Not Providing Value

This is the biggie. A mobile device is personal and interruptive. If it rings you answer it. If an SMS arrives you read it. It can pull you away from what you’re doing. If you get pulled away by your mobile phone there better be a good reason. SMS is not an app or web site waiting for the user to actively do something. It’s a true push notification that reaches out and grabs the attention of the user. That’s its power and that’s the danger for marketers. Your SMS messages need to make sense in that context. Specifically, your message needs to have a reason to be on the phone. Is the call-to-action time sensitive, such as a short-term sale? Are you making something convenient such as sending a coupon code that can be used at point-of-sale? Here’s an example of a no-value SMS from Alaska Airlines. Time-sensitivity and convenience are valuable. Better yet, make an offer that is valuable to go along with it.

Not Providing an Integrated Experience

In order to leverage 160 characters into a richer experience marketers are starting to put links in SMS messages. Where do you think the majority of these links go? Exactly. The company’s (non-mobile) web site. Oddly, iLoop Mobile, has a great example of failing at this. If your mobile message contains a link it must lead the user to a site designed for mobile viewing and designed for the on-the-go context of the mobile user. If not, you’re sending a message to your customer that says you value having access to them via mobile but you don’t value it that much.

Going Silent

So you’ve had an initial interaction with someone and they’ve given permission to message them. Don’t wait 2 months before the next interaction. The user may forget they opted in and opt-out just as quickly.

Having One-Way Conversations

SMS is a personal communication medium where two people connect in a back-and-forth exchange. In your marketing efforts when you send someone an SMS there is a natural tendency for them to reply – even just to say, “Thanks.” Capitalize on this by asking questions, getting feedback, and learning more about them. Make it a conversation. The best efforts will than incorporate that data into future communications.

Delaying Gratification

When a mobile user allows you into their inbox, reward them immediately. The most basic example of this is if someone has just signed up to receive offers from you via SMS. Send them the current offer even if it expires tomorrow. They were spontaneous enough to sign up so reward their impulse and send them that ‘thing’ they just signed up for.

I don’t think so.

According to Pew Research

• Cell owners between the ages of 18 and 24 exchange an average of 109.5 messages on a normal day – a majority of whom (55%) prefer a text message over a voice call.
• Smartphone owners also send and receive a significantly larger number of texts per day on average (52) than owners of more basic phones (30).

Push Marketing

SMS is really the only push-style mobile medium available to marketers. It’s the only one where a targeted recipient can be going about their day and, bam, a message arrives – one which will almost assuredly be read in the next 15 minutes. Sure, you can argue that there are push notifications available to users of your downloaded application; assuming you’ve programmed it that way. But there is a list of caveats to heap onto that notion:

• Doesn’t work for non-smartphone owners
• The person must have discovered your app (not a small feat)
• The person must have downloaded your app (hope it has good reviews)
• The person must have allowed your app to send notifications
• The person must not have deleted your app
• The notifications better be related to the app, or else (picture the first time you get a notification in the form of an offer and is not directly related to the app. This is encroachment and won’t be tolerated. Your app will be deleted in a heartbeat.).

Bottom line? SMS is the ONLY medium for you to reach out and engage your fans, 1+s, followers, etc. where they don’t have to DO anything (such as open your app or pull up your web site or scan your QR code). The content just arrives. And it WILL arrive.

It is, however, up to the marketer to make sure that content is timely, relevant and valuable. Mobile phones are, first and foremost, a means of personal communication (you text with and talk to real people in a two-way fashion typically). As soon as your SMS recipients feel like you’re just blasting them with your random thought or promo of the day they will desert your list in droves. You need to keep it conversational.

Familiarity and Ubiquity

SMS is one of the only applications that is installed on all today’s mobile phones. Every one of them. There are smartphone apps like Ping Chat that allow you to ‘text’ but only with other users of that application. Apps like this are a closed network. SMS is for all intents and purposes the only ’open’ network.

