Mobile Marketing Best Practices
Mobile applications, when they were first introduced, were going to revolutionize our lives. Well, as it turns out, it has been a slow transformation.
When Palm introduced the wireless Palm VII in 1999, the entire market for wireless and mobile data was approximately 2 million subscribers - predicted to grow, at the time, to 21 million by 2002. Those numbers never materialized. Palm VII's membership tapped out at 190 thousand subscribers.
Jump ahead to 2008. There were 272 cell phones sold in the U.S. per minute. To put that into context, there were approximately 7.5 babies born in the U.S. per minute.
Of the approximate 220 million wireless subscribers in the United States, 76% of these mobile subscribers have access to the Web on their mobile device, and one-third (32%) access it via their wireless devices.
While those numbers may not seem impressive, consider this: five months after Apple launched the iPhone in the US, the iPhone went on sale in Europe. The proper question we should be asking now is: "How will that affect my business?"
According to Harris Interactive, 25% of Smartphone or iPhone users are more likely to "occasionally" use their device to make purchases, compared with 17% of mobile or cellular phone users. As the iPhone and its successors' penetration increases, those number are only going to go up.
Aside from the iPhone phenomenon, data connections for phones have been getting faster. As the industry moves toward third-generation (3G) networks that carry both voice and high-speed data, marketers are now being presented with real opportunities to reach customers, particularly the young and socially connected.
While watching ads in exchange for free mobile content is one thing, conducting commerce is another. There is a growing group of startups and established players like PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, and Cingular who are betting that the cell phone is about to become king of small cashless transactions. According to Celent, total worldwide mobile payments will reach $55 billion by the end of 2008. You're right if you think you've heard the idea before. Mobile commerce was indeed a buzzword in the late '90s. But as with a lot of ideas from that era, its time has finally come.
While it is true that both MasterCard and Visa have enabled mobile phones as payment vehicles, it is interesting to note Visa's almost obsessive focus on mobile banking and mobile commerce as a strategy. In early 2007, as it continued to push its own mobile payments system, Visa USA invested in the Ireland-based mobile domain name provider dotMobi (DotMobi, which launched in September 2006, is a consortium backed by Ericsson, Microsoft, Vodafone, and other major vendors and operators. The group's main purpose is to push the .mobi domain name).
Opportunities
Texting is as stong as ever. Look no further than American Idol. The winner of Season 6 received 74 million votes with 609 million votes cast over the course of the TV season for various candidates. That is more people than voted in the last U.S. election.
We are seeing new engagement models develop. Already, radio stations have started "text clubs" that allow listeners to receive mobile alerts and promotions, and use text to interact with disc jockeys during broadcasts. Verizon Wireless' VCast's SongID service in the U.S. allows radio listeners to acoustically identify songs via their cell phones - allowing users to download the song or ringtone later.
Consumers see SMS promotions on billboards for the likes of Nike's New York mobile scavenger hunt and Crest's "Irresistible IQ" club-focused campaign that blended SMS and social networking.
In the UK, SatLav allows mobile users to send a text message with the word 'toilet' to 80097, and a satellite pinpoints their location. The satellite picks up the mobile phone's signal and uses it to find the location of the nearest phone tower. The database then automatically finds a toilet that matches the postal code of that phone tower - charging users 25 pence for each text.
Broadway Marketplace, a small grocer in Massachusetts replaced its card-based loyalty program with one that uses mobile phones to identify the shopper.
StoreXperience is allowing consumers to communicate with brands and stores through a simple application download to your mobile phone via a text message - allowing consumers to price check on the fly by "scanning” 2D tags with the phone's camera while shopping. Scanning one of the tags allows consumers to receive in-depth product information instantly to the phone from the retailer or brand.
Location-based services such as Dodgeball and Loopt are social networking tools that allow users to announce their whereabouts and invite friends to join them.
Mini USA introduced RFID-enabled billboards that "talk" to Mini motoristsis. Mini drivers in select US cities can utilize RFID key fobs to initiate personalized messages on billboards containing LED displays.
