April 2010 – Online Insights: Mobile

What is Mobile, Really?

Frank Desiderio, director of technology for Agency.com, remembers being approached to take the Discovery catalog online back in 1995: “The client wanted to take the catalog and literally paste the pages online.” It took brands a while to understand the value proposition of the browser and the digital click.

Here we are 15 year later and history seems to be repeating itself. Online storefronts are proudly announcing that they have “gone mobile” by retrofitting the online navigation to the constraints of the small screen. But have they? Really?

What is a mobile device?
The term “mobile” is often confused, so let’s start with a definition before we try to mobilize your commerce strategy. In a world of converging device formats and ubiquitous hotspots, when is the traditional online world mobile? For example, is a WIFI-enabled NetBook a mobile device?

Short answer: yes. It is unencumbered by ethernet cable and home-bound WIFI transmitters. By most appearances, this would seem to be a mobile experience.

The longer answer is no. Here’s why:

The scenario described above does not allow for an impulse reaction. Removing a NetBook from a backpack is a big step removed from an impulse experience.

No, mobile is not synonymous with “portable.” A mobile device is successful as a discovery, engagement and commerce tool when it is essentially a “mobile mouse.” Point your phone at the call-to-action and click. Procter & Gamble understood that the consumer makes a purchase decision in less than three seconds. The consumer needs to be empowered to click at this P&G “First Moment of Truth.”

What is a mobile application?
When we move from the device to the application layer, the same logic holds true. “Going mobile” is not the challenge. The challenge is in understanding the mobile consumer’s behavior: The m-commerce shopping experience needs to be designed for the mobile consumer and their impulse economy.

If the goal is to take a legacy media and make it work on a smaller phone browser with limited functionality, then the industry is definitely going portable. However, taking the tethered online storefront and porting it to a mobile browser may not necessarily make it truly mobile.

What is working?
Billions of dollars have been spent globally by consumers off the mobile phone on premium rate services (ringtones, sweeps, etc.) one dollar at a time. Now, with tethered credit-card services, this impulse purchase behavior can be extended to hard-goods purchases.

Successful “Deal of the Day” or “Deal of the Week” SMS alert services can be matched with tethered credit-card purchases. You see high conversion rates when the retailer can target interested consumers with unique merchandising opportunities.

“The native mobile storefront must place the consumer experience first, with total regard to the consumer’s context and behavior while also leveraging the unique capabilities of the mobile devices, offering timely and targeted access and offers, with immediate methods for search, purchase and re-purchase,” says Desiderio. “Couple this strategy with comparison-shopping capability and also with the enablement of sharing and reassurance via social networking—all to result in more confident purchasing decisions.”

Reply to buy—now that’s mobile!

Gary Schwartz is CEO of Impact Mobile and chairman of mobile for the IAB. He can be reached at gary.schwartz@impactmobile.com.

March 2010 – Online Insights: Mobile

Your Mobile Checklist

Are you exploring the mobile channel, excited to leverage its obvious potential, but confused as to where to start? If so, here’s a basic, seven-point checklist to help you build out and manage the mobile channel:

Leverage existing consumer behavior
How many conference panels have I witnessed where the line following, “This is the year of mobile,” is: “We just need to educate the consumer”? It is pure hubris to think you will “educate” the user, who is far more advanced intuitively then a pack of marauding mobile experts. They are using their phones for mobile web and SMS seamlessly throughout their day in our stores, hotels and events. Our humble goal should be simply to keep up and capture a small piece of the conversation.

Utilize the largest mobile install base
Do your best to ignore anything that looks like a “shiny object” or “new-fangled solution.” Your customer is using SMS and the mobile web as their main mobile channels. So should you. Don’t walk before you run; start at a crawl. Build your SMS opt-in community. Buy some mobile advertising inventory. Use both to drive conversion solutions. And remember, “reach” and “frequency” are two words you need to continually use in the same sentence as “mobile advertising” and “mobile marketing.”

Leverage existing promotions and CRM strategies
IT will tell you this, but I will remind you: mobile should be an extension of business as usual in the store, street and office. Use mobile APIs (application programming interfaces) and tie them into your existing communication services and databases. E-mail, IVR, SMS, MMS should all be fluid, two-way opt-in channels.

Keep it very, very simple
Somewhere between concept and launch, many mobile solution providers lose their simplicity gene. The mobile consumer is on the run: you need one click to engage, one click to commerce and one click to brick and mortar. Add one step and you have lost your consumer.

Make it a One-to-one channel
While SMS has a nearly 100-percent open rate (buzz-to-view time will amaze the most jaded CMO), it also has an equally high opt-out rate if the viewed message is not what the subscriber expected. Commit to being as relevant as possible.

Make it a “Trojan” channel
Allow your consumer to reach you directly for product and service information. They should be able to surreptitiously search, surf and txt that product directly and learn why they need to buy it now. New Balance allows the customer to txt their new shoes and walks them through a custom in-store experience. Likewise, your products can be the in-aisle expert guiding the potential consumer reviews, insights and tips. Additionally, allow the consumer to use this channel to post reviews, insights and tips to you.

