellular modems? Oh pul-lease! WiMAX? Getting there but not yet as ubiquitous to my liking) The temporal constraint is the times of the day that they have access to their computers. Smartphones free us from the shackles of the physical and temporal constraints. People are checking their emails ANYtime and ANYwhere. (Those of you who check email while on The Throne...you know who you are!) As a brand marketer, what communication strategy could you develop if you now know that you can reach your customer anytime, any place? Would you have a different communication strategy to those who are out and about on a Tuesday afternoon versus one to those that are checking their emails at 10:00 at night after the kids are all in bed?