Tracking Mobile Responders

I work for an interactive marketing service provider. We provide both software-as-a-service as well as strategic marketing and creative services. Not too long ago, the email marketing manager from one of our clients, a well-known retail brand, asked me about optimizing mobile emails for Blackberries. "Why Blackberries," I asked her. Apparently the corporate bosses thought it would be cool to see the emails they are sending to their subscribers within their own mobile devices.

Recently we began tracking the responses from our clients' email subscribers in a new way. Using open source information that we subsequently improved upon, we are able to identify the email clients that subscribers use at the time of opening an HTML-formatted email or when clicking a link within the email. Knowing the email client with a certain degree of confidence gives us insight into the percentage of email responders that are doing so from their mobile devices. We also know the manufacturer of these mobile devices.

In my recent data analysis, out of a total of 67 million individuals, about 1% of the subscribers are viewing their emails on a mobile device. Out of the 60 known mobile device manufacturers that we currently know about, more than 80% of the mobile responders use either an iPhone(43%), Blackberry(25%), or SonyEricsson(15%).

Mobile responders being only 1% of our population of email recipients may seem like the bottom news story of the day. But over half a million people should not be ignored - both in terms of their actions and their type of mobile device.

So, to finish up the story that I began this blog with, I advised our client that though the corporate bosses were using their corporate mobile devices, their subscribers were not. In fact, subscribers viewing this brand's emails on iPhones outnumbered the Blackberry viewers by a margin of more than two to one. My recommendation: optimize mobile emails for the device that the majority of their mobile responders were using - in this case, the iPhone.

Social Networking On the Go

It appears that social networking is now the #1 mobile web destination according to a recent research report. The data collected and published by Openwave indicate that Facebook and MySpace are the two top mobile search terms on both Google and Yahoo. The latest study from Nielsen shows that member communities and email are a close 4th and 5th place of global Internet activity (66.8% and 65.1% respectively). However, the same report shows that member community and email showed the two highest growth in 2008 (5.4% and 2.7% respectively). These two studies indicate a high convergence between the mobile and the social networking worlds.

I totally get this convergence because mobile and social are two worlds where people are choosing to spend a lot of their time now. For many people in the world, their mobile devices are the only ways that they are accessing the Internet. No wonder also that Facebook is extending their Connect API to the iPhone.

Will social networking replace email, as one headline asks? Look. Just because there are more sheep than journalists doesn't mean that sheep will be replacing journalists any time soon. Social networking and email are two different communication channels meant for different types of communication. Social Networking is all about airing your laundry in public. Email is a point-to-point communication technology therefore you would naturally chose one over the other depending upon what you want to say - and to whom you want to say it. That having been said, they are highly complementary as well. It is quite common now to receive an email whose content is so good that you'd want to share it with your friends by posting it to your social page - just like you'd share an article from a news web site.

The mobile device is growing in worldwide popularity as the launch platform of choice to the Internet. A surprisingly high percentage of Facebook and MySpace members access these sites from their mobile devices. Next to search, email is the #2 Internet activity on mobile devices. It's high time for marketers to step up and facilitate the bridging of the gap between these two mobile activities. For starters, interactive marketers - this includes email marketers and social media marketers - need to develop mobile-friendly email content that can be easily read on a mobile device and then shared (from said mobile device) to a social site. A lot of people use their mobile devices to triage their email inbox for later reading from a desktop computer. I've seen many a man sitting in the Husband's Chair at Macy's culling his inbox while waiting for the Missus to try on her forty-seven different outfits. (I know 'cause I'm there in the Husband's Chair too.) Give him meaningful and mobile-friendly content that he can immediately recognize the value of so that he can then share it with his Facebook friends. A simple and easy way to extend your brand.

If you want to know more about great social networking strategies, go visit my colleague's blog on Blogspot.

Do you have a favorite social site that isn't Facebook? Let me know what it is and what you like about it.

Mobile Marketing in a Recession

For those of you who've just recently returned from the "Lost" island, we are in a global economic cool-down. An interesting shift in consumer behavior has started and analysis of this change is starting to make its rounds in the press. According to a recent article in USA Today, online searches that include value words such as "coupons" rose 161% in December versus 2007. Google says that ad spending on value-related words such as coupons rose 30% in the fourth quarter over the same period a year earlier.

Comscore (cited in the USA Today article) also notes that online coupon sites are the number two most important online sites (next to search engines, of course) to consumers when shopping in the past 3 months. Slightly over 50% of consumers say they are using coupons more often due to the hardened economic times.

Maybe it's because of the way I was raised, maybe it's because it's in my DNA, or maybe it's both: I use coupons. I have no problems using coupons for items that I would normally buy. I also have been known to buy because of a coupon. To me, not using a coupon is like leaving money on the table. A dollar off a roll of toilet paper not meaningful to you? Let's put it a different way. Suppose you saw a dollar bill laying on the floor of the toilet paper aisle in the store. Would you leave it there or would you nonchalantly pick it up? The only problem with coupons is that they are required at the point of redemption. So if I forget to bring my coupon along, no joy.