Make it horizontal
In a world where most media is bought as vertical “push” media, mobile is often “pull.” It allows the consumer to SMS to get information, rewards and incentives off TV, radio, print and other non-interactive media. To help you create a synergy between channels, don’t manage your mobile channel in isolation.

Gary Schwartz is CEO of Impact Mobile and chairman of mobile for the IAB. He can be reached at gary.schwartz@impactmobile.com.

February 2010 – Online Insights: Mobile

M-Commerce–Where to Start

The 2010 consumer is way ahead of any national retailer’s marketing department. The consumer is leveraging their phone as a “mobile mouse” to click, search and explore in the mall and in the aisle.

The retail CMO is looking for some new-fangled, high-tech way of engaging with this itinerant shopper. The sage truth, however, is that the marketing department is chasing shadows.

Instead of focusing on the consumer and how they are leveraging mobile in their stores, they are investigating widgets and apps that have little to no reach or frequency within their consumer base.

There are two simple things that I would suggest to the retail or manufacturer CMO:

Learn From History
Let’s look at the then-emerging trends of the mid-’90s Internet, remembering that history tends to repeat itself:

The web browser was becoming standard on the desktop in the mid-’90s. During this period of enormous growth, businesses entering the Internet arena scrambled to find consumer models that worked. Many companies were lured into thinking that developing applications on the desktop would give them marketshare and consumer mindshare. They did neither.

The desktop became too fragmented and difficult to navigate. As the PC browser matured and the capacity of the Internet pipes expanded–increasing browsing speeds–server-side solutions that functioned inside the browser (e.g., ASP Applications) became standard fare.

Isolated in the browser, these in-browser solutions needed a communication channel to engage and re-engage the subscriber. ASP applications used e-mail for these purposes.

Presently, we find ourselves reinventing the wheel with mobile.

With the smartphone revolution, apps are the rage. “I-want-one-too” CEOs are running to their agencies and IT departments and developing applications that only five percent of consumers are returning to after a lonely month on the phonetop.

So what are mobile consumers using?

Learn From Your Consumer
Take an undercover trip to your local store, peer through your security cameras and watch the consumer. They are doing two things with their mobile devices in your aisles: browsing and texting.

Is the consumer opening the browser to find tips and information to help with their shopping experience? Are they messaging home for the shopping list? Possibly.

But the shopper is certainly not scanning 2D codes with their phones. They are not opening the security on their Bluetooth settings for inbound offers. They are not all downloading your app to their phones. The consumers’ toolkits are relatively simple: they are using both their browsers and messaging as the first data-click. Focus on these channels.

These mobile channels are so powerful because both are standard on any phone nationally, the consumer is already on board and they are proximate to purchase intent and POS.

The CMO should start where the consumer is. What is your text CRM strategy? What is your mobile web strategy? Solve these and you have the ultimate last-mile retail solution.

Gary Schwartz is CEO of Impact Mobile and chairman of mobile for the IAB. He can be reached at gary.schwartz@impactmobile.com.

December 2009 – Feature: Reputation Assaults

Trolls are no longer hiding under bridges. The are actively lurking online–and ready to eat your lunch!

By Mike Hughes

According to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, in Internet parlance a “troll” is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, slanderous, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as a discussion forum, chat room or blog. The troll’s primary intent is to provoke emotional responses or otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion. While most webmasters and forum administrators consider trolls to be a scourge on their sites, some websites welcome them as an opportunity for profit.

As a Peabody Award-winning documentary director for NBC in New York, I strongly believe in protecting free speech and have fought actively over my 30 years in the media to defend it. In traditional media, free speech reigns within reasonable legal boundaries and limitations of defamation laws, which require that the truth be told to the public under threat of legal penalties. Tragically, that is not the case with online media and many American businesses are being eaten alive because of it.

Reputation assaults by trolls represent a menacing and growing problem. Their actions encroach on direct-to-consumer commerce and our entire society’s free speech rights. Slanderous and false online postings are being enabled and protected from traditional slander and libel laws because of what amounts to a legal loophole known as the Communications Decency Act (CDA). Reportedly, the CDA was made into law so our legislators could avoid ruling on the political hot potato of community standards regarding pornography. To date, lawmakers have not been motivated to adjust the CDA to also protect and sustain our expectations of truth within free speech and to keep our rights from being trampled on by free-wheeling, online trolls acting with impunity.

The CDA loophole has allowed a few questionable entrepreneurs to create their own perfect storm of disruption and reputation assaults, inciting and hosting the most outrageous kangaroo courts imaginable. They persecute products and services for their own profit motives–and they have blanket protection under current Internet law. In the 1925 literary classic “The Trial,” Franz Kafka tells the story of a man prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his offense confusing to both him and the reader–a disturbing nightmare.

Likewise, a nightmare of confusion is ruling the day online when it comes to products being crippled by anonymous trolls posting false or dubious complaints about products, services and companies. In some cases, individual entrepreneurs can operate as judges by running their own privately owned and operated consumer complaint sites and using them as their own online fiefdoms.

I can only describe these sites and tactics as “questionable” until the CDA is more fully shaped by Congress to cover online defamation. The broad legal strokes of the CDA give questionable site operators absolute power on decisions about reputation assault postings because of their immunity to slander and libel laws. And we all know what happens when any group of individuals has absolute power.

