the dark side | sms marketing

MobiTV; the nation’s largest mobile TV network, had 3 million subscribers at the beginning of 2008. Granted, this is a small percentage of the overall mobile phone users, but it is still 3 million people, 82 percent of whom are between the ages of 18 and 39, and the remaining 18 percent age 40 or older.
These subscribers (67 percent male and 33 percent female) love television, are highly mobile, technophiles, trend setters, and mavens who drive tech purchases, both within corporations and among their friends. If you are trying to reach such a target market and have a significant budget, you can look into adding MobiTV advertising to your marketing mix.

Mobile Marketing Awards
When you create your amazing mobile marketing campaign and get the results you were dreaming of, enter your campaign in the Mobile Marketing Association’s Mobile Marketing Awards (MMA Awards; tinyurl.com/mobile awards).

Audio and video have huge potential in mobile. User adoption and a phone’s ability to handle it are not significant enough to warrant launching full campaigns around it. Of course, this will change quickly. If you can think of a situation where your customers are mobile and need or want something that you can provide with a video, then you should consider mobile video marketing. Here’s how it would work: Your customers can see your other marketing (maybe a sign, a billboard, or a flyer, or hear you on the radio). You can offer them a short code; they can reply to get a link to a mobile video. It can work for cars, houses, or other big ticket items that you are willing to invest in to promote via mobile. Consumers are also willing to deal with the technical details of getting a video.
Mobile video will also be big in user-generated content. If you can think of ways to get users to create a mobile video and share it, you might be onto something. But be aware that user-generated TV commercials are already considered to be old news, so you might find that as quickly as user-generated mobile comes in, it will go out again.

There is no doubt that the Apple iPhone has changed the mobile industry and that there are opportunities galore for developing websites and applications for it. As the most voracious consumers of the mobile web, iPhone users are a good target for specific applications. In Chapter 9, I discussed building iPhone-specific websites, and here I am covering applications-software or widgets that run on the device. Since all iPhone applications (not widgets, though) must be provided through Apple, your application must fit into one of the following categories:

• Calculations
• Entertainment
• Games
• News
• Productivity
• Search tools
• Social networking
• Sports
• Travel
• Utilities
• Weather

To be clear, application development is not a do-it-yourself job unless you are a software developer. To download the iPhone software development kit (SDK), you need to sign up as a Registered iPhone Developer and be running an Intel processor-based Mac on Mac OS X Leopard. If you meet those requirements or are willing to hire someone who is, then you can dive into iPhone development.

According to Yahoo! Mobile (www.mobile.yahoo.com/developers/ tips), the following specific tips can be used to create successful widgets:

• Tap into mobile user passion points. Hit on a passion point, content, or service that mobile consumers want and need while they are on the go.
• Provide personalization and customization. The best widgets provide updated information based on users’ customized preferences. Let users customize your widget so they only get the stuff they want.
• Keep things simple—don’t try to incorporate too many features into one widget. You can always build more than one widget.
• Optimize for a mobile experience. Be mindful when designing your widget that it will be on a smaller screen and that network speeds will be slower on a mobile phone.
• Keep it fresh. The most regularly used widgets are those that constantly provide new, up-to-the-minute information to users.

To consumers, mobile widgets are simply small graphic files that can be downloaded onto their phones. When consumers click on the widget, it launches an application, opens a website, starts a game, triggers a video, or sends whatever the widget creator decided. To marketers, widgets are the opportunity to have space on the mobile screen and be closer to their customers.
As with all mobile, your widget needs to provide specific and appealing value or no one will download your widget. Some of the most popular are ones associated with major brands (Wikipedia, Wall Street loumal), fun games (Suduko, Memory Game), weather, news, stock quotes, and more.
All widgets are not created to work on all phones. Some (WidSets) work on Java-enabled mobile phones; others (Yahoo! Mobile Widgets) work on iPhones; some on Windows Mobile devices and Nokia S60 series. You get the point: Widgets are cool but certainly not universal. This is one good reason to know which headsets the majority of your mobile site visitors use so you can focus your efforts on the type of widgets most of your users can access. By using mobile-specific analytical tools as described in previous articles, you will know this important piece of data.

Widgets as a marketing tool have great potential if they are the right match for what you offer. People only get widgets that appeal to them for their own reasons. You won’t be able to get away with a widget that doesn’t provide value to the person who is going to put it on his mobile device.
Check out the following widget sites and see what makes sense for what you do. You’ll either start getting ideas, or you won’t. Either way, you’ll know if widgets are a good option.

PayPal Mobile
PayPal users can set up a mobile PayPal account so that anytime they are on a site or see an ad for something they want to buy via their mobile, they can do it. This would be perfect for selling tickets to an event. Just put the PayPal logo on the marketing materials and show people how they can register and pay for the event immediately.

Shop Text
ShopText is a mobile commerce and promotions company with a software platform that transforms any ad into a point -of-sale opportunity. ShopText technology creates a secure, direct-to-consumer marketplace where consumers can shop, sample, and save. Your customers can sign up with ShopText by signing up online, entering their credit card information, and then activating their phones. Each time they want to buy from a ShopText vendor, they can just text the keyword from your ad and enter their pin codes. Bingo, they just ordered with their phones.

