6 Benefits of Mobile Marketing

Posted on March 24, 2011 by Penny Zenker, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.

Mobile marketing is not a fad but a lifestyle change. I find the growth statistics of the Mobile segment amazing. There are 4.1 billion mobile phones worldwide. 86% of Americans own a mobile phone and 68.7 of those are frequent text users. This number has trippled since 2007. I was not an early adopter of texting but I have noticed in our communication that often people prefer to text one another than to make a quick call. 1.56 trillion text messages were sent in America last year.

If you have not started to capitalized this market for your business, it is time. Mobile marketing in conjunction with other forms of marketing such as advertising and social media could take your business to the next level. Small businesses have so many cost effective and affordable opportunities right now to build relationships mobile marketing.

Now is the time to invest in your business. While others are still in a holding pattern, create your strategy and take action.

Here are 6 real benefits of mobile marketing.

1. Targeted Marketing

Mobile marketing is just like any other marketing effort this should be part of a greater marketing plan. Targeting is an important part of that planning process. Targeted marketing is grouping customers to create a common value proposition. This strategy will maximize value from these segments, creating a personalized experience for the customer.

Hopefully many have learned the negative effects from Email spamming. It is harder to win back a relationship you have destroyed. People will not only opt out of future communication but they will more than likely be left with a negative impression of your brand because of the personal nature of text messages. It is about the quality of communication rather than quantity. This is your opportunity to get close to existing customers and prospects who are already using, have used or are interested in your product or service.

2. Personalized communication

When you get a message to your phone, it simply still feels more personal than an email or a letter. That is why statistics show than 95% of text messages are opened and 83% are opened within 1 hour of their arrival.

Leverage personal communication wisely by creating or enhancing the relationship. Engage them in a two-way conversation. Do a survey, provide a service by providing immediate information while they are on the go, link them to a promotion, participate in a contest, provide creative ways to provide value to them.

Mobile marketing can be used for customer acquisition, retention and brand building.

3. Affordability

Text messages have proven to be ten times more effective than other advertising tools, including email, mail and newspaper advertising. There are some great platforms out there that are “plug and play”. Easy to use and offer affordable plans. A small investment can yield more than 5X the value of the investment.

4. Better Results

The average response rates for mobile marketing campaigns are between 15%-30%. This is 5 to 10 times better than the average email marketing campaign. Higher response rates mean more revenues, greater loyalty and higher profitability. Depending on the value of the average customer sale and lifetime value of new customers, the ROI can be much more than 5 times the investment.

5. Speed and efficiency

I mentioned early that almost all text messages are opened within 5 minutes of receiving them. With an effective and fun offer or call to action, you have your responses within minutes or hours as opposed to other methods that may take days, weeks or months. Amazing!

Speed is the most critical element of an effective campaign. If planned properly a mobile marketing effort can realize much greater response rates than reported above because of the speed of data possessing and analysis. That means the insights of the campaign can be derived quickly and applied immediately as follow up for those who participated or as an adjustment for those who have not yet participated.

The speed of mobile marketing will change traditional processes completely.

6. Measurability

Technology makes tracking easy. In most platforms, you can track how many people opened your message and how many people acted on your message. Usually these technology platforms have flexible management tools to analyze and report results.

Mobile marketing can add greater measurability to advertising and direct mail, which has been difficult to track. By creating an add or letter with a call to action, by texting a key word to a short code the campaign can be tracked and measured for effectiveness and is much more efficient that the entire handling of written responses.

Mobile marketing is ideal for restaurants, real estate, car dealerships, service shops, spas, florists and so many more.

This is a call to action for all small businesses.

Work smarter not harder!