Most people worldwide look in awe at the American judicial system and view it as the gold standard of legal systems. Consumers with legitimate complaints have many means of addressing their needs, including small claims courts, attorney general offices, state and city consumer complaint mediation, as well as the Better Business Bureau, chambers of commerce and the non-profit American Arbitration Association. The latter now offers professional mediation services online.

Unfortunately, online posting sites have become the go-to spot for consumers who do not have a legitimate complaint and wish to blow off steam about their purchase decision with false reputation assaults and, in doing so, become trolls. American law is sadly lagging behind Italian law, which has wisely banned this online conduct.

To infer that every business listed on a questionable site is a rip-off or every product listed is a scam is no more accurate than using an ethnic slur to describe everyone of a certain race. This behavior replaces truth with emotional and broad generalities. This is always a stupid and often an oppressive and evil thing to do.

The biggest problem is that consumer awareness lags far behind this new reality due to the blinding speed of the Internet. Most are unaware that a posting they may be reading is not even in the same universe of credibility as reports from organizations such as the Better Business Bureau or Consumer Reports magazine. A blistering attack on an unregulated reputation site may have been written by a frustrated, underemployed man who kicked his dog and beat his wife before posting a hate rant about someone he saw on TV whose face he didn’t like.

As Seth Godin writes in his bestselling marketing book Purple Cow, “It’s people who have projects that are never criticized who ultimately fail. Will you do some things wrong in your career and be unjustly criticized for being unprepared, sloppy or thoughtless? Sure you will. We often respond to criticism by hiding, avoiding the negative feedback and thus (ironically) guaranteeing we won’t succeed. The only way to avoid criticism is by being boring.”

It is vitally important that products, services and businesses be criticized truthfully and fairly without a troll escalating the criticism to barroom drama that disrupts normal on-topic discussion and kills the enterprise.

The Damage Done

At ReputationMedia.com we have interviewed hundreds of business owners and have discovered the ravages done to perfectly legitimate businesses that now need professional help to tackle these publicity and reputation challenges. The problems only escalate if the business owner files a rebuttal on a questionable site. This action moves the posting up to a higher search-engine ranking and often angers the person posting the complaint to launch further attack.

An unfairly attacked business owner must recognize when he or she is being “worked” by professionals who own these questionable sites and who may wish to leverage the business owner’s fallen status to gain what might be called “protection money” in the form of counter-posting fees.

Business owners today need professional help and publicity advice–in addition to legal reform. Consistently helpful legal recourse for them has not yet been found and may come too late for them to remain in business. When businesses are forced to close their doors because of a troll’s false posting, jobs are lost and more foreclosure signs go up on the houses in our neighborhoods.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas L. Friedman recently commented on Meet the Press, “Online postings should come with the warning, Caution: reading this may be hazardous to your mental health.”

Our advice to business owners is to confront this situation head-on with awareness followed by building a “firewall” of backlinks to positive, “white publicity” stories about your business in advance. Advance backlinking is designed to prevent the first negative comment about a business from rising to the top of Google as fast as a weather balloon. This is one way to protect your marketing investment against trolls who hack into the minds of your prospective customers with mental viruses by posting slanderous or off-topic messages to disrupt normal, on-topic product presentations.

Before launching a new product or ad campaign, ask yourself if it’s wise to build your castle on anything less than a solid foundation. A wise marketer today will consider the precautionary steps of posting hundreds of links every month to positive content about themselves, the product and the company as much in advance as possible to protect his or her investment, assets and good name from a lurking troll. Once an online publicity campaign is launched for only a few thousand dollars, the monthly fee for backlinking to good publicity can be as low as $200 per month.

Winning the War

Trolls and troll sites promoting reputation assaults are unlikely to stop any time soon. On the contrary, they are growing and expanding in scope because unethical marketers now look for the first signs of competitor companies or products impeding their success. Online, success means traffic that can be stolen and more traffic means more business.

It’s simple to divert traffic from its intended destination to a troll’s site by posting a phony online assault sign such as, “Wait! Don’t be scammed–buy our sure-fire humdinger instead.” Sometimes, this is the only way an inferior product can hope to compete with a superior competitor.

The trolls are winning. Every day they become more emboldened and empowered by the growing number of questionable sites which are posing as consumer advocacy sites. They justify reprehensible activities by posing as “the good guys” as they conduct their businesses as wolves in sheep’s clothing. They need to be outed for who they are–the trolls leading the trolls–and they need to be regulated or neutralized in some way.

Questionable sites have empowered trolls with unlimited potential for unethical extortion, which is being used and will likely expand dramatically if not stopped.

Two women recently walked into a Berkeley coffee shop and demanded free coffee, stating that if their demand wasn’t met they would file a slanderous complaint about the small shop on a complaint site.

Business owners are even being threatened with an online slander assault when they simply invoice an individual for a past due account.

Where does it stop?

I believe the following actions are needed:

Increased public awareness through campaigns focused on consumer advocacy fraud.

Direct lobbying efforts toward members of U.S. Congress and to U.S. Senator Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine), a ranking member of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs should call Senator Snowe’s office to ask her to review the Communications Decency Act and to join other professionals in asking Google to end their support of unscrupulous or questionable sites that exploit business owners.

