This may sound great, but a quick check of most popular websites here indicates they (web designers), have a lot of work to do. The average download time to a borrowed 3G iPhone was over 30 seconds. Studies tell us that most people will ditch a website after a 10 second wait.

It’s not just me. There’s a handy online testing tool available at www.ready.mobi that provides the stats on any website you like to enter.

Over 90% of the NZ websites I entered gave a poor or bad result, even those that boasted they were mobile-friendly. Somewhat ironically, restaurant and associated directory websites are the worst for mobile browsers, even though this sector has some of the highest traffic potential for mobile users.

So, why have local web designers and developers dropped the ball? Is it a cost issue or don’t they realise the speed at which mobile is coming? Certainly business owners would be concerned if they knew. It’s like having a store and deliberately turning away customers.

I don’t personally believe it’s always a cost issue, since there are cunning methods to ‘mobilise’ almost any existing website in a couple days, for under $1,000.  There’s also the option to establish a Facebook page, since these are inherently optimised for both desktop and mobile users. Blog-based sites are also another option, as these are often much easier to ‘mobilise’ than those expensive, custom-built websites. For those that like video, then setup a channel on Youtube and have your mobile customers go there instead.

P.S. Want your website mobilised? email kevin@digitalmarketing.co.nz

I think the issues are more around education and awareness. Mobile access of the web has come upon us fast. Let’s hope these tips rock the boat a little and get local web designers on the mobile fast track. Otherwise, just give us a call….

Those who are willing to have their day interrupted as their pockets buzz with your offers are going to be your best customers. If you have the typical ad agency or email marketer mentality of “batch and blast,” mobile is going to be a disaster for you. It’s called SPAM. Customers will revolt and you’ll get bad press, possibly legal action.

However, if you learn to treat mobile as a totally different type of channel, it can and will be incredibly successful. Text messaging open and response rates are record-breaking and unlike email, most customers love it. Done well, it’s seen as a customer service, not spam or a sales pitch. With success in mobile, there is a new set of best practices, which I’ve outlined below:

Mobile – For VIPs only?

Your first approach to a mobile strategy should be to offer something only available via the mobile phone. The incentive should be good and be the only place your customer can take you up on your offer.

I am sure most of you have been to an exclusive bar or nightclub before. Ever been in line when someone walks right past you up to the front of the velvet ropes and right into the club? He or she is what is known as a VIP. This is how you should treat your mobile club. They are VIPs that can get exclusive updates, offers, and content only available in the mobile channel. Make it exclusive and make it appealing.

Free or Charge?

Should it be free to signup to mobile offers? I don’t believe so. It’s shouldn’t be prohibitive either. Vodafone/Telecom ‘kindly’ get the major share anyway, charging 20c when customers text in using a signup keyword. It’s optional for the business to put a premium on this, but in my book, 20c is about right. Charging 50 or 99c (as seen on some TV mobile/SMS promotions) is a ripoff.

Building your list

There’s lots of traditional ways to gather mobile phone numbers. Have customers fill out paper forms, online etc. However the best is to use a keyword, being a permission-based tool to automatically build the list. The nominal 20c cost involved for the customer also provides the disincentive to minimise abuse of the offer and system.  There seems to be an entire industry and sub-culture out there of people (i.e. low value, disloyal customers), that do nothing but sign up to any offer or competition that’s going.

In fact for this and other reasons, I personally believe the ONLY way to gather customers mobile phone numbers is via a mobile keyword facility, and not a form on a website or even a paper form they fill out in-store, which then requires someone to manually enter things into the system. Sure, you can promote the mobile keyword and offer on your website, in emails and with printed brochures, signs, magazine ads, even on radio/TV, but the opt-in process should use a mobile SMS message facility with keyword. It’s simple and most people are happy to do it if there’s a chance of getting a discount or special offer.

Make sure when you are opting people into your database, you not only get them to join, but you could also manage their expectations with the types of messages they will get, how often they will get them, and how they can opt out. The careful use of different SMS/TXT keywords and opt-in processes as well as various web/online mobile list building tools make this bit easy.

