Mobilize, the company behind the award winning M BAR GO® mobile CRM platform, has released the results of a mobile campaign for Approved Food & Drink, the UK's largest online seller of clearance food and drink.
The campaign was a simple SMS call to action, tied to an online offer, which was sent to 6,000 opted-in Approved Food & Drink customers. According to Mobilizie, it proved very effective. Site visits in the hour immediately after the texts were sent (4pm) were 90% higher than average. Revenue for the day was up by 150% on the previous day. Orders placed in the three hours immediately after the texts were sent out were up by 550% compared to the previous day
“Although this campaign only scratches the surface of what our platform can achieve from a CRM perspective, it shows just how effective the humble SMS can be in persuading consumers to shop,” says Mobilize Managing Director, Stefan Magnusson. “Fortunately, Approved Food's website can accept discount codes, which means we can start building profiles and really leverage the mobile CRM capability of our platform in the future".
Approved Food & Drink Founder and CEO Daniel Cluderay was impressed by the company’s first mobile campaign.
“What would have been a low to average revenue day turned into a very strong revenue day,” he says. “I sold in the order of twice as much as I expected and set against the cost of the campaign it was an outstanding result. Mobilize provide a terrific service which I will definitely use again."
Mobilize operates the SHOP SCAN SAVE mobile savings club, whose mobile coupons can be redeemed securely in over 21,000 convenience outlets in the UK.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Approved F&D SMS Campaign delivers impressive results
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Kodak's Success in Mobile Marketing
Objectives
Kodak is a leading global provider of innovative solutions for conventional, digital and blended photo print production environments, with a brand that is recognized worldwide. Kodak Express outlets, located in cities around the world, are a one-stop destination for photo printing, products, and accessories, as well as photo customization and personalization.
Seeking ways to both increase foot traffic to stores in India, and gather and consolidate user profile and preference information from Kodak Express customers, Kodak decided that a mobile advertising campaign would be the best option.
The advantages of mobile for the campaign were clear. Usage of the Internet on mobile phones is huge in India. At the end of last year, there were more than 346 million Indian wireless subscribers, and the market was growing at the rate of approximately 10 million new subscribers per month. Much of the growth of the mobile Internet in India follows a trend seen in many countries throughout the world, where the mobile web is used as a primary Internet connection by people who do not have access to a PC at home.
Strategy
To execute its mobile campaign, Kodak turned to the BuzzCity Global Mobile Advertising Network. In addition to providing a platform, BuzzCity helped devise a strategy that allowed Kodak to effectively execute the campaign and get the most out of its budget.
“We brought some specific experience to the table that was particularly important to Kodak,” says BuzzCity CEO, KF Lai. “First of all, and perhaps most significantly, the BuzzCity network is global, and we have extensive experience serving the Indian market. In fact, the Indian market is currently number two in total mobile advertising page views generated though the BuzzCity network. Secondly, our system allowed Kodak to run a highly-targeted campaign. The company had the ability to target ads by geographical area, makes and capabilities of handsets, and more specific demographics like age and interests.”
Kodak decided to target mobile internet users in the ‘Community, Entertainment and Lifestyle’, ‘Information’, ‘Mobile Content (news and related content)’, and ‘Search/Portal Services’ categories. Additionally, the BuzzCity network allowed Kodak to utilize different types of mobile ads and easily implement a mobile survey that would allow it to gather information from users.
Kodak wanted to attract a broad range of potential customers, which was reflected by its tactical approach to the campaign. It decided to run both text and banner ads and target its campaign broadly to men and women between 15 and 40 years-of-age throughout India, with no specific city or regional targeting. For its ads, Kodak went with simple, concise messages, such as: ‘Kodak Express Shoot It Win It!’, and ‘Print them now. Win them now!’
As an incentive to complete the survey, the company devised a contest that required users to make 50 prints at a Kodak Express outlet from a digital camera or cameraphone. Once potential customers completed the survey, they were entered into a draw to win a 2GB iPod Nano or a 1GB memory card. In order to complete their contest entries, they were prompted to enter their name, mobile number, and camera capacity. They were then redirected to the nearest Kodak Express outlet to complete the process by ordering the 50 prints.
Results
The results of the campaign were impressive. In one month, it generated 11 million visits to the survey landing page, with a clickthrough rate of 1.7%. But beyond the numbers, Kodak also gathered important information for future interaction with its customers through the survey component. The Kodak team also gathered mobile numbers it could use for future SMS marketing, and was able to gather information about its customers’ camera capacities and functionality so it could better serve them in the future.