Some sort of plan, executed by an association or organization of Internet properties–including consumer advocacy sites–to promote self-regulation through creating common practices and industry standards, as other association such as the Electronic Retailing Association has done.

The promotion of business owner awareness that a dollar of prevention is worth ten thousand dollars of cure. Using backlinks to accurate, positive content in advance is as vital as computer virus protection.

If you don’t take control, some troll may take control from you–and with it your hard-earned reputation, your income, possibly your health and your hope for continued American small business innovation.

Mike Hughes is a direct marketer, PR consultant and a frequent speaker on Internet publicity. He can be reached at mhughes@reputationmedia.com.

November 2009 – Online Insights: Mobile

Callstream Optimization

By Dev Bhatia

In 1998, leading web marketers and e-commerce companies pioneered the concept of clickstream optimization. On the web, user interactions that began with banner and text advertisements could be monitored through the entire process to completion of an online sale. Tied back to the cost of placing that ad, clickstream optimization could help marketers improve the efficiency of these processes to deliver profitable–and scalable–sales campaigns on the web. Thus rationalized and proven effective, web advertising thrived.

Fast forward to 2009. Now, pioneers are figuring out how to make the mobile web profitable for publishers, advertisers and marketers. In this medium, the answer is callstream optimization. The callstream is the path a user takes from initial interaction through to sale, and on the mobile web, the path is very different than online. Here, it’s at once far more complicated and far more rewarding, than online. Marketers who master callstream optimization will manage to become industry leaders. They will not only create giant sales campaigns, but in the process, deliver results which will help shape and link two very different industries: mobile advertising and teleservices.

On the surface, these two industries seem far apart. Mobile advertising firms have raised tens of millions in venture capital dollars over the past few years. Mobile advertising is projected to grow to a big business over the next decade, as more and more U.S. consumers use their mobile handsets to access and use the mobile web. Powered by the iPhone and demand for interactive applications on every handset, the future is bright, indeed.

Teleservices, on the other hand, is an industry which might be described as headed in the opposite direction. A mature, multi-billion dollar industry, the teleservices sector has stagnated in the U.S., as low-cost offshore providers have pressured margins, while at the same time, outbound calling restrictions have capped demand for services.

These two industries are about to be linked as never before, in a symbiotic relationship which will help the other in ways few might have imagined.

This is because what works on mobile, better than anything else, are banners linked to inbound call capability. Users first click an ad banner on a publisher site like ESPN, then go to a landing page to see more information from the advertiser and select the “click to call” button to learn more. By doing this, they immediately dial to the advertiser. Suddenly, these banners become inbound sales generators, delivering self-selected prospects to call centers. The phones start ringing–and just in time for many call centers.

The growth of this “click-to-call” channel couldn’t have happened any sooner for the mobile ad industry, either. While venture dollars flowed just two years ago, those dollars are pretty scarce right now. Many mobile advertising startups, even those who have raised multiple rounds of financing, are now struggling to rationalize themselves. Getting to sustained positive cashflow is not a given. The ranks of early advertisers, such as ringtone and mobile content businesses, who themselves were often funded with venture capital, are thinning. The advent and growth of click-to-call marketing not only provides a much-needed new market, but also establishes a baseline for what a mobile ad is worth. From now on, the value of a mobile ad is tied to the value of an inbound lead. Big industries, including telecom, financial services, home security, education services and more, pay handsomely for inbound leads to acquire their new customers.

The Missing Link to Click-to-Call
So why isn’t click-to-call already huge? Because it’s hard.

It’s not like mobile ad networks haven’t tried click-to-call. Some of the biggest, including admob and JumpTap, enable marketers to rapidly create click-to-call campaigns all by themselves. The problem is that these campaigns rarely work. What’s missing? Callstream optimization.

Just as ad dollars spent on the Internet prior to clickstream optimization failed to deliver a sensible return on investment, most dollars spent on mobile advertising also fail to deliver an ROI–unless marketers follow strict rules of engagement. They must manage and optimize the entire callstream. This isn’t just hard, it’s harder than even the online counterpart. Online, companies developed protocols and software to manage an entirely digital process (banner, landing page, checkout). But in mobile, the process is not entirely digital. It starts with banners on sites, which is good, but rapidly turns into calls over the voice network, answered by live agents. So it’s a hybrid of a digital and labor-driven experience. To optimize, marketers must master everything from banner placement to interactive voice response to call-center staffing and training. No easy task. And no wonder many click-to-call campaigns fail.

At my company, we’ve tackled this problem head-on. We’ve built proprietary technology to not just serve mobile advertisements and landing pages, but also to manage what happens next. We track things like call duration, IVR flow and queue time. We spend a lot of time on mobile-specific staffing and training. Because call-center utilization is an essential component of profitability, mobile campaigns must be scaled differently. Spikes in advertisements are bad, because they lead to high hold times and low conversions. Managing the entire value chain requires a significant investment, and the learning curve is steep.

Said another way, callstream optimization is not for everyone. But those who can figure it out, like the early pioneers who saved web advertising, will contribute greatly to the long-term success of mobile advertising.

Dev Bhatia is the CEO of Tyrannosaurus, Inc., North America’s largest mobile web media buyer, managing direct-response campaigns for major brands across a wide spectrum of mobile ad networks and publishers. He can be reached at dev@nnosaur.us.