While mobile marketing is going mainstream, global mobile commerce, or m-commerce, is expected to grow steadily to an estimated US$88 billion industry by 2009 - mobile entertainment - ringtones, games, iTV, wallpaper, gambling etc - will continue to be the largest application for buying and selling via the mobile phone. Having taken root in Asia, m-commerce will continue its spread westward and once all of the players have agreed upon the rules, the m-commerce channel will be key to marketers.
From a pure mCRM perspective in the B2C world, Starbucks and retailers as a whole, have the opportunity to implement the smartest application to date with in store high speed wireless Internet access through Wi-Fi hot spots. Though this is not a mobile phone based system, companies such as Starbucks, McDonalds and Borders in the US have an enviable and unique opportunity to communicate with its customers in store. Through its partnership with T-Mobile, Starbucks can become the gateway to the Internet by launching customers from a store specific Starbucks home page - which presents incredible opportunities for CRM - limited only by imagination. In fact Wi-Fi has become so popular that Zagat Survey, which rates restaurants in various cities, now offers a guide to Wi-Fi hotspots.
Interestingly enough, while we've been touting this Wi-Fi opportunity for years - many years later, on March 16th 2006, two patents were published by the US Patent & Trademark office, granting Google:
Why does it take Google to figure out the obvious?
For the most part, the next five years will be about continuing to build the infrastructure that will allow for wireless access. While Shannon's Law cannot be undone (He said that English text is not compressible to fewer than about 1.5 binary digit per English letter, no matter how complex and clever the encoder), capacity will be constrained to the extent that new spectrums are released to the public.
Aside from the Starbucks example, airlines had been building their in-flight e-mail and internet capabilities. Singapore Airlines and Lufthansa tried to launch inflight web access but market demand never materialized and the service was discontinued in 2006. Now Jet Blue, American Airlines, Virgin America and Alaska airlines all plan inflight tests in 2008.
Who's Who in the mCRM Technology Market
Oracle/PeopleSoft PeopleSoft teamed with Research in Motion (RIM) to offer PeopleSoft Enterprise Sales for BlackBerry. Sales reps can enter information once, and that data is stored simultaneously in the sales app and Outlook or IBM's Lotus Notes. When the device detects a wireless connection, it automatically syncs data with the core Sales Force Automation system.
Siebel Siebel recently announced its partnership with wireless provider Good Technology to offer its hosted solution, CRM OnDemand . Wireless access is provided via Palm and PocketPC devices, and eventually, Symbian-powered handheld's and smart phones.
SAP mySAP CRM offers wireless access to field reps through a variety of devices: laptops, PDAs, and other handheld's. Mobile workers have access to core sales CRM functionality, including sales forecasting, sales pipeline data analysis, task management, quote generation, and submitting sales orders.
Microsoft Microsoft CRM Mobile is completely integrated with its CRM app, offering full-functionality from a Pocket PC or Pocket PC Phone Edition with Windows Mobile 2003 software.
IBM IBM is partnering with Siebel to develop CRM solutions on its WebSphere platform. It has become a market leader in providing pre-packaged, industry-specific wireless solutions.
Sybase iAnywhere, a subsidiary of Sybase, provides mobile middleware, databases, and device management for CRM applications, such as mobile ProspectSoft.
Salesforce.com This hosted CRM solution offers a Wireless Edition that is free to its Enterprise Edition customers. Via RIM Blackberry, wireless PDAs, or a WAP-enabled mobile phone, mobile workers have a real-time connection to salesforce.com with no need to sync data.
Saleslogix for PocketPC Saleslogix, from parent company Best Software, offers a full-featured CRM solution, which is available via PocketPC. This device gives sales reps the ability to view, add, and edit contacts and accounts; complete tickets; schedule meetings; and more.
Salesnet Hosting both the CRM application and the data, Salesnet is sold by subscription in a range of editions, according to the size of the enterprise and the type of industry.
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