There were a couple of distinct takeaways from the campaign that advertisers can take to heart. The first is that engaging potential customers in a multi-faceted mobile marketing experience is essential for strong results. In this case, contact with the Kodak brand started with the ad banner, which redirected customers to a landing page that allowed them to take the survey, enter the contest, prompted them to find the nearest Kodak Express outlet from the ‘store locator’, and finally, encouraged mobile web users to become customers - thus completing the cycle of customer engagement. The second lesson is comparatively simple but no less important: use clear, straight-forward marketing messages - a particularly important piece to mobile marketing campaigns because of the inherent limitations of the screen size.
The success of the mobile campaign was validated Kodak’s choice of mobile for its Kodak Express initiative,” says Lai. “But even more significantly, the results validate the strength of mobile advertising’s value proposition and its potential, if well executed, to help brands achieve an unprecedented level of bang for the advertising buck.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Mobile Marketing: Sink or Swim
After years of talk about mobile data services, the day has finally arrived where demand is close to matching the hype. Instead of figuring out how to entice users to adopt new applications and services, the main issue at hand is how to deal with the imminent tidal waves of data usage heading to operators' networks.
In the last two years, we’ve seen Smartphones move to the mainstream, and we can expect continued uptake, along with the development of other mobile devices such as netbooks and PC dongles. According to Strategy Analytics, by 2011, the amount of mobile data traffic will increase nearly fourfold from its current levels.
Two waves
At Openwave, we’ve been closely tracking the amount of data on networks, and have identified two approaching waves of demand for mobile data. As stated above, the first is upon us: the arrival of Smartphones in the market. From mid-2006 to mid-2009, the volume of data served to Smartphones increased almost 100 times. In the US market, the current amount of data traffic represents around 100 petabytes (100,000 terabytes) per year. By 2012, this could grow to as much as 250 petabytes.
At the same time, we’ve seen that the volume of data served to feature phones peaked in 2008 and has started dropping off as Smartphones are replacing feature phones as the device of choice for mobile data consumers. Current data volume totals for feature phones in the US are around 8 petabytes, projected to drop to around 5 petabytes by 2012.
While this trend is important for operators, we predict the second wave of demand fuelled by new mobile devices will completely eclipse the growth in Smartphones, both in terms of magnitude and speed. Current levels stand at around 800 petabytes per year in the US, but we feel that this could exponentially grow to nearly 4500 petabytes by 2012.
The situation is the same in Europe. The analyst, Forrester, predicts that 125 million Europeans will access the mobile Internet by 2013, more than tripling today’s number of users. According to a December 2008 comScore report, 25% of the total UK population now accesses the Internet from a mobile device, up 9% on last year.
While the growth is largely driven by better hardware, we have also seen a number of other non-traditional players entering the mobile Internet market and sparking competition. In February, France Telecom-Orange announced a large push into the combined mobile and PC Internet space, through a joint deal with HP. Skype announced deals with Nokia and Sony Ericsson to integrate its service into several different phone models. Before Christmas, the operator Hutchinson and handset vendor INQ, launched the INQ1, which integrates data services such as Facebook, MSN and eBay directly into the software of the handset.
User Experience 2.0
As we have witnessed in the traditional web, niche information and personalised content are usurping mass market hits. We now see major brands prioritising the customer experience and exploring the best ways to reach their customers through what some are calling ‘User Experience 2.0’, an attempt to proactively unite users with relevant content and services. The goal is to make content discovery much simpler and more targeted, eliminating the awkward left-to-right scrolling when browsing, presenting relevant content first, and improving site navigation. It is a dynamic process of interpreting the content being served and enhancing and adapting it on the fly to provide the best possible user experience.
User Experience 2.0 is an exciting prospect for consumers, but it can be a little bit daunting for operators. Networks are already struggling to support the increase in traffic; a better experience will only increase traffic volume.
And thus, the operators are faced with the current dilemma of investing in their infrastructure during uncertain economic times. Cutting corners could result in a poor user experience, impacting the operator directly as subscribers are more likely to blame the network than the handset or content provider.
Operators must figure out how best to spend their money to cope with this massive increase in data demand, improve the experience, and monetise it in a way that benefits their business and their subscribers.
Content optimization
In the short term, operators can take rapid action to ensure they are optimizing their networks. The key is to use data management and compression techniques. Openwave’s experience with customers around the world, including Telstra in Australia, has shown how the ability to rapidly scale to meet changing customer needs, as well as support new protocols, content types and applications, is critical to competitiveness.
