Mobile News

Offline acquisition

Millions of marketers continue to interact with their customers through direct marketing. The direct mail industry in particular has grown steadily over the past couple of years. More than US$200 billion is spent globally every year in direct mail marketing. The proponents of mobile marketing are aiming to leverage this means of communication and take a small yet significant share of this market.

The use of paper forms to collect profile information through direct mail and at the point of sale is a low-tech traditional solution to gather data and opt-ins from mobile users. The unitary costs of distribution of these marketing messages are higher than their digital counterparts described below. Traditional mail messages can cost between [euro]0.10 and [euro] 2.00 per unit. The average response rates to direct mail are also traditionally low, ranging between 1% and 4%.

Internet registration

Marketers, content aggregators and operators use web portals as an important channel to recruit new customer profiles. This allows them to increase the efficiency of tracking customer information and improve the effectiveness of their campaigns. The costs of setting up web portals have decreased significantly over the past few years. The transactional cost of communicating with registrants is marginal. Response rates are usually higher than those observed in using traditional mail.

WAP and i-mode

WAP and i-mode interfaces are browsing-type technologies that allow users to obtain information from WAP configured sites. Collecting information over a WAP site is similar, in technology terms, to the set-up required to collect personal information over the Internet for Internet recruiting.

Personalisation

Personalised “push” campaigns are one of the first ways to drive a mobile marketing campaign and derive directly from their e-marketing counterpart, the e-mail campaign.

While push campaigns have traditionally been executed over SMS, the increase in the number of WAP-enabled phones makes WAP push a more visually attractive mechanism to present marketing content to subscribers.