Post 11 of 12

Identify your goals… What are they and how does the Mobile Channel compliment them?

Before any financial or resource investment into a mobile presence consider the following;

Once you begin to answer these key questions you can begin to formulate your mobile strategy.

Is your website rendered for mobile and do you need an app? If you think you do then what would is its purpose?

An effective mobile strategy often includes both elements. An app can form a compelling front end, which incentivises users to engage further with optimised content and features hosted on a comprehensive, compelling site.

Integration? Integration? Integration?

A mobile presence should fit into an integrated multi-channel marketing strategy. Think about how mobile data is captured and what future use it will have. A long term approach will help to shape your mobile presence and what it needs to do for your business.

Its also important to consider how your mobile presence will integrate with back office functions. Do you need to link into booking engines, CRM systems or loyalty programs? What about billing or invoicing systems? This level of integration will require careful planning and communication with your suppliers and partners.

Keep it relevant….

The most important way to engage with customers via mobile is through relevant, interesting and useful content. Here are some considerations for keeping customers close;

Personalise – Use customer data and insight to create targeted offers and promotions via mobile

Location – Mobile’s unique advantage is location: use location based targeting to find your nearest outlet and strengthen the proposition with compelling local promotions “head to your local restaurant now for 20% off” etc..

Keep them entertained – think about how you keep your customers coming back for more?

Quick and Slick – Mobile is quick, its users are impatient and constantly demand immediacy, turn them off if your user interface is slow and they wont come back for more…

How are you going to market your mobile channel proposition?

Once your mobile presence is up and running, think about how to get people interested in and engaging with your content. Here are some practical options;

Assessing Success

Once you have successfully launched your mobile channel or re-worked and integrated your existing mobile strategy into your overarching marketing one, there is still plenty to do to ensure it’s performing as well as it can.

Any investment into a new channel or new strategy needs to be monitored and evaluated on a regular basis. Mobile is no different, and given the fast adoption of mobile as an engagement channel it’s probably the main one to keep track off out of all the channels at your disposal.

There are so many ways to measure success but here are some ideas to get you started;

The mobile consumer experiences many possibilities throughout their day using their device. Simple SMS, MMS and Email via their phone are used daily and more and more people are using Voice interaction (Siri) search, apps, location based services, payments and QR codes to name a few (but not all) of the rest.

When we come to perform our success measurement we need to look at the following;

Mobile Messaging

You can track device carrier in some instances, device identifier, Sent messages, Failed messages, Pending (with network) messages, timestamp of delivery and URL conversion from bitly or other types of links. A good partner will also have an audit trail based on each mobile number and should be able to give you every message and subsequently every call to action (CTA) that the customer has performed with your communications.

Track by voucher download and redemption where your CTA is a follow up piece of content like a voucher or a coupon.

Mobile Apps

Track by downloads and usage would be my starting point then create your own reporting from there once you have lots of interaction with the app.

These are base statistics and you can add to these stats around email via a mobile device which you can get via your email provider including browser type so you can make your emails stand out for particular browsers. You could add in a location based lookup element to your campaigns and track where someone was when they performed a call to action.

Once you start to analyse the success of your mobile strategy in conjunction with your mobile partner of choice, your possible statistics are endless.

good luck!

themobileexpert