Integra, Openwave’s mobile Internet platform, is designed with open interfaces to flexibly address the market's need for fast, open and secure service management. It also gives operators the ability to introduce new services, without having to overhaul the infrastructure, which can deliver significant cost savings. At Telstra, the introduction of Integra has brought a fourfold efficiency gain over an equivalent WAP gateway.
In the long term, however, bandwidth management will require more than just optimization. Some operators are considering whether a tiered usage and cost model will be better for their business than the current ‘all you can eat’ subscriptions. If so, they must figure out how to migrate their users to this new pricing structure. Smart operators will be able to distinguish themselves from their competitors by offering premium services to customers. This will require close bandwidth management, in order to make sure that a sufficient portion is reserved for these preferred services.
More devices, more opportunity
The expanding eco-system of the mobile Internet will also bring new business opportunities for operators. New devices mean new mobile Internet services and additional sources of revenue. The introduction of the iPhone alone has increased data traffic six-fold per customer. The Blackberry Storm and other popular mobile devices will only solidify these trends.
In order to launch the right services, it’s critical for operators to gain a deep understanding of consumers’ online habits. Openwave’s Mobile Analytics tool does just this, working seamlessly and unobtrusively with the data access portal to monitor usage. Mobile Analytics gives operators significant advantages by combining demographic information with data consumption patterns to deliver relevant products and targeted advertising to consumers.
If operators are slow to act, the market will move without them and they will be marginalised to the role of a dumb pipe, mere providers of flat-rate data access, similar to the fixed-line operators before them. Operators need a solution that capitalises on their core business and unique assets to add value across a mass market of handsets.
Openwave’s Mobile Internet platform and services are a mass-market approach to bringing the PC Internet to mobile devices. Leveraging the mobile operator’s network ownership and direct relationship with the consumer, the solution not only helps deliver a fast, safe and seamless user experience, but gives operators the monitoring tools to manage traffic and effectively market their services.
It is clear to us that the scale of the challenge facing the mobile industry is immense. It is therefore absolutely paramount that operators embrace it head-on, invest in capacity and begin to develop services that will make the most of the coming opportunities. Some already have, but more need to follow.
Ambiguity of Mobile Users opting to use WiFi Connections
According to new research conducted by Bango, over 20% of mobile users are now connecting via WiFi. The outcome of which, is the fact that being unrecognized by the networks, it’s making it difficult to sell and market mobile services to these users and significantly impacting mobile content revenues.
This is troubling to the world of mobile marketing in that it cuts the usually high ROI and conversion rates of mobile content that is purchased via operator-based billing. When mobile users, who are accessing content via carrier networks, come across mobile services and solutions, they could easily purchase by way of being billed directly by their carrier. When that same user is connecting via WiFi, operator billing is not accessible, which in turn adds more steps for that user to purchase and cuts conversions significantly. The statistics also reveal that many customers that access their operator portals via WiFi are blocked, which prevents them from accessing or purchasing operator approved content and services.
With WiFi becoming the de facto connection method for obvious reasons, it’s forcing mobile carriers and mobile content providers to find new ways of tracking users and allowing them to utilize the ease of operator-based billing while still utilizing WiFi connections. It’s estimated that by 2010, over a third of all mobile connections will be via WiFi, so to counteract this shift, mobile billing providers and carriers alike are already working on new methods to integrate carrier-based billing no matter how the mobile users are connected.
Mobile Marketing Softdrink Brand in UK
Since then, the makers of our favorite refreshments have continued to pioneer new and more innovative means for promoting their products and capturing our attention in the mobile realm.
Coca-Cola, for example, is very particular about its mobile marketing projects. For the latest endeavor, a pool of beta-testers have been selected: British youth.
Coca-Cola Great Britain will give away “50p free mobile credit” with every purchase of Coke product: Fanta, Dr Pepper, Sprite, etc.
Geared almost entirely to British teenagers, the campaign will run for one month.
According to the official announcement, cans and bottles of Coca-Cola soft drinks will feature a code to enter into www.gimmecredit.co.uk.
Addressing the importance of mobile technology to the youth of Great Britain, Cathryn Sleight, marketing director at Coca-Cola Great Britain, said “We wanted to bring them both value and a point of difference that will fully engage them with the promotion.”
Coca-Cola has high hopes for the campaign, and its success could very well determine the size and scope of other mobile campaigns on their upcoming slate of promotions, both domestically and abroa
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