October 2009 – Online Insights: Channel Integration

Direct Digital Marketing

By Brian Deagan

There are millions upon millions of ways to effectively combine the respective strengths of the various digital communications channels to improve customer relationships and increase sales. In fact, simply contemplating where to start is enough to intimidate some marketers from seeking the new innovations necessary to keep their businesses ahead of the competition. However, these marketers will miss out on huge segments of the ever-evolving pool of consumers and prospects by failing to employ a multichannel strategy in their direct digital marketing.

Direct digital marketing–digital marketing that is addressable to a specific consumer with an e-mail address, a mobile phone number or a web browser cookie–is the best way to unlock new opportunities and improve key loyalty and sales metrics.

Getting the most out of a multichannel direct digital marketing strategy first requires the ability to leverage the massive amounts of valuable data available to advance business goals. Having a universal profile management system enables marketers to bring known customer attributes–like past purchase history and enterprise customer data–together with online behavioral data points like keyword search activity and–most important–e-mail, mobile and website activity. Combining data from multiple channels unlocks entirely unique segments. For example, it becomes possible to create a segment of customers who have not made a purchase or opened an e-mail in the last six months, but who have used a mobile coupon. Understanding a customer’s multichannel lifestyle opens up enormous opportunities for growth.

While many attractive multichannel strategies exist, here are a few effective and cost-efficient tactics that use multiple data points to create previously unattainable segments and best-in-class results.

Multichannel Tactic #1: New Product Launch (Channels: Web, E-mail)
When launching a new product exclusively online–using the e-mail and web channels–it is important to use the data points from each channel to shape overall strategy. For example, if a company chooses to send an e-mail announcing a new product, the content on the website should reflect information gathered from the e-mail channel. Onsite targeting technologies–using the web browser cookie as a customer “address”–can leverage data points like e-mail opens to create rules that rotate dynamic content on a homepage or landing page.

This way, when a customer opens a new product e-mail and clicks through to the homepage, they should see the new product again. (Remember those old advertising clichés about frequency and consistency of message?) If a customer who has not received the new product e-mail visits the homepage, it is better to display legacy product that the consumer is familiar with in order to create the conditions for an immediate purchase. A recent study showed that this exact tactic showed a potential increase in sales of 25 percent.

Good onsite targeting solutions also include built-in testing and optimization tools that ensure the most effective content is always in market. This is an elegant, but simple multichannel approach currently employed to great success by direct digital marketers.

Multichannel Tactic #2: Customer Communi-cations Preference Center (Channels: Mobile, Web, E-mail)
The consumer is clearly multichannel, but marketers are lagging behind. One way to make communication with consumers more convenient for them–and more profitable for you–is to create a customer communications preference center. For example, every direct digital marketing program includes some form of e-mail marketing. But is each e-mail newsletter available for consumers to receive in the form of a mobile webpage, an SMS message or a mobile e-mail? If not, it is limiting the consumer’s capacity to interact with your brand, and limiting your brand’s ability to create the conditions for a purchase. Consumers want choice in how they receive communications, and marketers who fail to take advantage of the multichannel environment are leaving sales on the table.

Multichannel Tactic #3: Sales Event Reminder (Channels: Mobile, E-mail)
Every direct digital marketer knows that the majority of e-mail opens happen within the first 72 hours of a campaign’s launch. But if a sales event is planned for Friday through Sunday, and the e-mail campaign was sent on Monday, it is likely many customers and prospects will completely miss the opportunity. As proven and historically reliable as e-mail is as a channel, it is still rather imprecise and sometimes verges on impersonal. These traditional drawbacks to e-mail create the perfect opportunity for including mobile in a sales event reminder campaign. Because mobile is as precise and immediate as it is personal, a reminder for a sale can be sent anywhere from two days to two hours before the event. Using both the mobile and e-mail channels to inform customers about an event opens the door to additional viral, word-of-mouth activity and helps maximize potential sales.

Multichannel Tactic #4: Re-marketing with Triggered Messages (Channels: Mobile, E-mail, Web)
Understanding the customer’s website browsing behavior unlocks myriad new and exciting segmentation and targeting strategies. Recognizing a website browser as an e-mail subscriber immediately allows the marketer to understand what content and information has already been presented to the customer and display more aggressive offers designed to capture a sale. However, when that e-mail subscriber, mobile subscriber or return website visitor browses product pages without purchasing–or abandons a shopping cart–it can be difficult to re-engage that customer in a meaningful way to entice a purchase. Re-marketing is an extremely effective tool for re-engagement, and mobile and e-mail are the ideal channels.

Sending a targeted message with a more aggressive offer to an e-mail or mobile subscriber hours after they abandon their shopping is a proven tactic for increasing sales. A tactic as simple as requesting feedback with a brief survey or form also provides additional insight necessary to complete immediate sales opportunities and create more successful marketing programs in the future.

While multichannel strategies may seem expensive and complicated, they are quite cost-effective and surprisingly simple if the right solution is available. Software solutions that combine multichannel capabilities with a marketing datamart specially designed for developing cross-channel, targeted segments is ideal.

