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Mobile Conference
We sponsored the Mobile Conference last Thursday in Dublin. Great day out and some really good presentations. Admittedly we’re slightly biased but SMS Marketing was the winner on the day with a really good case study from Aviva outlining the myriad of ways they’ve used and benefited from SMS Marketing.
Mobile Marketing is just like Coffee!
SMS Outperforms All Others
I read a great story of SMS success in my favorite US city, Chicago, this week. The Chicago “Shedd” Aquarium is one of the largest tourist attractions in the city and home to 22,000 aquatic animals representing 1,500-plus species of fish, reptiles, amphibians, invertebrates, birds and mammals from around the world, and recently they decided to dip their toe in the waters of SMS marketing.
From the article on Mobile Marketer:
“Shedd Aquarium in Chicago ran a multichannel campaign to promote its newest program, Fantasea, and its televised SMS call-to-action generated more than 300 percent more responses than online, print or outdoor advertising.
Mobile Commons, a mobile messaging company, powered the SMS portion of the campaign. The text call-to-action appeared in television commercials on Chicago’s Fox affiliate.
“The key finding here is clearly that mobile SMS outperformed anything else Shedd Aquarium ran,” said Anthony Risicato, CEO of Mobile Commons, New York. “This wasn’t just somebody responding to a call-to-action, people were entering their email address and ZIP code to enter a contest.”
Great SMS success story from a great city, and shows that almost any type of business can utilise the powers of text message marketing!
SMS is the KILLER app!
JP Morgan predict Mobile Advertising growth of 45% in 2010
JP Morgan have recently released the findings of a study concerning the growth for Mobile marketing and advertising in 2010. Their main predicitons for 2010 are as follows:
According to JP Morgan’s 2010 Internet Industry Outlook released yesterday, online display ads are set to rebound, and the mobile advertising industry is on the verge of an even stronger return.
JP Morgan’s leading industry analyst Imran Kahn released the 328-page Interest Industry outlook which notes that total U.S. mobile advertising for 2009 is estimated at $2.6 billion, up 62 percent, with $2.3 billion of that from text messaging. Just 178 million was mobile search, and $140 million was display. Both of these were up 80 percent last year.
Turn to 2010, and mobile advertising is, according to Kahn, forecast to grow 45 percent to $3.8 billion ($3.2 billion SMS advertising, $253 million mobile display, and $31 million mobile search.)
Mobile Marketing: From carpet bomb to sniper
SMS Marketing – The ONLY rational choice
Mobile Marketer, a wonderful site found at www.mobilemarketer.com, featured an interesting article today by Jay Highley, CEO of Tetherball, a mobile loyalty specialist.
The article dealt with a simple fact: if you really want to reach a mass audience with your marketing message via their mobile phones, it had better be by SMS.
Jay starts: “We’ve all seen the news stories and articles touting the revolution of mobile coupons that allow customers to simply wave their phones in front of scanners at their favorite retailers and magically redeem offers and coupons. Sound too good to be true? Well, it is.”
On the practicality of using high tech apps: “The last thing any retailer would want is my wife, who is admittedly technology challenged, holding up a long line of in-a-hurry customers waiting to check out while she fumbles around to find a coupon that was sent to her mobile phone… Bad experience for everyone: Customers (even the tech savvy ones), retailers, cashiers and our whole mobile marketing industry.
Jay recognises that although iPhone apps are currently all the rage with the marketing community, that many people are suffering from a form of “bright shiny object syndrome” and forgetting the practical side of things.
“The retail brands and clients that I talk with everyday are interested in reaching 100 percent of their target audience with their marketing programs, as opposed to the four or five percent they can reach via the iPhone. In fact, the minute you commit your mobile loyalty program success on a downloadable application, you have immediately eliminated 90 percent of the mobile users”
Jay summarises his views on the matter by saying “The ubiquity of SMS makes it the only rational solution on which to base your mobile program if you want to reach the masses.”
And in case you think he is an anti-iPhone nut: “By the way, I am an avid iPhone user and totally love the device”
SMS Marketing – Pizza Time
It seems that the good folk at Pizza Hut are continuing their foray into the mobile marketing space in the US with the commencement of some SMS engagement initiatives. Recently the Global pizza giant used SMS marketing to generate buzz about its new Hershey’s Dunkers offering and consequently built a mobile database of consumers to remarket to.
Television adverts included a call to action for customers to text the keyword HUT to short code 269411. Consumers who texted in were entered for a chance to win a Pizza Hut pizza, once a month, for a year straight.
A marketing executive involved with the campaign stated how she was impressed with the medium’s ability to connect with Pizza Hut’s key demographics, they used “TV spots to promote their new product, and at the end of the spot, they promoted the mobile call-to-action with an awesome sweepstakes attached”
“The combination of mobile and the sweepstakes offer of free pizza for a year proved to be an unbeatable combination,” she said. “The results were outstanding, and more than enabled the client to build a vast mobile database which they could use for future marketing.”
The campaign has proved immensely successful and in just two weeks the campaign has received more than 2,000 opt-ins and 54 percent moved on to double-opt-in.
Consumers who texted in received the following message: “Congrats! You are NOW entered 2 Win a free 1 topping pizza every month for a year from Pizza Hut! Winner notified via phone call on 8.23.09.”
Participants were then sent a confirmation and a chance to double-opt-in: “Reply YES Now for 10 more entries to WIN & to get Xclusives from Pizza Hut. max4msgs/mo. std txt rts apply. Reply YES Now!”
The final message said, “Success! You are subscribed! STOP 2 quit. HELP 4 help. Std msg chrgs apply. Look 4 exclusives on your Mobile Phone!”
Pizza Hut really seem to be making great inroads into usage of mobile marketing, and this example in particular would make interesting reading for Irish Pizza retailers like 4star and Apache.
UK Smartphone usage up… a little.
Recent research carried out by Nielsen has indicated that smartphone usage in the UK is on the up from Q2 09… but just barely.
In the UK the number of people using smartphones had moved from 8.8million in Q2 to 10.4million in Q3. The Vice President of mobile media at Nielsen commented: “Although there have been sizeable increases in the take-up of new mobile technologies, such as video and location-based services they remain niche forms of behaviour. Although the era of the handset as a truly multimedia device on a mass-market level lies somewhere on the horizon, the key for companies to successfully harness mobile lies in a realistic understanding of what media activities people on a large-scale are actually doing on their handsets now.”
In reality a small proportion of the population are engaging with their mobile devices with things like video, with most opting to occasionally browse the web. It is obvious therefore that text messaging is still the most important way for advertisers to reach their customers.
As a whole smartphones have crept from a market share of 14% to just over 15% over the last quarter, and the much lauded iPhone hold just 19% of this share. Therefore those marketers choosing to pursue iPhone apps over SMS are in reality resigning themselves to communicating with just 19% of 15%… or 2.85% of all phone users in the UK.
That choice seems somewhat unwise when compared to the 100% of phones that can receive SMS messages!
