June 19, 2009

Five Point Plan for a Perfect Mobile Marketing Solution

I don’t particularly like mobile couponing.

I don’t think offers broadcast via Bluetooth or WiFi or any other interruptive mechanism have much of a future.

And it seems particularly obvious to me that having to download an app in order to participate in a retailer’s “special offers” is a plan doomed to smallness (unless the retailer wants to give the phone away with the app installed.)

Instead, I think key to a ubiquitous, useful and successful mobile marketing solution (the kind that actually links mobile and mortar), needs to demonstrate these attributes:

  1. It must build on the mobile technologies that are most widely used today (that’s voice, and texting)
  2. It must be pulled by the user, not pushed by the marketer.
  3. It must be timely - which means presented at the right time, but also time-sensitive (i.e., it must expire quickly.)
  4. It must fit within the existing flow of a purchase cycle (and, by doing so, cannot interrupt any portion of that cycle)
  5. It must allow for the redemption of the offer without additional connective technology (this is really an expansion of #1, but different for some subtle reasons.)

To a lot of people, these are going to seem like obvious constraints. For others, they’re going to seem backward-looking and dismissive of more cutting edge mobile technologies. For the record, I’m envisioning a system where the “integration” of mobile marketing is as seamless and ubiquitous as the integration of paper or TV into marketing, but still allowing for the unique capabilities of the mobile platform (personalization, trackability, etc.)

Some justification is required, so here goes:

  1. Nearly everyone in the U.S. has a mobile phone, many people have more than one. All of them are capable of sending and receiving voice (“well, duh,” you might say, but this fact is often overlooked.) Most (90%)+ are capable of sending/receiving text messages. No other technology is as ubiquitous.
  2. Interruptive marketing is doomed to fail in the long run because the noise will always quickly drown out the signal. Even a subscription-based service where users opt in to receiving offers has to be judicious about how often messages get sent.
  3. Delivering offers when people are succeptible is important - and so long as you are delivering them on-demand, fairly easy. But if your goal is to activate your customer, the offer has to expire. Quickly. (If for no other reason than, with the opportunity missed, a customer will re-opt-in for another chance.)
  4. Interrupting the purchase cycle is always going to reduce the number of people who complete it. If you’re asking people to request information or opt-in for an offer, the response has to come back to them immediately… and you can’t be garaunteed that immediacy with any carrier network all the time.
  5. Screen-scanning registers and Bluetooth-enabled checkouts are great… but it will be a long time before they’re everywhere. A long time.

This is something of a work in progress, to be sure. I’m trying to center in on some core principles for mobile marketing, though.

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