It is also the most familiar. Nearly three quarters of American adults use text-messaging. Among Millenials it is nearly 100% according to Pew Research. Other than a voice call there is no other mobile phone activity that is more familiar or prolific.

Mobile operators are invested heavily

Finally, the mobile operators make too much money on SMS to let it get pushed aside. They will acknowledge the services that go around the SMS network, such as Ping Chat, but they will keep their eye on text-messaging in terms of pricing and promoting its use (e.g., free to any other user on that carrier’s network) to make sure there are ongoing reasons for people to keep texting.

SMS is not going away. Ever. In fact, if SMS isn’t playing a role in how you stay connected with your customers you should contact us about how it should.

What doest this mean to the email marketer? Generally, it means develop and deploy a strategy to provide a good mobile email experience. And do it now.

You may be asking yourself if it is really all that urgent. Good question. The number of recipients of any company’s email newsletters/promotions who are reading on mobile devices will differ widely. It will depend on the audience you have collected in your email database.  Follow the steps below to develop your plan for addressing the rise of the mobile email reader.

1. Know your audience. This is key to any good strategy. If you are unsure whether you really have many mobile email readers you need to do a little research. Start by equipping yourself with data. In an upcoming campaign enable all your links with analytics that will tell you the device (e.g. computer, iPhone, Android, Blackberry) being used to follow those links. Atomic Mobile’s SmartURLs will do this for you and even re-direct visitors to your mobile site (when you have one) or main site accordingly. Contact us for more info.
2. Update your email designs. If you’ve decided that you are going to accomodate the mobile email reader then learn about design techniques appropriate for mobile. There are many resources for this but you can start with ones from Melanie Attia of Inside Campaigner.
3. Create a mobile website. As a mobile email reader myself I know the experience of clicking links in email that take me to a full, non-mobile website. It’s terrible. In fact I’ve learned to avoid clicking links as most companies don’t have mobile sites.
4. Know how mobile impacts your results. Most mobile email clients, like many web clients, don’t automatically download images in email. For good reason, too, as most images aren’t mobile friendly and mobile users pay for the data they use. This means your open rate (if you’re using images to detect open rate) will be negatively affected and probably already is.  Second, per #3 above, mobile users may not be clicking any links in your emails because the resulting experience is likely a poor one. There goes your click-through-rate as well as any downstream conversion activities you are tracking.

The botom line? Research and recognize the growing mobility of your cutomers/email recipients, make a plan to give them a good experience and watch the performance of your campaigns start to go the other way.

Contact us now for help with mobile in your email marketing.

“Is mobile marketing really so hard that it leaves today’s digital marketers fumbling around trying to get it right?”

Reading through their blog posts (students are required to blog about the campaigns they experience) I had sense of growing disappointment. So many of the campaigns they were trying, which leveraged things like 2D barcodes, apps, SMS and MMS, simply didn’t work. That is, the student’s experience on their phone was completely broken. In one example, Reebok promoted a new woman’s shoe line in Shape magazine via a SnapTag which, when sent in using MMS, resulted in an SMS containing only a link to a YouTube.com video. OK for some smartphone users but anyone else is out of luck. Another campaign – this one by Ski Utah – offered a look at their “amazing deals” via their QR code, which directed you to their regular Internet site; a very broken experience for anyone not using an iPhone or other smartphone. In fact it didn’t even work on those devices. I was becoming disappointed and a bit embarrassed. Disappointed by all the failed experiences and embarrassed by fellow marketers who can’t put down their iPhones.

The lesson: User experience needs to be considered for all mobile devices, including smartphones.

The students, not all of whom carry smartphones, wondered aloud if mobile marketing is really so hard it leaves today’s digital marketers fumbling around trying to get it right. The answer is no, it isn’t really that hard but it takes some planning; you can’t just slap a 2D barcode on your magazine ad and call it a day. Sure, that approach may seem to work just fine on the Senior Designer’s Motorola Droid but he is the vast minority. Smartphones as a category only make up around 28% of all mobile users in the U.S.* and only a portion of those devices have the large screens for Internet browsing and can play flash video. Good mobile marketing gives a great experience to the smartphone holder but acknowledges the majority of non-smartphone holders as well by providing an experience appropriate to their device.