With the ever-increasing popularity and ease of software-as-a-service marketing solutions, marketers have more tools at their disposal to create and execute simple multichannel direct digital marketing strategies that appeal to consumers and increase sales.

Brian Deagan is the co-founder and CEO of Knotice, a direct digital marketing solutions company. You can reach him at bdeagan@knotice.com.

August 2009 – Online Insights: Mobile

Video Trends You Can’t Ignore

By Timothy R. Hawthorne

With smartphone usage rising steadily both in the U.S. and worldwide, there’s been a lot of buzz about mobile video lately. Whether they’re viewing graphics, playing games, watching movies or short snippets of shows, cell phone users are gravitating to a medium that most marketers have yet to tap.

According to Nielsen’s Three Screen Report for the first quarter of 2009, the 13.4 million Americans (up 52 percent from 2008) who watch videos on their phones view an average of 3.5 hours of mobile video every month. The research firm says the growth stems from increased mobile content and the rise of the mobile web as a viewing option.

“Smartphones and data plans are more affordable than ever,” says Catrina Sheridan, vice president of products and marketing at dotMobi, a U.K.-based mobile Internet services firm. “Also, consumers are developing a familiarity and comfort with mobile content via their handsets. These factors make mobile video very attractive for marketers.”

Here are six key trends that are unfolding right now in the mobile video world that you don’t want to miss:

iPhone users are leading the charge

Equipped with a YouTube app right on its welcome screen, the iPhone put mobile video on the map when it made its debut in 2008. With its original model now priced at $99, expect the iPhone to boost the number of mobile video users even further. “By the holiday season, we expect to see a lot more consumers being able to view videos on their cell phones,” says Eyal Yechezkell, CEO at New York-based Predicto Mobile, which touts itself as the largest “paid” mobile community.

Mobile video isn’t “one size fits all”
Not all phone models support the same video formats, nor does all video appear correctly on the hundreds of different smartphones available on the market today. “Be sure the footage you shoot is supported by the audience you’re going after,” advises Sheridan. “You don’t want to create content for an iPhone audience in a format that the phone can’t play.” (Test your content before publishing it by going to http://deviceatlas.com/).

Apps are gaining traction
Highly unique with focused functionality, apps for iPhone, Palm and BlackBerry users are revolutionizing the mobile experience. In July, just three days after it celebrated its one-year anniversary, Apple’s 65,000-strong app store hit the 1.5 billion download mark. Verizon Wireless and Sony Ericsson both threw their hats into the ring this year, with Verizon launching a carrier-branded store later this year and Sony Ericsson adding mobile apps to its PlayNow content offering.

Marketers demand more accountability
High on San Francisco-based online advertising firm 1020 Placecast’s list of “interactive advertising trends to watch right now” is the use of new, improved metrics to measure ad performance. The company points to “view-throughs,” a method for gauging the impact of an ad that a consumer sees but does not click on, as a particularly useful tool for users of mobile video. A view-through records a consumer’s exposure to a specific display ad, and then measures when that consumer returns to the advertiser’s site during a later session. Placecast says the tool is popular among marketers who want a more accurate measurement of their mobile video efforts.

The medium plays well with others
Mobile video goes hand-in-hand with YouTube by allowing consumers to view user-generated content “on the go.” It also adapts well in the growing online social networking arena, where users share video content in a viral fashion. “Combine all of these elements,” says Sheridan, “and the end result is a huge, democratic marketing system that’s applicable for companies of all sizes.”

Handset makers are answering the call
Whereas smartphones with data capabilities were once the domain of executives and the well-off, they are now commonplace among all consumers. “Anyone using a newer phone these days can ‘consume’ any type of media, including ringtones, graphics and videos,” says Yechezkell. “As more and more of these sophisticated devices are purchased and used, marketers should be looking at how to promote their products via mobile video and/or the mobile web.”

With consumers checking their mobile phones the minute they wake up in the morning, before they go to bed and every few minutes during the day, mobile video is a medium that no marketer can afford to miss out on. To maximize their investments in this arena, Yechezkell says “test, test, test…and then test again” before putting any content out there for consumers to view.

“Use different types of ads to see how your audience reacts, and then adjust accordingly,” Yechezkell says. “Make your call to action very clear (using a ‘click here’ button, for example) and test out different banner sizes and inventories to find the right niche for your product in the mobile world.”

Timothy R. Hawthorne is founder, chairman and executive creative director of Hawthorne Direct, a full-service DRTV, print, mail and digital ad agency founded in 1986. A 36-year television producer/writer/director, Hawthorne is a cum laude Harvard graduate.

ERA 2009 D2C Convention

Summer 2009 – The Third Pillar of Digital Direct Marketing

The waiting game is over. Mobile marketing is not just a viable
marketing channel–it’s well on its way to becoming an essential
one. The time to embrace mobile is now and these six tactics
are both proven and easy to implement.

By Brian Deagan

As one of the three pillars of direct digital marketing, mobile marketing is no longer an emerging channel worth only a casual glance from marketers. In fact, today–according to Nielsen–the average mobile subscriber sends and receives more text messages than phone calls. Fortunately, many effective mobile marketing tactics are readily available to capitalize on these existing consumer behaviors, further engaging customers while driving revenue.