If I was to tell you that by sticking to this very basic strategy you could build a solid database of loyal, high value customers, who will look forward to your messages and offers on a regular basis. Done well, the opt-out or unsubscribe rate is typically under 1% per campaign.

Show me the money!

Let’s look at the numbers. Initially at least, your mobile database is probably not going to be as big as your email database, but is that important? Answer this:  which is a bigger return –a call-to-action that sees an average 20% take (redemption rate) on a mobile database of 3,000, or a 2% redemption rate on an email database of 10,000 people?  If you guessed the mobile database made you more money, you guessed correctly. (Example calculations see note 1).

Time and time again mobile has a higher response rate.  Let’s take a look at the reasons why:

• 95% of cell phones have SMS capabilities and 87% of the population has a cell phone.
• You can reach someone no matter where they are.
• Over 95% of text messages are read within 15 minutes.
• Unlike email, there are virtually no delivery issues with SMS. If you send it, they will get it, and right into their inbox.
• All mobile clubs should have a keyword opt in so you cannot sign up anyone but yourself.
• 33% of email addresses change on a yearly basis, but with number portability (the ability to take a number from carrier to carrier), people are ditching their home phones and keeping their cell phone number for life.

Enough said…

Note 1. Typical costs: 10,000 html emails @ 3c per recipient, plus typical $1,000 copywriting, design and setup fee = $1,300. Typical 20% open rate and a 2% (max, often much less) redemption rate = 200 sales.

Mobile costs 3,000 list @ say 18c ea = $640 incl average $100 setup.  98% open rate and a 20% redemption rate = 600 sales.

Above inspired (and elements extracted) from an article on mobilestorm.com

“We have had a lot of success driving revenue and foot traffic. Before I go into stats, the first thing you should all think about is customer. What would they like and what is the best method to deliver that key "something" to them. Many restaurants and QSR’s have seen great results using simple text message coupons/offers and sweepstakes off their TV commercials. Meaning you can embed a ‘call-to-action’ in your video to drive response. The text message drives the traffic/redemption. Example, you see a commercial for KFC with a visual and/or audio call-to-action that says/reads, "text KFC to 12345 to get $2 off your chicken meal". The consumer texts and gets an immediate text response. This text message has details on how and where to redeem. On average we see a 1% response rate, based on Nielsen estimates.

Here’s the best part, follow up with a second text message asking the consumer to join your exclusive database for more savings. We typically see ~33% opt-in rate (we call this a double opt-in). That rate fluctuates based on brand and if there is an additional offer in the DOI message (get a free appetizer and more info from XYZ Restaurant, reply YES).

We typically see between 52%-113% redemption rates (based on the number of people that requested the offer and then went to the store and used the coupon). Village Inn in Phoenix ran a Bogo entree and saw a 113% redemption rate, that means that people forwarded the text to friends and they redeemed too.

Perceived SPAM is as BAD as SPAM!!! (even if you are not legally spamming, if the consumer thinks you are… that’s bad for business)

Here are the stats:

• 97% or more cell phones in the USA are text (SMS) enabled. basically, everyone.
• Response rates on TV ads: ~1%
• Redemption rates: 52-113%
• Database opt-in: averages 33%.
• Re-marketing to your database: 60% or more redemption rates on average
• Opt-out of database, we see less that 1%, but it is all in how you manage your database.
• Only 21% of American wireless subscribers are using a smartphone as of the fourth quarter 2009
• Smartphone owners in the U.S. tend to be male, younger (between the ages of 18–34), affluent (income of $75k+), and they use the phones for a mix of both personal and business purposes, with more emphasis on business usage.
• iPhone user is similar, but skews even higher for the more affluent (twice as many in the $100k+ income group).

Want to setup your own mobile campaign? It’s surprisingly affordable. email: kevin@digitalmarketing.co.nz

It’s a key question for those in business.