A quick how-to:
Knowing that your customers will be accessing your site from their mobile devices (they’re trying even if you’re not telling them to) you start by planning for some level of ‘graceful degradation’. When your site detects a mobile device, just as it would a regular browser, the elements that get rendered should change according to the capabilities of the device. However, with hundreds of devices it’s nearly impossible to accommodate each one individually so try this: create two mobile sites, one for smartphones and one for everyone else. (Atomic Mobile can help you do this.)

So, marketers and designers, put down your smartphones and plan mobile efforts that work for the majority of mobile users.

*Neilsen, November 1, 2010

You should contact us here to learn more about non-smartphones.

This is more than just a sweepstakes or contest to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar. With gamification the marketer creates a game with things like points, increasing difficulty levels, or social competition. The game itself is wrapped around a set of core business objectives such as:

• increase sales
• generate social activity
• reinforce a brand
• promote a new product

Game-play, then, is designed to promote behaviors that result in measurable results towards those objectives.

Guy’s article goes on to say how early in the development of the gamification concept it was recognized that mobile “was perceived as a revolutionary interaction channel for gamified marketing promotions.”  By adding personal interaction as well as portability and time-sensitiveness to the game, mobile is the way to take gamified marketing to a whole new level.  The only thing Guy’s article lacked was a good example of mobile gamification.

Here’s how Her Interactive, maker of the Nancy Drew PC games,  did it. They started with the following objectives:

1. Determine their customers’ willingness to engage with the brand via mobile
2. Create a post-launch buzz following the release of The Captive Curse

They then worked with Atomic to construct an SMS-based game to entertain and engage fans as well as promote social interaction and eCommerce. Here were the key elements:

• 10 puzzles to challenge users and create competition. Puzzles exposed the context of the new game but were solvable by any Nancy Drew fan
• Opportunities within the game to post status updates to a user’s Facebook
• A grand prize drawing for users completing all puzzles
• Unique promotion codes for an exclusive discount on the new PC Game. Each code was tied to an individual player.
• One opt-in solicitation for future messages from Nancy Drew/Her Interactive

The results were stunning. First, players engaged with the game, and by extension the brand, at an extremely high level. Over 60% of players completed the entire game with an average of 30 SMS sent and received per player.  Second were the business results:

• 44% of players posted a link to the game on their own Facebook
• 75 % of players opt-ed in to receive future messages from Nancy Drew/Her Interactive.
• 10% of players redeemed the mobile coupon

Now, I recognize that Her Interactive is in the gaming business so offering a game as a marketing tactic isn’t hard to imagine. But with results like these it appears to be the right tactic for the right audience. How much more could a marketer ask?

You should contact us here to learn about gamification with mobile.

With all the hype in the mobile world around location-based marketing this survey reminds us that location is not a holy grail for those looking to make offers via mobile device.

Location vs. Preferences

Think about it for a minute. Imagine you are at work downtown. Would you rather receive an dinner offer from a random nearby restaurant or one from a restaurant near your home a train/bus/car ride away who has a special on your favorite entree? Probably the latter. Would you be more interested in knowing when Macy’s has a sale on your favorite shoes even though you’d need to drive to the mall to get them or receiving a random offer from Macy’s because you checked in at the mall?  You’re probably thinking, I want both. That is, the most interesting offer combines the fact that you are nearby with knowledge of what you are actually interested in.

Relevance vs. Value

In fact, the most compelling offers combine location and preferences as well as time. This makes the offers relevant. But the offer must also be valuable. Ten percent off your favorite entree at a nearby restaurant won’t have enough weight to get most people to act; it isn’t worth the effort for just 10% off. A mobile device is a personal space. If someone allows you to make them offers via their mobile respect the opportunity by creating relevant and valuable offers.

