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Next month in Leasing World we will be exploring Mobile computing in a Special Report, but in the meantime, here’s something about Mobile marketing
Personally, I find receiving certain information by text, such as my mini-bank statement, appointment reminders, 20 percent-off voucher codes for the cinema, or Pizza Express, quite useful, and usually welcome.
On the other side of the coin, the marketing side, I hadn’t quite put two and two together as to how I might use texts to communicate with customers and prospects. But when you think about it, the email Inbox has become cluttered up with (often well-meaning) news and information, while the mobile text space is still relatively uncluttered. This means that, for a while at least, you can still achieve a personal contact via text, that you no longer can via email. “Quick, let’s clutter it up,” say the marketers, (Oh-oh, do I hear a herd thundering this way, suddenly?). You can have too much of a good thing, they say, and they have been proved right. First there was junk mail, and I’m sure that in the early days the first of these letters were probably opened and read with interest. Not any more, there was so much of it they had to ban it, and it’s only been let back in recently under stricter rules. Next there was telesales, a nice chat and possibly a tempting special offer, nowadays a call from a call centre is likely to incite annoyance, even rage. Then came email, the funny thing was that marketing via email didn’t take off straight away, it was assumed to be a semi- private thing. But then so were telephone numbers and home addresses. Now, using email is more akin to daily wading through a swamp, Look, we’re sending
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you news, you don’t like it, but you were on a mailing list I bought, still if you don’t want it just unsubscribe, if you can just answer a few questions before you do, and we’ll still keep your email address on file just in case, to sell on. Now there’s the mobile phone, not for calling you on because that’s like telesales which already is old hat, but the new input stream is text. Currently I receive about 450 emails every day, reduced to 300 after filtering, (they come onto my phone, too), but only 10 or so texts. Next year, I wonder, will it reach a hundred texts a day? Texts work with nearly any phone, not just smartphones, but if you do have a smartphone, then Apps come into the picture, plus the leverage that comes from a telling statistic: it is estimated that half of all small businesses are using smartphones. That’s because smartphones can be used to handle the various business activities that businessmen encounter while on the road, which can save time and money. Here are some no-nonsense Apps to consider: 1. Cisco Webex Meeting Centre: Many people already enjoy the learning options available via WebEx meetings, and you can bring those features to your iPhone using the Cisco WebEx Meeting Centre.
2. If you want to market through mobile phones, it helps if your website is specially tailored to mobile phones. mobiSiteGalore is a 100 percent free mobile website builder. It has a rich feature set, including the option to let customers pay for your products through their mobile phones (PayPal, Google Checkout and Bango). The service includes useful features like
Click-to-Call, which adds a link to your page that visitors can simply click to dial your phone number.
3. In the US, MobiOpons offers a service which you only pay for when someone within 40 miles of your business views AND clicks through your offer on their mobile device. You create your offers using the service’s online creation tools, then set the budget for your campaign to control the number of clicks you want to see.
4. iTunes U offers programmes from some of the top colleges and universities around the world. The introduction of mobile learning Apps doesn’t mean classroom training is dead or dying. Training decisions are very specific to each individual business and its needs. It does mean business owners have more options.
5. Accounting and tax Apps, mileage and expenses tracking, time sheet creation, and mobile banking.
Texts, as everyone knows, are technically called SMS (Short Messaging Service). Recently, some carriers started adding Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), an upgraded version of the SMS through which you can send and receive multimedia messages such as texts, pictures, video clips, audio clips, etc., with any other compatible cell phone, but this is still very new for business maketing.
There are two primary ways that marketers are using SMS. The first is what might be referred to as bulk sending – you have a database of opt-in mobile subscribers and you send them messages. The second is a mobile generated request that relies on what are called short codes – text “get more info” to 121212. Read more next month.
www.leasingworld.co.uk ■ March 2011
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