A mobile marketing campaign is a marketing campaign that is conveyed to the customer or potential customer via SMS (Short Message Service), also known as text messages, on their mobile phones. A mobile marketing campaign can serve as a means to build a marketing database, bringing in new customers/potential customers; it can be designed to provide you with a better means of reaching the particular audience that your product or service is meant for; or it can be created to increase sales, perhaps by taking advantage of the immediacy of text message marketing or of the location-targeting capabilities. Mobile marketing campaigns, in other words, are not just one thing, but can be many different customer approaches that take place through the medium of communication on mobile devices.
Types of Mobile Marketing Campaigns
Mobile marketing campaigns can work in a variety of ways. For example, you could design a campaign that focused on providing your opt-in customers with a mobile coupon. This could be a general coupon (10 percent off) or coupons geared to your customer’s history, or coupons designed to move a certain line of merchandise. A mobile coupon campaign could be done to increase sales or as part of a customer loyalty program.
Mobile marketing campaigns can also take a more interactive approach, using for example, texting contests or voting. Texting contests, also known as text sweepstakes or text to win, are a competition that can reward a person who fulfills some criteria (answering a trivia question correctly first) or a random selection of those who respond. Text voting allows users to give feedback on anything topic that you can think of which might be of interest to them and tie to your brand. You can give instant polling feedback to those who vote, and/or reward those who vote for the winning whatever-it-is. Both text contexts and text voting can build brand perception and engage customers in a bit of fun, while increasing the feeling that they are important to you.
Mobile marketing campaigns can also be very straightforward, alerting customers to sales, drops in price on items they have ordered in the past, or news about topics that they have selected when they opted in. Mobile marketing campaigns can function in other ways as well.
Mobile Marketing Campaign Strategies
Here are some tips of strategies to use in mobile marketing campaigns:
• What do you want to accomplish? Clarify your goals before you being, rather than just doing something because it seems cool or fun.
• Use double opt-in to sign people up. Research shows that you’ll benefit by having both a higher response rate and fewer complaints.
• Don’t send a high number of text messages, and give people an idea of what to expect from you. “Opt-in to receive a weekly coupon on Friday for our weekend sales” is clearer than “Sign up for free coupons sent to your mobile device.”
• Include an opt-out route in every communication.
• Keep your messages useful—base them on what you know about your customers (they like pretzels with mustard; they always come in on a Wednesday; they wear size M) and timely.