Bango
Bango is one of the biggest mobile payment gateways that can collect money for you worldwide through your customers’ phone bills, credit cards, or PayPal accounts. Bango has a free starter package that allows you to sell up to 10 products and get 20 percent of the revenue from your sales.
Its pricing ranges up to $1,599 per month, and for that, you get more services and can keep up to 90 percent of your revenue. Bango is an option for those who sell worldwide or are a major brand.

mPoria
I saved mPoria for last because it is technically not a mobile payment program but a complete m-commerce provider. Its Go Mobile! service is a turnkey m-commerce solution that enables retailers to build, customize, and monitor a complete m-commerce site easily and cost effectively. Uyou want to sell physical products via mobile, mPoria is the tool you need. You can open a mobile store in minutes, and you can sell your wares almost immediately at a surprisingly affordable investment.

It would be impossible to adequately cover m-commerce (buying and selling of goods and services via mobile) in the scope of this blog, but I would be remiss not to mention ways that mobile users can pay for products or services with their mobile and ways you can collect those payments.
Downloadable items will almost always be purchased through and billed by the carriers. The carriers stay in charge of downloadable payments for two reasons: 1) to protect their customers from unscrupulous vendors, and 2) to protect their share of the revenue stream that downloadable content brings to the bottom line. If you are going to sell downloadable content, you will be sharing part of your revenue with carriers, and all billing will be done through them. Even if you were to go through a site that will help you create and sell downloadable content, you will only get a percentage of the profits, and they will handle all billing.

If you are going to sell anything that is not downloadable, such as physical goods (books, sporting goods, food, tickets for an event, clothes, and so on), then you can accept payment via mobile using one of the mobile payment providers listed here. Before you dismiss selling physical goods via mobile, consider that Juniper Research reported in 2006 that u.s. consumers spent an estimated $480 million on physical merchandise using their mobile devices, and the U.K-based research firm expects this figure to exceed $l.9 billion by 2010. The following vendors can help you set up your mobile payment gateway.

A large percentage of people regularly check email on their mobile devices. Is your outgoing email easily read on a mobile device? Chilling question, isn’t it? In the early days of email, everybody sent and received text-based emails. Then came HTML emails. Gradually over the years, as more email software started to read HTML-designed email effectively, more businesses started sending out graphic-filled emails. Now that so many people are checking email on their mobile devices (where multiple graphics might not even allow the email toopenorrenderitjustplainuseless).it.stime to think about offering an alternative. Currently, it is an email best practice to send messages in multipart MIME format. Don’t worry if that sounds too technical; it just means that your email system will deliver your email in the best possible format for the device your reader is using to check email.
Much the same as with the mobile web, it may be best to offer your readers different content if they usually check their email with their mobile devices. Even if the phone will open up a long email, it doesn’t mean that your customers will read it. Their mobile email services may not even download the entire message.
When you send a plain text email, be sure to keep your line length short (between 60 and 65 characters is standard). If you know you have a lot of mobile email readers, you can make your text email even more compact.
Also keep in mind that on a mobile email system, your readers may not see who the sender is. It is helpful to include a note in your subject line to indicate who the sender is. However, your subject line is going to be even more important, both real estate-wise (you have fewer characters to display) and content-wise (your subject line needs to be provocative enough for someone to open an email on their mobiles).

Mobile Email List
If you know a large percentage of your readers open their email via mobile, you can create a special mobile email list. On your site where visitors go to subscribe to your email list, you can offer a special mobile list that is especially designed for a mobile device. (It could be your m-zine instead of your ezine.) The mobile version of your email can consist of headlines overall and short paragraphs that link to a mobile website for further reading. It can also include a way for readers to send a reminder to themselves to read a full-size version later.

Mobile is one of the greatest technological and cultural transformations in history. It has revolutionized communication as we
know it, and will have equal impact on how and when we gather and send information.
-Brian Fling, flingmedia.com

Trying to decide on the definitive tools and techniques of mobile marketing is a little bit like trying to get a 2-year-old to sit still. This serie of the next articles is a compilation of some important but unrelated concepts that need to be covered in a comprehensive blog such as this; however, these topics don’t need their own articles. This article has been arranged in much the same way as the rest of Part 2: in order of most-applicable-to-use-now tools to the more advanced techniques. Early in the article are items that nearly everyone needs to be aware of for use in mobile marketing. Later in the next articles are the more advanced and technological stuff folks will want.

If you already have a customer loyalty program, you can add mobile marketing preferences to your customer profile that let customers indicate when and under what circumstances they are willing to accept your mobile offers or information. When you begin to add time, location, and personal preferences to your loyalty profiles, many customers see images of the Orwellian Big Brother and may opt out. Be clear about your data privacy and network security policies. There are digital identity standards and mobile application development tools, such as those offered by 509, Inc. that allow your customers to not only control their personal data (it lives on their device, not on your server) but determine when and how they will share that information. It is simply a browser plug-in that your web service provider can customize to your needs. From your customers’ perspective, they are simply using the browser. The benefit of this approach is that location and preference data are available for a particular mobile marketing transaction without the need for you to store personally identifying data. If privacy or data liability is a concern for your business or for your customers, these new technologies are worth considering.