It has become obvious over the last few years that the era of page-long ads loaded with copy may slowly start becoming a thing of the past. We live in a growing era of 160 character text messages, and 140 character tweets – two of the most popular advertising mediums with everyone from small businesses to large corporations.
Even those who (still?) support email marketing are looking at the best ways for email to tackle mobile. So how is your business heading into the mobile market – are you jumping in head first with innovative campaigns, or are you merely attempting to mold your current marketing campaigns to have a mobile component? In fact, after the explosion in popularity of email marketing, most emails from marketers go directly into junk mailboxes, creating the exact opposite of a campaign that will engage your customers. Email just isn’t as successful as mobile anymore, as Steven van Zanen notes in his article, Making the Case for SMS Marketing Over Email:
“One of the most effective ways to engage consumers is via SMS. Reaching 95 percent of British mobile users and up to 5 billion people worldwide, the humble text message is one of the most trusted mediums of communication.”
In 2011, mobile messaging surpassed email traffic by 500 times, and postal by 300 times – so how does a business take advantage of this shift? Adopting a short message mentality will connect your brand with your customers on their level, one where they actually read your messages. Below we’ll summarize what R.J. Talyor suggests as key areas to focus in alongside this shift.
We can never express the importance of knowing who your audience is before beginning any mobile campaign. Failing to do so will not only alienate your audience, but fail to get your message to it’s intended subscribers – a lesson presidential campaigners are learning by using mobile apps (which can only target a rough estimate of 49% of the US market who have smartphones with app capabilities) versus a more comprehensive campaign like Barack Obama’s 2008 text campaign.
Additionally, it is key to test, test, and test again. Make sure that you learn the kind of messages that your customers want to receive. Failing to do so will result in opt-outs en masse, the exact opposite of what a mobile campaign’s goals are.
“Subscribers are not interested in recycled content or batch and blast messages. Use the information collected to send personalized, relevant messages.”
Use your messages to personalize to your community. This is the key benefit to individual location based campaigns, which see much more success, over nationwide corporate campaigns. Personalization will result in higher levels of interaction and redemption, and create a sense of community between your brand and the subscribers in your campaign.
Once you have your customer’s attention, keep it. Using text messages to direct subscribers to desktop versions of your website, or to a non-mobile optimized email campaign, can be fatal.
“When consumers opt in to receive mobile messages and provide their email address for future communications, marketers must capitalize on the opportunity by continuing to build the relationship across email, Facebook and Twitter.”
With the shift in focus that comes along with a transition to a mobile and interconnected society, your customers are expecting that, if they are receiving content from you on their mobile device, what you are sending them is mobile friendly. Don’t lose customers to a poorly executed mobile campaign, give us a call today.