Air2Web Mobi-Log

mobile ads go outdoors

From 1990 to 2000, every major company built a website and web presence to connect with customers, increase consumer awareness and motivate people to buy.  The average user in the U.S. spends almost 3 full days per month online.  But now, corporations now have to mobile to engage customers all day, every day, 24 X 7.  Given the “always-on” aspect of cell phones, this can be a blessing and curse for consumers. 

So what about when we are driving along exposed to the various forms of out-of-home ads?  On the one hand it’s amazing that every billboard does not have a mobile call to action.  Creating advertisements for a sea of consumers rolling down the highways without offering them a way to connect to your product or service seems almost negligent. 

On the other hand, there are credible studies that say texting while driving is almost as dangerous as driving under the influence.  Many of us likely already know this just based on common sense, yet the temptation to get things done, take action, and check items off our agenda is often too strong to ignore, even behind the wheel.

Billboards today already have meek calls to action when they post phone numbers.  We have the power to pick up and dial right then and there with out mobile phones.  Texting is arguably more involved. 

Maybe all next-generation billboards could have giant QR codes that you can photograph and convert as you wiz by at 65 mph?  Calvin Klein recently incorporated QR codes on select billboards throughout New York and Los Angeles as part of an advertising campaign promoting the brand’s jeans. 

Maybe hardware and software providers can devise other ways - mobile hot keys or other short cuts - to enable drivers to quickly and safely capture, store, or act on text-based offers through billboard advertising. 

And let’s not forget that some billboards are as focused on pedestrians more so than on drivers.  In New York’s Times Square, visitors can use mobile phones to interact directly and in real time with many of the electronic billboard ads there, such as the campaign where texting the word DISNEY to the short code “4YETI” make the mythical creature’s eyes flash at a specific time.

Just go to billboards.com  and you will see that “from highways, city streets, taxis and trains…to in-store, sidewalks, cinemas and malls…to elevators, airports, medical offices and more…” text and SMS have a huge role to play in out-of-home advertising.

location. location. location.

What’s the deal with location-based services?  Is this an idea whose time has come?  Will people’s private lives be compromised (see our recent newsletter article on privacy in mobile)?  Will consumers become walking and driving account profiles?   Will companies build new business models and revenue streams around localization?

The short answers to all these questions:

‘It’s here’, ‘For sure’, ‘Maybe but doubtful’, ‘More so than before’, and ‘Absolutely‘! 

According to JiWire, “As location-based services become more prevalent, consumers are growing more comfortable with exchanging their whereabouts in return for targeted advertisements and promotional offers.”  Almost 40% percent of on-the-go consumers are interested in receiving offers from nearby stores through their mobile phones.

Here are a few of our thoughts on mobile and location-based services.  We’d like to hear yours as well.

• Location-based mobile marketing and customer care are coming, whether we want them to or not.  They are already here in some cases but not in any sort of industrial strength manner The same process applied to other communication technologies that compressed time and space, like the DARPANET, which became the Internet, which took 20 years to mature.  Ditto for the fax machine, which had its fits and starts … Zapmail was a fax from FedEx before faxing went mainstream.
  

• Location-based services will operate using intermediaries, at least to start.  When you log on to Twitter, FourSquare, or Facebook, these social media applications will be able to tell advertisers and others that you are in or near a certain location.  Doing it this way gives users a feeling of anonymity and control over when and where they show themselves.  It also makes aggregating demand based on location easier and more effective for vendors.  ABI Research projects the market for location-based social networking alone to reach $3.3 billion by 2013.
  

• Location-based services will blur the line between selling and servicing.  Imagine you are driving along and suddenly receive a text saying you might need an oil change and that you can get 20% off at the service station down the road.  The ‘system‘ might know when your last change was, as well as the fact that the service station vying for your business is having a lull that day and could use the trade (and will offer a discount to get it).  Inter-mediating service to sales will become a business in its own right thanks to location-based mobile capabilities. 

As for Air2Web, we cannot stress enough how important we think it is that companies help customers first, and sell to them later, in order to build long term relationship through the mobile channel (see our recent post and article about mobile customer service).  Location-based services can help do that.

What are some of your thoughts on mobile and location-based services?

help first, sell later

Increasingly, consumers demand that quality brands offer mobile self-service capabilities.  The self-service phenomenon is nothing new in business … look at how industries and companies have made it core to their customer care process, not only saving money but actually making customers happier in the process.  This only drives further demand from buyers for self service of all kinds, mobile included.

There are lots of self-help tools out there, based on channels from the Web and IVR to mobile, and they show up in a wide range retail categories, including package services (UPS, Fed Ex), travel services (Expedia, Travelocity), food and beverage (Starbucks, Domino’s), apparel (Bebe, JCPenney), and many others.  Mobile is extending the possibilities and expectations for self-service.

