Mobile Marketing: 4 Ways to Optimize Your Mobile Marketing Efforts

No other marketing vehicle offers the combination of context, locality and actionability that mobile does. The rapid adoption of smartphones is obliterating any limits on this interaction. Consumers are all over them, and you can legitimately speculate that mobile technology might replace the personal computer as we know it in the near future.

On the mobile web, however, standard e-commerce sites seldom make effective selling tools. Changing technologies, restrictive mobile carriers and undulating legislative hurdles, just to name a few things, leave the mobile space still ripe for growth.

What follows are four tips to help you tap into the potential that the mobile channel offers:

1. Apply for your short code. If you want to use a catchy short code — known as a vanity code that’s unique to your company — it can take eight weeks to 10 weeks. You can shave a bit of time off the process if you’re willing to use a “shared short code,” which is exactly what it sounds like: an existing number that several companies use. You acquire a short code through your mobile technology vendor.

2. Build your list. Opt-in permission is a mandatory requirement for mobile marketing campaigns. Get specific consent to contact people via SMS. After getting consent in writing, as opposed to pre-checked boxes, keep a record of the fact that you have it. The opt-in process has to be started via another channel. Mobile carriers come down hard on companies that spam.

3. Measure for success. Before you launch an SMS campaign, set benchmarks for how you’ll measure its success. Conversion, coupon redemption, list growth and surveys are common measures for success that can help drive changes or optimizations for your SMS program.

4. Go beyond the click. Rethink the way you measure success and go beyond the click. Big brands aren’t always aiming for an on-the-spot mobile purchase, particularly on large, high-priced items.

In these cases, brand recognition and recall are much more qualitative measurements of success. Reaching consumers on mobile devices — their most personal devices — allows you to generate meaningful, targeted consumer interactivity and interest.

Therefore, be closely monitoring mobile advertising’s effect on consumers, particularly post-mobile interaction, and not only consumers’ effect on your clickthrough rates.