Dos and Don’ts

Do: User preferences can be implied by tracking purchase history but few companies have their point-of-sale systems linked to a mobile user (either via phone number or mobile app registration), So how do you collect preferences? Well, how does anyone learn what someone else likes? They ask them or they are told in the course of a conversation. By making your marketing efforts conversational with engaging back-and-forth communication you can learn more about them and what they want.

Do: Provide robust back-end logic to target offers accurately. If this isn’t something your company can pull off on its own hire a firm to help you. It is imperative that your offers be relevant. Getting it wrong may not be disastrous but getting it right will pay off exponentially.

Do: Accept lower delivery volumes in exchange for higher response rates and less drop-out/opt-out/uninstall. Mobile is not the place for ‘spray and pray’ offers. The goal is to be targeted and that every offer you make is so relevant and valuable that, while you may not make as many offers, your redemption and satisfaction rates completely eclipse the volume issue.

Don’t: Don’t use push messages/offers via SMS or mobile apps for branding and awareness. Ever. Mobile is not the place to look for ‘eyeballs.

You should contact us here to learn more about mobile offers.

The Misunderstanding
The misunderstanding starts with not acknowledging the fact that nearly all mobile phones are capable of SMS. It has the broadest reach of any mobile mechanism outside of voice calls. Apps are nice but have serious limitations in terms of reach.
Add to that the fact that text messages have a read rate between 90% and 95% (Try doing that with email!) and you can see the true potential of SMS.
But even those of you who understand this are probably overlooking the other important aspect of SMS; it is personal. Mobile users developed their usage habits for SMS by sending and receiving text messages from people they know. The messages are personal and they are one-to-one. It is a unique and sacred medium in that way. The use of SMS as a marketing channel or a communication channel more broadly should reflect those habits. It is very likely your efforts to leverage SMS are missing this last point and your opt-in and opt-out rates probably reflect it.

The Misuse
Misuse begins with over-use.  You’ve developed a database of people willing to receive text messages from you. Great! But take it easy. Depending on how personal, relevant and valuable your messages are you should probably aim for 2-4 messages a month. (Obvious exceptions include services like daily weather alerts.)
Treating SMS as you would your email channel is another gross mis-use.  To quote Steve Smith of Media Post, “..the mobile use case is about either urgent need-to-know or impulsive want-to-have data.” If there isn’t a reason the recipient should have your message now then save it for email. SMS is no place for your newsletter.
Finally, spam. Unfortunately spammers have slimed their way into the mobile channel and devised ways to send unsolicited SMS. While we work to control and even eliminate this activity it continues to affect the mobile user’s willingness to accept text messages from anyone who isn’t in their personal contact list. In fact, if you’re aren’t delivering customized and/or personalized messages you may be considered a spammer, too.

SMS 2.0
So its time to re-examine SMS and re-think your approach. In broad terms evaluate how you turn your SMS efforts into conversations with your customer. Conversations that show you care about them and respect the opportunity to engage them in this, the most personal of mobile channels.
Here’s what I mean by way of example. Let’s say you are a pizza restaurant. In the past, you would put out a call-to-action such as “Get mobile coupons! Text PIZZA to 12345″ and the mobile user would receive an acknowledgement that they are on your list and if they are lucky the coupon of the day.  An SMS 2.0 program would create a dialog and look more like this:
CTA: “Get mobile coupons! Text PIZZA to 12345″
Mobile User: “PIZZA”
Tony’s: “Mobile coupons from Tony’s Pizza. Please tell us more about what you like. Do you prefer thin crust, regular crust or stuffed crust?”
Mobile User: “Regular”
Tony’s: “Regular crust. Got it. One more question. Do you like meat on your pizza or do you prefer veggies?”
Mobile User: “Both”
Tony’s: “Ok, you like both meat and veggies. Use code: ABC123 for $5 off your next family size, regular crust Combo. Reply with your name and we’ll have it ready in 30 minutes.”
Tony’s: (two minutes later): “Would you like to receive future mobile offers from Tony’s Pizza? Reply YES. Msg & Data rates may apply. txt STOP to opt out. Info at m.tonyspizza.com”*