There’s an important point here for retailers who want to successfully mobilize their business:  mobile services (and selling via mobile) are best delivered in the context of a relationship or ongoing dialog with consumers.  Thus, it’s important for marketers to recognize the ways in which mobile does, and does not, resemble the evolution of the Internet.  For that reason, we believe B2C companies using mobile must create a strong “foundational benefit” for consumers first - e.g., mobile customer self-service - before using that most personal of technologies to sell to them.

Similar to the reasons why customer self-help programs succeeded in the first place, mobile offers companies the most cost-effective channel to consumers, while consumers increasingly prefer mobile to all other channels, like voice and Internet.  Just ask any parent how much their kids text them vs. making a phone call!

That’s why companies get a better return on mobile if they first use it to improve the cost and experience of customer care, so that they can then personalize and improve the relevance of marketing and sales efforts.  Once customers want and expect you to talk to them over mobile, then you are ready to sell.  For more detail and examples of customer self-service over mobile, please see our October newsletter article.

mobile marketing for the holidays

Are you ever puzzled why retailers don’t use mobile more? Sure, there are plenty that do, including Air2Web clients like bebe, Domino’s, FootLocker, JCPenney, Proctor & Gamble, WalMart and others.  But some retail companies who rely on the holidays to make their annual numbers may be late to the party and risk being pushed aside in a multi-channel marketing frenzy in which mobile will play a lead role.

More than ever, this holiday season retailers are jumping on the mobile bandwagon.  Some in the industry see the close of 2010 as the turning point for mobile and retail.  In a recent Mobile Marketer article , Vice president of Strategy at Wunderman, Thom Kennon, said, “I suspect when we all look back to try to understand when mobile moved from interesting to nice-to-have to the heart of an all-channel brand program, it will be Christmas 2010, and we all nod knowingly.”

Air2Web paid homage to that possibility in a recent newsletter article and Mobile Marketer interview on mobile this holiday season.  We talk a lot with our clients and partners about personalization, voice, and value as guiding concepts behind an effective mobile strategy, but the 5-second version of all that … the blog version … for retailers is “when you decide to talk with (and not just “to”) your customers over mobile, make it worth their while.” 

When you engage customers over mobile, give them a reason to interact with you that will make them more interested in or satisfied with your brand.  If customers meet you over SMS, offer them a path to somewhere that helps meet their needs.  If you want them to see your latest products, give them a discount for going there (virtually or literally); if you want them to see a new video about your brand on your new mobile website, tell them what they can do about it … “walk into one of our stores in the next 24 hours and receive an extra 10% off.” 

And that does not mean always going for the sales jugular either.  That is, it’s not always the case that the customer is one mobile message away from a purchase.  One step leads to another, especially if consumers can communicate on things that have meaning for them.  For example, in the case of retail fashion, they could give or get feedback on product colors, styles, and availability. 

There are a host retail experiences this holiday season where mobile can help busy shoppers save time and have more fun … eating, going to the movies, sharing gift ideas, booking travel, and, of course, shopping.  As for what to do with mobile - it runs the gamut from simple text messages and alerts, to mobile coupons and location-based offers, to QR codes.  Just remember to make our mobile offerings simple, actionable and portable across various types of devices so you can reach the greatest number of consumers.

What makes a good mobile client?

Some mobile clients are better than others. Politically incorrect? Not really. Some B2C companies are simply better suited to mobile than others. We recently talked about mobile ROI, and it only follows that the bigger the sale or savings with mobile, the more sense it makes, for everyone.

At Air2Web we think of “good, better, best” when it comes to the suitability of mobile solutions for a particular company. While there are dozens of criteria and attributes, there are just a few categories that matter. If you’re reading this as a mobile solutions prospect, then it might be an excellent way to save yourself a lot of time and effort deciding how to mobilize your business (or not).

First, is your type of business well suited to mobile in general? 

Are you in the retail space where the one-to-many rule reigns supreme but where you are trying to personalize every customer touch point possible? Do you have a large subscriber base, with fast product cycle times? Does your company have a cost savings mandate (we can assume you have a money-making one)?

Second, how critical is customer care to your business?

Do you spend a lot of money on customer service? Does a larger portion of your care budget go towards IT and automation? Do you have to spend a lot of time and money on customer education?

Next, what type of contact center costs do you have?

Do you have high call volumes (see our last blog on mobile ROI in contact centers)? Lots of live-agent calls? Increasing costs per call? High shed rate? This last term refers to types of calls that can be “shed” from live-agents and answerable through SMS - billing inquiries are a good example.

Is your company or industry in a lot of customer care pain (a la consumers)?

How bad is churn? How much does service reputation matter? Are switching costs low and competition high?

When you start to look around for solutions, how “mobile ready” are you?

Do you have a mobile strategy and a named champion or is your mobile journey run by procurement? Is there a budget and a timeline…and an ROI target?

And finally, are you strategic or tactical in your vision for how to mobilize your business?

Is mobile a ‘nice to have’ or a ‘must do’ and does the executive leadership “get it?” Is your culture one that innovates? Do you look for vendors or for partners?

If you are nodding your head north-south on most of these, you may be a good candidate for mobile. And yes, we realize that these are “loaded” questions…but they are real nonetheless.

