3Cinteractive Blog

I sat through a great meeting yesterday with a direct marketing firm from Boca Raton. As I demoed our platform, we reviewed a couple of the firm’s ideas. A lot of direct marketing firms are dealing with e-mail or direct mail, which is a slightly different beast than SMS. There are particular ways to maintain conversions with mobile marketing, that wouldn’t apply for e-mail marketing. In addition, mobile marketing is about spending the time to build a database rather than simply catching and blasting opt-in messages.

This firm got the concept that many do not: Mobile marketing isn’t restricted to a stand alone campaign that can be monetized immediately. In fact, a well designed mobile marketing strategy will have always-on campaigns that support other direct marketing efforts. Your brand’s short code is equivalent to it’s URL. When I work with a client, this is one of the first concepts that I establish. Once your short code is live, you need at least one campaign that will run constantly and collect interested consumers who read your marketing material. Mobile activates traditional marketing in a way that websites cannot. Missing this concept causes a lot of brands to avoid mobile marketing because they aren’t quite sure how to monetize it.

Do not put the cart before the horse. Sure, you should have a plan to monetize your database, but establishing the database is the first step. There are more ways than the imagination can conceive to monetize your SMS traffic. Just yesterday I listened to John Duffy, 3Ci Chief Executive, discussing leveraging a client’s SMS database to reacquire customers (at a fraction of the cost), while David Ross, 3Ci Chairman, was walking a radio station through the different “avail” strategies they can use for sponsoring message space.

Mobile marketing is quickly growing out of its infancy stage. As the market begins to expand, the carriers will be forced to be more selective when activating campaigns, as this is the only way to prevent SMS from becoming a haven for SPAM. If you know that your market is moving to mobile, start preparing now so your database is at critical mass when it matters most.

- Ainsworth