Not only has the interaction been conversational but ultimately the offer was relevant to the customer’s preferences. In addition, Tony’s Pizza now knows much more about this person and can deliver much more relevant future offers. In the SMS 2.0 world the future offer interaction might look like this:
Tony’s: “Tony’s Pizza: 2 for 1 regular crust Combo today between 5p and 6p. Use code: ABC123. Order now and get free bread sticks! To order reply with your name.”
Mobile User: “Kelly”
Tony’s: “Thanks for your order for 2 for 1 regular crust Combo, Kelly. Your order will be ready for pickup at 5pm! 415.555.1234″

It may take a bit more work to set up a campaign like this but considering the time spent interacting with your brand and the positive impression left when a customer sees that you really want a dialog and to serve them on a more personal level it’s well worth the effort.

*When opt-in is requested as part of a dialog as shown in this example we see opt-in rates as high as 75 percent.

You should contact us here to learn more about SMS 2.0.

Recognizing that the use of QR codes in the U.S. is still new, and in the interest of being instructive rather than critical, we’ve put together some guidance for marketers who want to use QR codes*. QR codes can be a quick and powerful way to engage users and there is often a bit of mystery as to what lies ‘behind’ the code. A good implementation will reap the benefits.

Note: Most implementations are where the scanned code directs the user’s phone to a URL and sometimes directly to a video. To-date extremely few are designed to trigger SMS or a phone call. We focus on the URL approach here but the basic tenets hold for most implementations.

Consider The Mobile Context
This is the one some marketers overlook. Consider the environment in which the code will be seen. Be particularly careful with outdoor advertising such as billboards and buses where users may be in their cars or simply can’t get into a position to scan the code properly. The user needs to be able to pull out their phone and scan. They shouldn’t have to stand on a bus seat or run 145 mph.

Make a Flexible Code
Try to avoid using URLs that have been shortened using services like bit.ly and goo.gl because they don’t allow you to change the URL. Better to use a code generator that allows you to change the url or use a url that points to a page on your own servers that you can redirect. Why do this? For flexibility and as a back-up. Say you have a QR code for a ‘Deal of the Week’. With a code you can redirect you simply point the code to that week’s deal instead of over-writing last week’s deal. This would have saved the ASUS Computer campaign. Try www.QRJumps.com and www.qreatebuzz.com.

Optimize Pages for Mobile
Please, please point the code to a mobile-friendly URL. While some web sites render acceptably on a smartphone, most don’t. The purpose in life for a QR code is to extend the time you get to spend with the user and treat them to content they can’t get from the printed page. Don’t send them to your non-optimized home page. Build mobile-optimized landing pages that can be read by most web-capable phones and deliver a solid experience. Avoid linking your code directly to a video. If you want to promote video add a link to your landing page. This way when a user has trouble with the video the experience isn’t a complete failure as there may still be images and promotional copy on the landing page.

Include Instructions
Give the user instructions on what to do. QR codes are still novel to may readers and most don’t even know what it is let alone what to do when they see one. Tell them what they will get when they scan the code and brief instructions on how to download a reader.

Include an SMS Option
Supplement with an SMS keyword.  This could double or even triple your participation as many more phones can send SMS and view mobile-friendly web pages than can scan a mobile barcode. In fact, consider SMS instead of a barcode to simplify your call-to-action.

Test, Test, and Re-test
Test your QR code before finalizing any printed material or making it available to scan. It sounds obvious but this one step can save the whole campaign, just ask ASUS. Start by testing all the phones from people in the marketing department but go over to the IT department, too, as they are more likely to have a sample of Android-based phones rather than iPhones. Try to find a Blackberry or two as well. As part of this process of testing it’s important to test your code using a wide variety of 2D barcode readers. Your code, if not proprietary like Microsoft Tag, should work on all or most readers.

* For the purposes of this article we are referring to all two-dimensional (matrix) barcodes including standard QR codes, Aztec codes, data matrix codes, semacodes and Microsoft Tags.

 You should contact us here to learn more about 2D barcode strategies.