Every company, whatever size, started off without any mobile marketing department or without a list of mobile numbers for their customers and they had to perform data gathering exercises on their potential mobile customers.

As members of the SMe community, your small business will be in a similiar position.

You will know the power of mobile based on how you communicate with your friends and how you can recieve content and alerts from your favourite programs, sports clubs etc.. but you may not know how you can achieve this level of communication in your business (however small) with the customers you serve every day.

Whether you have a bricks and mortar store or an online business the ability to perform simple data gathering exercises to increase / or start your mobile marketing program is something you can do with very little time and effort required.

Whatever your business, product or service, you have to create something that offers the customer something special and gives added value to your customers.

Mobile Marketing allows you to communicate with your customers on a one to one, personal basis in the first instance, but it has many more benefits than just that.

It’s cost effective, meaning that you can use mobile to cut costs on call centre staff, administration roles and to some extent even the way you advertise across other channels can be streamlined to improve cost efficiency.

It’s convenient, it allows people to receive and digest your communication when and wherever they are best placed to do so and likewise they can text back whenever they want too. It is also very easy to set up and manage for your business.

It helps to increase relationship building, as you can keep your customers in the know and up to date with your business as well as ask them for their opinions etc, increasing that feedback which is so important as you grow your business.

You have the ability to mass market your message very quickly and easily making it totally personal to the end recipient.

You can integrate your mobile campaign with any other form of marketing communication, making it the most adaptable marketing channel ever.

And when your campaign is done, you can sit back and check out the results to a deep level of understanding. Or perhaps check the results as you go, using real time reporting, so you can stop your campaign and make alterations if you feel the need.

So when we start looking at building a list of subscribers for your business we can assume that anyone who joins your program or list will be specifically interested in your products or services.

Here are the 3 stages to creating your very own opted in mobile numbers list;

STAGE 1- ACQUIRE & GROW

Create a product or service that offers something special of gives added value to your customers. Bricks and Mortar stores have 2 for1’s and BOGOF’s whilst for Online Business you can use online only discounts or offers that arent available anywhere else and that the customer will gladly give his or her details to get.

*TIP* – Dont ask for more than 5 fields of information when data capturing for mobile, use Name, Address, Postcode, Email & Mobile as standard and amend accordingly, but if you ask for too many you will switch people off.

Include signage and Point of Sale for your offers to gain greater publicity and if your an online business then your primary way to gather user data is to offer a rich, rewarding & satisfying customer experience from the initial opt in point to the re-engagement communication and beyond.

Make sure you include permissions and a link to a privacy policy on your website & let the customer know where they can find information relating to what you will do with their data.

STAGE 2 – MAINTAINING YOUR SUBSCRIBER DATABASE

It is really hard to “ACQUIRE” a client, but its even harder to keep them for any length of time… On the flip side you can lose a customer in 5 seconds flat if you dont keep them interested.

Send mobile exclusive deals, information, rewards, offers and vouchers to increase the value of your mobile program for your customers.

*TIP* – Make sure your content is worth sharing!! If you have great content your customers are more likely to spread the word.

Try sending messages to your customers that include a call to action. A simple text back keyword response to recieve a voucher or bring their phone into the store & show a code to the till assistant etc…

This allows you to monitor responses rates & judge the success of your offers by the number of delivered SMS messages against the number of responses back.

STAGE 3 – ENCOMPASS SOCIAL MEDIA INTO YOUR MOBILE CAMPAIGN

Call out some of your mobile exclusive offers on social media sites like Facebook to encourage people to visit you & respond to the CTA. If your an online business ensure you add your links back to your website in any socila media ads. This way you can direct them to your privacy policy, email or newsletter subscription or simply other areas of your website.

DATA SECURITY

The easiest way to start managing your mobile data, is to look at the initial data you have from your customers, this should be in the main customer database, with other information on that client. You may decide that you need a separate database for Mobile than for other communications like email, direct mail etc…

Whichever way you maintain your mobile data, you need to remember that you need an initial database of “opted in “numbers with which to start your marketing from. As you promote your company / product / offers you will inevitably receive some “opt outs” back, people who no longer want to receive your offers.

To comply with legislation on spam messaging, you must withdraw the numbers that “opt out” within a time period of no longer than 1 week later. This will maintain a healthy, concise database, with lots of live data to send your messages out to.

Manage your “opt out” lists on a weekly basis; take time to do this right, make sure you keep your lists separate, have one “opt out” list and one “opt in “ list. The “opt in “list is your “live” database and should always be up to date, as this list is your catchment area, this list will provide you with your actions, whatever they may be.

Good Luck

themobileexpert