As always, it seems consumers are way ahead of the game. Mobile phones are now a big part of daily life with text messaging the most common activity for most of us. It’s rapidly taking over other key chores too once done on a PC.

Many are already using it as their main device for emailing, twittering, Facebook page updates, youtube videos, google search, interactive maps, and generally surfing the net to quickly find the best deals while out and about.

So, where do business owners start in connecting into this super-growth mobile market?

Here’s Four Quick, Inexpensive ways to Start Mobilising Your Business

• Get your own business keyword. Add it to your ads and store signs, letting you build up a database of loyal customer phone numbers and email addresses, rewarding them with information, coupons or offers.
• Mobilise your website, ensuring it appears quickly and is easy to navigate on a mobile phone browser. It’s not as difficult or costly as many make out. 
• Setup a business Facebook page. Not only free, but very mobile-friendly and smart.
• Get a twitter account. Like Facebook, mobile friendly, free and good for business.

Bring all this together as an inter-connected, cohesive strategy

Contact us today for details and pricing. kevin@digitalmarketing.co.nz

Tri-messaging is marketing messages that are created, integrated and unleashed for email, social and mobile channels to stimulate engagement.

The graph Lyris provided, reminded us again of how marketing has dramatically changed. Again how the consumer, not the marketer or advertiser is in control. Business are now just participants, not drivers of marketing. Seth Godin and other gurus forecast all this long ago,

However this paper showed what digital marketing is really about today. Finding the best touchpoints where our customers are. Certainly it is around email, social websites and mobile.

Mobile is the most interesting element, since is can bring everything together. Modern iPhone and smartphones can do it all – Collect and send emails, monitor, view, even update blogs, facebook pages and twitter accounts at will, on the go. 

The other neat, emerging mobile phone marketing tool is text messaging and the use of business-defined keywords. These can be easily established for any business, allowing customers to ‘opt in’ to company specials, coupons or events. It’s not broadcast marketing or spam either. These are customer-requested, auto-response text messages providing quick information, coupons, even weblinks through to a mobile-optimised ‘mobi’ website, in realtime.  (Read more)

“Laptops are for old people”

It’s only a matter of time before smart retailers, restaurant owners, advertisers and marketers realise the sales potential on interacting with their customers through these channels, focused around mobile email, texts and mobile web. Forget clunky MS Outlook or IE/Firefox on a PC – As my friends teenage son told me, who’d ditched his PC for an Apple iTouch, “Laptops and PCs are just for you old people”.

P.S. For more on mobile marketing, keywords and mobi websites visit my mobile marketing website at www.quicksave.co.nz

• Of their visitors on the web, 74% come from Google.
• Of their visitors through mobile devices, 99% come through the iPhone (they have one of the more popular apps).
• They’re seeing more than double the revenue off of those mobile users versus normal web users.

There’s been related articles here on the use of and importance of SMS messaging for marketing  – For restaurants especially, where mobile activity is strong, the success formula is really quite simple.

For lead generation they need an integrated direct mail, mobile phone and website marketing strategy. To keep customer returning they need a means to build and track everyone via an online CRM system, linked to a mobile phone e-loyalty programme.

For an innovative link with traditional media and for lead generation, utilise individual event TXT keywords or longer term introduce QR barcodes on all printed newsletters, signs and menus. Make it super-easy for loyal customers to bookmark your website or to respond to offers on their mobile.

This allows instant subscription to SMS offers, to pass on referrals and even give out e-discount vouchers to friends. Easy

You’d never know it by looking at TV, Radio, Outdoor or Print promotions today. Most still cling to the old 0800 phone number, even though it hasn’t been the crowd favorite for many years. It seems that most ad agencies and marketers today are still locked in the past, and it’s likely costing them in lost sales.

First, look at your market

However although the rapidly rising star in 2009, TXT isn’t the answer in every market. For example, a recent fundraising direct mail campaign for the coastguard used the [gasp] old post reply envelope! From this ‘older’ audience, many retired, there was a huge 35% response. Here, old fashioned mail was obviously the most appropriate. 