SOME GROUND RULES
Before you can realize the full benefit and value of successful mobile programs, it is important to grasp some helpful guidelines for mobile marketing. First, the success of a mobile program is determined in part by participation. Choosing a widely adopted consumer use for the mobile device, like SMS text messages, is fundamental for the short- and long-term success of a mobile program. A text-centric strategy is particularly relevant for opening up all of the opportunities within the mobile channel, from reminder messages to more complex mobile dialogues. Second, it is important to avoid generic messages that hold little value for the recipient, because they can be mistaken for mobile spam, a label that can derail a good mobile marketing concept before it gains momentum. Third, mobile marketing is like e-mail marketing in that good data is required. The better the data is, the more effective the mobile tactics are. Of the three aspects to direct digital marketing–e-mail, web and mobile–mobile is the most personal. Therefore, an impersonal batch-and-blast strategy is both obvious and intrusive to the recipient–a sure-fire way to turn off potentially loyal consumers. Mobile programs need an extra touch of personalization and message relevance to engage the consumer.

Pure-play e-commerce companies have a variety of effective mobile marketing programs to choose from. Here are three widely applicable tactics that have been proven to enhance the consumer experience, reinforce brand and drive revenue for companies with an exclusively online presence.

In-Stock Alerts
One effective way to leverage the mobile communications channel is to give consumers information they would not customarily receive through other channels. The best example of this type of mobile program is an in-stock alert. The ideal mobile marketing partner has software capable of integrating with existing inventory management systems. When a website visitor tries to order a product that is currently out of stock, allowing that visitor to sign up to receive a mobile alert when that product is back in stock is a valuable service. Additionally, prompting that visitor to specify size, color or other preferences for the in-stock mobile alert provides key information to entice the purchase. Having mobile marketing software that captures key preference data and then uses that data for personalized, triggered messages is crucial for executing effective tactics like mobile alerts.

Sales Alerts
In today’s economic climate, alerting cost-conscious shoppers to special, limited-time-only sales events is a good way to boost sales in a short time-frame. While the sales alert is traditionally an e-mail tactic, extending the e-mail experience to mobile affords the marketer more options, such as time-oriented (“Sale ends in 10-minutes”) and inventory-sensitive (“Only 10 items remain”) incentives. Because consumers carry their mobile devices everywhere, they are better equipped to take advantage of limited-time offers. A good mobile marketing partner is able to store mobile data in the same database with the website activity history. Drawing on both data sources to build powerful segments enables mobile communications to be more personalized and relevant to an individual consumer.

Mobile Notifications
Mobile notification programs are used for a variety of reasons–they can provide consumers with vital information about recent purchases, or provide the necessary push to make a previously delayed purchase. A mobile marketing partner with software capable of storing both website activity history and mobile data is crucial for this tactic. Specific programs include sending a free-shipping notification to a consumer who has recently abandoned their shopping cart, or sending a notification about a new product offering from a preferred brand. Providing ample opportunities on the website for consumers to opt-in to these types of useful mobile communications creates the right conditions for quickly building up a mobile database and offering a brand experience web-only consumers will jump at the chance to explore.

While e-commerce companies stand to gain a great deal by successfully incorporating the mobile channel into their overall direct digital marketing strategy, hybrid retailers with both brick-and-mortar stores and an online presence have myriad mobile tactics available that are more tailored to their business model. Some effective mobile programs for these hybrid retailers are targeted at a segment of the mobile consumer market that prefers to shop online and buy in store. Rather than executing digital marketing programs and tactics designed to circumvent customer shopping preferences, effective mobile marketing takes advantage of current shopping habits. Here are some examples.

Sending The Shopping Cart To A Mobile Device
M-commerce (making an actual purchase from a mobile device) has not reached mass consumer adoption yet. In fact, a significant segment of consumers still shy away from making purchases online, even though they spend a great deal of time researching their purchase before going to a store to “kick the tires” and buy. Marketers have long been seeking a way to measure this elusive segment of consumers, and allowing online browsers to build a shopping cart and send it to their mobile device is one way to connect the dots. Clothing retailers are in an especially advantageous position here. A shopper can go online and choose color, style and size for the clothes they want, place them in their shopping cart, then send that cart to their mobile device. Once in-store, a clerk can easily help the shopper find the clothes they picked out because the shopping cart includes important information like SKUs.

Sending Coupons To A Mobile Device
Many consumers research big-ticket items, like appliances, online before purchasing in store. Rather than providing these consumers with aggressive offers to entice them to purchase exclusively online, it’s easy to use the mobile channel to give them a coupon offer they can use in the store. Present the coupon online during the research process and allow the shopper to forward the coupon to their mobile device. The coupon can include a quick response code for easy scan and redemption, or it can include a personalized coupon number to track redemption. Both redemption methods are effective and help you create more enticing future offers for a specific segment of buyer.

Store-Focused Mobile Alerts
The previous hybrid retailer mobile tactics are examples of companies giving control over the timing of a purchase to the consumer. While effective, there are times when store traffic is unexpectedly light or when monthly forecasts are bleak. A mobile alert sent by a store manager to a segment of local customers is a useful method for creating foot traffic that moves inventory within a tight time-frame. The corporate entity can tightly control content and frequency by giving store managers the option of choosing from several pre-approved campaigns, or store managers can devise their own campaign and tailor it to their specific markets with light corporate governance. The right mobile marketing partner is able to execute either program type and provide measurable results that continually improve sales.