What’s your mobile ROI?

For any business case we measure ROI for how well it helps a company make money or save money. Period.  A cursory search of ‘mobile ROI’ on the Web returns lots of material about mobile marketing and how mobile can help sell more (we agree, check out our mobile retail article on personalization, voice and value).
 
But mobile is more of a game changer than simply giving B2C companies a new marketing channel. It can transform how companies and consumers operate with each other as well.
 
If that’s true, then there should be some examples of the flip side of the ROI coin - how does mobile help companies save money? Inside the marketing mix, one could say that mobile coupons are cheaper than paper coupons, or that SMS text messages are cheaper than direct mail … but that’s not what we mean.
 
Let’s take a source of enormous operational costs for many B2C companies - the customer care contact center. A few figures make the point. Let’s say a retail contact center manages one million calls per month, which is not really that many for a very large B2C provider like a cable or telephone company.  
 
And since they already have tried to leverage technology to the hilt, IVR solutions may address up to 70% of these, which leaves 300,000 calls for the agents.  Considering hold times, fully loaded labor costs, and agent utilization, the average cost per call might be between $1 and $2 (and many are much higher).
 
In our experience there are still a significant number of calls that make it past the IVR gauntlet but that still can be answered without a live voice - many of these have to do with things like billing and account balance inquiries.  In one case we found that live-agent calls could be reduced by another 25% with mobile - e.g.,  with SMS (or texting).  
 
That’s 75,000 calls per month or up to $250,000 each month in savings, minus the cost to set up and run a mobile solution, which should be (and is) considerably less, since this is a story about ROI.  If your inbound call volume is even greater, results actually accelerate with economies of scale.
 
So how has mobile helped you save money lately?

The “who” and “why” of mobile: part 2

It’s fair to say that everyone knows they need to “do something” with mobile, yet many are unsure where to go.  As we said in our last post, the supply side is crowded (overly, so expect continued consolidation), and there’s a universe of options.

One important trend:  Mobile solutions are increasingly focused on business impact, and not just through marketing.  Providers are getting more functionally and vertically focused to compete. 

In addition to the hardware providers (mobile devices), voice-data carriers (connectivity), and aggregators (access), other key business categories across the mobile marketscape include:

Marketing and creative ad agencies that offer advice on mobile to clients seeking new marketing channels.  These include traditional houses like Satchi & Satchi as well as pure-plays like MobileEra and MobilePosse.

Business process providers, companies who seek to help clients apply mobile to a specific business process or function.  Companies like Mbill or MobilePay support wholesale banking transactions.  Outsourcing providers like Convergys and TeleTech help clients operate multi-channel (mobile) customer care functions.

Business intelligence providers, like Acxiom, Epsilon, and SAS help B2C clients leverage massive amounts of consumer data by linking backend systems with customer profiles to enhance sales efforts over mobile devices.

Online communications service providers like Premier Global have expanded their clients’ channel access from e-mail to include mobile.  Coupled with services like those from LivePerson, B2C companies can talk with customers on their terms.

And then there is an entire, inter-dependent network of industry influencers and indices, such as the Mobile Marketing Association, Nielsen, CSCA, and others.

When it comes to mobilizing your business, all of these entities are working towards giving end users more personalization, voice, and value.  So once you have figured out the “who” and “why,” it makes it that much easier to move to “how,” “what” and “when.”

The “who” and “why” of mobile

Not sure where to start in the world of mobile?  Join the club.

To determine what to do in mobile (and who is out there to help), we always tell clients that understanding who & why is the all-important first step. Too often companies jump in before getting clear on their motivations behind mobile.  And while a majority of B2C companies say that they have a ‘mobile strategy’ according to sources like the Mobile Marketing Association, many organizations have not planned very far beyond the PowerPoint presentation.

Unfortunately, given the state of the supply-side, the answers are not always clear because there are so many choices among a host of providers for content, connectivity, and other essential mobile solution components (more on that in Part 2).

But rather than look into the supply-side mirror for a reflection of how you can mobilize your business, we encourage companies first to take a tactical step (or two) backwards to make the right strategic leap forward.

Really it’s the same thing you would do with any business case.  When it comes to mobile, there are a few basic questions to ask. (Remember that mobile is another channel for your message and you don’t need to rethink your entire strategy to incorporate it.)

• What is the business challenge or opportunity, and why should I choose the mobile channel to execute against?
• Who is my target demographic for mobile campaigns or mobile customer service?
• How is my market best served (SMS, apps, mobile web, QR codes, location-based services)?
• Where does mobile fit into my business and my overall marketing/customer experience strategy?
• How do I work within my department or other departments to drive opt-ins, downloads, etc. (multichannel marketing/customer care)?

So tell us, why does your organization want to go mobile and who are you targeting?  Share it with us, and in our next blog we’ll address how the market is moving to help answer some of the questions above.

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Mobile phone penetration is 87%, exceeding that of cable television, internet access and PCs in the home.