But in most business to business or consumer markets, we would expect other channels to be much more appropriate and cost-effective. In business an email or link to a website form would seem perfect even adding in PURL link, to dramatically improve the click-through rate. Why is this? These business individuals are likely spending a lot of their day checking their mail and then going online. Studies tell us that 42% of people prefer to respond online often because they want to check you out first – See if you’re credible.

For modern consumers, going online to respond works well, but if the customer was out and about seeing billboards or shop signs, or even home reading a magazine or newpaper ad, today we would expect SMS TXT messaging to be better. Especially so when it’s a promotion by a highly credible person or organisation.

For example, a recent ad campaign highlights the lead generation ability of TXT keywords on advertising, and why smart, innovative companies are now adopting this strategy to get back instant enquiries from consumers.

Hampsta is a start-up Xmas saving scheme company targeting Chriscos customers and new clients with an aggressive TV and print value-comparison marketing campaign.

Fronted by the Mad Butcher’s Peter Leitch, Hampsta sought to swing middle New Zealand families to get them to sign up to Hampsta. The call-to-action offered consumers 3 enquiry options:

• call an 0508 number;
• go to the hampsta.co.nz web site
• or TXT more to 244.

Results:

Within two weeks, the company had thousands of enquiries.

Three times as many people TXTed compared to going to the web site, and five times as many people TXTed compared to calling the 0508 number. The reply TXTs let people know they would be contacted shortly to help them join. This kept the call centre productive with both taking calls during ads, and then making calls.

According to Hampsta’s Gary Alway: "We wanted to go for the maximum number of responses in order for our telemarketers to follow up. The txt response captured all the data we need and was by far the clear winner, an absolutely staggering difference. Set up was so simple and easy."

Does it have to be a choice?

So, here’s a clear trend that shouldn’t be ignored. Remember, marketing is a two-way deal. It’s not just how we promote our products or services (Radio, TV, Banners, Print or Online), or even the offer made, it’s sometimes how we ask people to respond that can make or break a campaign.

And you don’t have to choose between methods either. Just do what Hamster promotion did. Give the consumer a choice of ways to respond, then you’ll quickly find out what’s best for you and your market. Our advice is to always include TXT in that selection. It’s affordable and flexible too, since multiple keywords and campaigns can be purchased, allowing you to expertly track different promotions.

And What About Mobile Advertising?

In the short term, the use of TXT as a response channel makes more sense than pushing out ads on mobiles, which is often talked about. This will come, but it takes a lot more planning and is around ten times the cost. There’s many more legal hoops to jump through too, to ensure it’s all appropriate and permission-based.

However setting up a keyword response channel as described above is easy and for the small cost, I believe it should be added to every promotion today, whatever media you advertise in.

Certainly mobile marketing represents immense opportunities. It is not as saturated, wasteful or as inefficient as email with all it’s spam and delivery issues.  It’s growing really fast too, especially with the younger consumer market. They are clearly glued to their mobiles and use it ahead of everything else, including their laptop, which is simply a device to help them with their studies or homework. It’s only us older (30+) people who are still glued to the larger screens and constantly checking our email.

It’s only us older folks who still spend time viewing the larger screen and checking our email.

Where to Start?

For eager marketers, the key issue is how to use mobile effectively to communicate your message? You can’t just go out and buy a mobile phone list like you can a direct mail list. And even if you do get a decent list, you can’t actually do a bulk communication without incurring a huge amount of planning, effort and expense. Working with a traditional advertising agency and mobile provider to set up an approved mobile marketing campaign or promotion can cost thousands.

But this is thinking about it from an old-fashioned agency and communications provider perspective. i.e. thinking about campaigns, design, branding, offers, delivery etc. It suddenly gets very complicated. Why is this? Well, traditionalists see mobile simply as another media ‘channel’ that needs to be tamed and molded. They have a mass market, interruption-based mindset. But these old fashioned ‘push’ marketing strategies don’t work as well with the young or on mobile.