Just as digital cameras and cell phones formed an alliance that changed the world, it appears that coupons and cell phones are forming an alliance that will have similar behavior-changing effects. For example, Domino's Pizza recently announced that they have selected Air2Web to be their sole provider for their new mobile coupon campaigns. This partnership totally makes sense to me. According to the Food Marketing Institute, paper coupon usage has declined 40% in the last few years due to lack of immediacy and the manual effort of clipping. But due to the benefits of mobile devices that we all know about, coupons have a brand new life.

The advantage of mobile couponing is multi-fold. First, mobile devices are highly personal so this means highly personalized and highly relevant coupons. Second, we all take our mobile devices with us wherever we go - so you're never without your coupons. And third, both SMS and mobile-friendly email present a highly interactive medium from which marketers can analyze the performance of their discount campaigns.

So...are you a Coupon Clipper like me? Come forth, Brother! Come on down, Sister and testify. Give me your feedback. 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?

Cross-channel Marketing

Mobile marketing works best as a compliment to your existing marketing mix. In today's blog, I'm going to discuss how web site analytics can play an important role in your mobile marketing campaigns.

If you've been in online marketing for a while, then certainly companies like Coremetrics, Omniture, and WebTrends are very familiar to you. (Google also joined the pack with their absorption of Urchin Software back in '05.) One thing that advanced web analytics packages can do is give you information regarding individuals who did something on your web site at some point in time. Interactive marketers have been combining web analytics with email marketing for a while now with great results. It's time now to combine web analytics with mobile marketing to boost your results.

Typical web analytics provides three types of data points for customers identified as email marketing subscribers. There is an action (e.g. Viewed, Carted, Abandoned, Purchased), a product (e.g. Product ABC, Prospectus XYZ, etc.) and a date/time stamp. Savvy interactive marketers use this information to construct highly relevant and highly targeted email remarketing campaigns. For example, you can send out a "reminder" email to your subscribers who have purchased laser printer toner three months ago that it might be time to buy some more soon. Include a personalized offer in that email and you're certain to boost your conversion rate.

The mobile marketing channel is another way to leverage the power of your web analytic data. A lot of mobile marketing initiatives I've seen don't go much further beyond sending alerts and offers to people who have opted in to receive SMS messages. Nevertheless, the same segmentation discipline that you use in your email marketing should be applied to your mobile marketing. Just like with an email campaign, you can create a "reminder" text message that is sent to any subscriber who has recently purchased a renewable commodity. And since it's a text message, schedule it to go out during the daytime when it's more likely that your subscriber is out and about and in a position to actually act upon your call to action.

As of today, web analytic data is compiled in batch mode and isn't available in real-time (please comment below if you know otherwise). But if in the future, it does become available in real-time, please heed my advise and DON'T CREEP OUT YOUR CUSTOMER! What I mean by that is, don't send your customer a real-time text message as soon as you discover that he abandoned his online shopping cart...""Why did you not buy,....Dave...?" Yes, it's still a good idea to send a follow up message to someone who abandoned an online shopping cart - just wait a bit before sending that message.

Any additional ideas on how web analytics can compliment mobile marketing campaigns? I want to hear from you!

Real-time Direct Response Marketing

Ten years ago, email marketing was pretty much the lone real-time direct response marketing channel. In the intervening time, search engine marketing and mobile marketing have joined the family. Being from the same family of real-time direct response, there are numerous ways that mobile marketing and email marketing effectively complement each other.

For example, mobile marketing is a fantastic way to grow your base of email marketing subscribers. To those of you who are experienced interactive marketers: you already know that growing your email subscriber list plays a very important role in your strategy for revenue growth. Using a mobile marketing campaign as one way of growing your subscriber list is a really good idea. It's really simple 'cause it's pretty basic to implement.

Start with a simple text-to-reply offer. You can have it displayed on your website, printed promotional pieces, ad banners, sponsored web search ads, and on your tradeshow signage. The type of offer will depend a lot on your situation. For example, if you're exhibiting at a tradeshow, it's common to have a text-to-register for a free prize. If you are a retail shop or an eatery, you display in your shop window a text-to-reply offer for a discount coupon for in-store purchases. Regardless of the offer, in your reply text message, invite the person to sign up to receive your email newsletter.

One way that the person would sign up for your email newsletter would be for him to text back a defined keyword (like "EMAIL") followed by his email address. Another way would be for him to enter in his mobile browser the URL that you provided to him in your reply text message. And speaking of URLs, use the shortened version that services like TinyURL and others will give you.

While you're at it, make note whenever people sign up for your email newsletters from their mobile devices. Why? Because chances are, they'll be reading your emails also on their mobile devices. This means that you have the opportunity to craft highly targeted and highly relevant email campaigns just for your mobile subscribers.

Any other ideas of how you can combine email and text messaging? Leave your comments!

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!