It is easier to get these tactical mobile programs started now than it was 12 or 18 months ago. However, there is a time investment required to get mobile marketing programs up and running. In addition to the time needed to provision a short code, every mobile program must be approved by the mobile carriers before it can be executed on their respective networks. E-commerce or hybrid retailers seeking to expand their direct digital marketing strategy to include mobile marketing must find a good partner who has solid relationships with the U.S. Common Short Code Administration (CSCA) and a carrier aggregator to ensure a program is approved as rapidly as the system allows.

Mobile marketing is sensible because the investment in creative, overhead and technology infrastructure is relatively low while the benefit of increased measurable sales and enhanced consumer loyalty are substantial. Though getting a program in market does initially take time, the benefit and value of opening an additional communications channel with willing consumers is important, and the business value is being realized more quickly than ever before.

Brian Deagan is the co-founder and CEO of Knotice, a direct digital marketing solutions company. You can reach Deagan at bdeagan@knotice.com.

Spring 2009 – Online Insights: Mobile

M-commerce is for Real: Three Case Studies

By Jason Taylor

While mobile commerce has been around for almost 10 years, it is just now beginning to take center stage for retailers. Mobile web usage has been doubling every year, with massive growth expected in 2009. Customers have developed an increasing “need for speed” and a preference for optimized experiences on their mobile devices, and companies are recognizing the benefits of providing such experiences. Giving customers an optimized mobile commerce site not only drives significant sales—just as providing a secure and easy-to-use e-commerce site boosted online shopping 15 years ago—but it has become a necessity to compete in the market today. Now, more than ever, retailers have options in functionality to combine their web and mobile sites, and several e-retailers have found great success as early adopters of the trend toward m-commerce.

The following mini case studies help illustrate the variety and power of mobile commerce applications.

1-800-Flowers

1-800-Flowers’ mobile site clearly responds to the needs of the customer. Flowers are often a purchase made for quick-response—a forgotten anniversary, a last-minute thank you—and 1-800-Flowers from the start had a firm grasp of what buyers were looking for in a mobile commerce site.

Since launching in 2007, 1-800-Flowers has taken a targeted approach in its mobile site by immediately presenting customers with the most popular actions and orders available on the site. This means that the mobile purchase process is quick, easy and requires as few clicks as possible. 1-800-Flowers went for simplicity in the design to facilitate quick transactions. In a five-click process, a customer can browse, select and purchase flowers on their mobile device. Complemented by the iPhone and BlackBerry downloadable apps, the 1-800-Flowers.com mobile site offers all customers—on any device—speed and convenience in mobile commerce.

American Airlines

The business traveler was an early adopter of mobile, needing access to wireless information as often as possible. It was only a matter of time before airlines and hotels went mobile to adapt to its core customers’ mobile-heavy lifestyle, and the mobility capabilities of American Airlines have surpassed anything imagined 10 years ago. American Airlines launched their mobile site to complement the extensive enhancements that were made to its main website in 2007. Seamlessly connecting customers to the new features, the mobile version of AA.com enables everything from purchasing a ticket to changing a reservation, and even gives customers additional information on their destinations, including weather updates or airport info. The robust feature set on the mobile site allows a busy AAdvantage frequent flier member to request an upgrade, while the simplicity of the interface also gives a vacationing family the ease and convenience of checking-in on the way to the airport. Last November, American Airlines launched mobile boarding passes, giving flyers the flexibility to board using their mobile phone as the actual ticket. Through 2-D barcode technology on their mobile site, American Airlines passengers can present their phone to be scanned. Not only do they save paper and time, mobile boarding passes are an additional convenience on the full-featured American Airlines mobile website.

Sears

Ticketing and enabling small purchases on mobile phones may seem like naturals, but most people don’t think of mobile commerce as including larger buys, like an engagement ring or home appliances. Doesn’t this apprehension remind you of initial opinions regarding shopping online? As it turns out, people do make big-ticket purchases on the mobile web. Sears2Go, Sears’ mobile website, launched in November 2008 and gives customers access to the full product lines available at the company’s brick-and-mortar locations, including appliances, apparel, electronics and computers, jewelry, automotive accessories, fitness and sports equipment, tools, toys and games. Sears’ philosophy was to keep it simple, fast and secure. By utilizing the company’s main website, Sears was able to offer this simplicity, speed and security while providing the ultimate convenience and selection. Sears has also been using SMS text messages to send customers deals and alerts for well over a year. With the launch of the mobile site, Sears is leveraging text and e-mail message alerts since links will automatically redirect to the mobile site that allows for instant purchase on the customer’s phone. Sears is also integrating mobile with its brick-and-mortar stores by offering customers in-store pickup, sending shoppers an SMS text message when merchandise is ready at the store. Within just one month of launch, Sears2Go saw success in all 50 states and has seen consistent growth since then. Jason Taylor is the vice president of mobile products at Usablenet, a company that specializes in helping organizations support users of mobile and assistive technologies for web access. He can be reached at usablenet@launchsquad.com.