Because of this, it’s not this creative sector that are really succeeding with mobile marketing overseas, but small entrepreneurial companies with a clearer understanding and vision of this new world order. And they’re making simple, quick and cheap too…

In part 2 we’ll see how it’s being done by these new industry leaders…

New Cool Print-to-Mobile Tools

Instead having people attempting to key in those long text messages or website addresses on their phone, we use the mobile phones’ built-in camera to do it all for them. i.e. To start, the phone instantly captures specific instructions from any printed item. e.g.:

Just snap a photo of the barcode which then:

1. tells the Phone web browser to go directly to the product providers webpage for more information, even to buy the product or
2. prepares the phone to email or forward a special message on, with a link back to the suppliers web page with a special offer or
3. simply tells the phone to just save the details into it’s built-in address book or perhaps use the message as a discount voucher.

All this could be very handy if say you see a promotion on a magazine ad, website page, on a building, even street, realty or bus sign, and don’t have time to take down all the details. Now you’d just snap a photo of it and the special QR barcode (left) included in the photo. This provides the information for the phone to do its special ‘thing’, like sending you to the corresponding website on that product or property or translating it into readable text. This will really come into it’s own this year as more people upgrade their phones as the newer 3G networks expand.

Simply  TXT QR to 710

But why wait? Many Vodafone users here with the modern camera phone may already have this QR capability today and don’t know it. Simply  TXT QR to 710. They then get a link to download the correct free QR Code reader.  (For full details click here)

As discovered overseas, it’s certainly a great way to connect with a youth market that’s notoriously difficult to reach – not just because it offers something new and different for them to interact with, but also because it generates a lot of street buzz.

Looking for more neat QR code ideas? View the videos below:

Call us on how to add your personal QR code to your next website, brochure, flyer, poster or business card .

"Ever since the iPhone came around, it turned the mobile-advertising opportunity from something really stiff, cramped, awkward and slow into something beautiful, sexy and fast."

Faster 3G networks plus new software provide enhanced opportunities to do much more with the amazing iPhone and other Smartphones. A recent Advertising Age article provide clues of what’s to come for publishers and advertisers.

As one commentator put it: "It’s just good business for publishers to move as aggressively as possible to serve content on as many platforms as readers want to consume it, and in ways that optimize each platform’s strengths…" Our new multi-platform world undoubtedly provides great opportunities for innovative publishers, advertisers and retailers.

However I personally believe that’s only part of it. If it’s tied in with other print-to-mobileweb enablers like QR barcodes, RFI chips, we start to see the bigger picture of where mobiles fit in the marketing and wider e-commerce arsenal.

Look to your Cellphone to become your wallet. 

The cellphone could become your cash, ID, loyalty card, travel pass, discount voucher, credit card and much much more. In fact in Japan all this advanced technology is already commonplace. The rest of the world is only now catching up. Because everything is digitised, this transaction data is collected in realtime, helping forward-thinking marketers monitor and plan campaigns.

It’s easy and consumers want it.

As was once remarked by a great scientist*, to know the future, watch your kids, don’t ask the academics. So, I’ve been watching mine and other kids recently, seeing how they interact with others and use emerging technology. Conclusion?

The small, not the large screen will dominate

Anyone who’s visited South Korea or Japan in recent years will know how the small screen mobile phone has dominated the lives of their teenagers. A friend’s 14 yr old son here does the same. He always uses his iTouch to surf the web, answer emails, listen to music, watch videos, often ignoring the bigger screen TV and his own laptop.

I asked him why he didn’t use his laptop for web access? "No, it’s stupid – laptops are just for old people" he said "much easier and faster on the iTouch".

Wow. So, where does all this leave direct marketers? I guess it’s that we need to look at tools and applications like this that puts more power in the hands of users and let’s them interact on their terms, not ours.

QR barcodes is another particularly interesting print-mobile-web application that will likely play a big part in coming years. Marketers could easily (and cheaply) use these types of innovative tools to boast sales. There’s likely to be many more coming. Ask your kids, they’ll know…

* Clifford Stoll on TED