Mobile News

The management of the end-to-end mobile interaction–i.e. the use of mobile marketing as a booster of the marketing encyclopedia and not only as below-the-line instrument–requires a number of functionalities that span across several steps of the mobile marketing continuum. We review these requirements and indicate when requirements are specific to fully managed services offered by MMSPs.

We cover first the ability of the solution to manage a variable number of subscribers, as this is the “alpha and omega” of mobile interaction management.

* For promotional mobile marketing, the profile management feature provides the basis for collecting initial subscriber data while taking into account opt-in and opt-out information.

* For mobile CRM campaigns or activities, profile management also reflects the ability to assemble subsets of subscribers based on arbitrary attribute values to engage users into personalised value-adding dialogues.

The software solution typically comes with a predefined set of attributes per profile recorded in its own database. This definition represents the profile data wheel in the software. The functional requirement for a flexible data wheel is to allow changes to the attributes at least in the form of additional fields. Ideally, the product will only mandate that the mobile identifier and necessary opt-in or opt-out tracking fields are defined, leaving the definition of additional fields to the user.

Most mobile marketing solutions available today provide basic anti-spam attributes along the mobile identifier at the centre of the profile data wheel (described in Chapter 2) in order to guarantee:

* the use of opt-in data only and the existence of opt-out services

* the respect of limits in the number of marketing messages that may be pushed to individuals.

The profile data wheel underlying a given mobile marketing campaign solution must be integrated in such a way that a configurable limit of messages per time period exists for each individual in the database. This limit must be adjusted according to the delivery notification information received by the gateway (if requested) and decremented accordingly. For each subscriber in the profile database, opt-in and opt-out information is available separately. This information is taken into account in all operations managed by the mobile marketing campaign solution.

Over time, the software will accumulate a number of profiles gathered over several campaigns. A functional requirement will be to support queries on the profiles based on the attributes previously defined. Some products offer the possibility to save queries for later re-use. The queries can be used to determine counts of profiles matching certain criteria, but also to create addressable subsets of subscribers. The support of subsets or new subscriber lists is an important functional requirement for launching campaigns with higher granularity and gauges the strength of the attribute definition. The subsets can be used, for example, to:

* isolate campaign participants into a reference control group that will be contacted after the campaign finishes to assess the relative awareness

* evaluate a specific combination of attributes by running a same campaign in two flavours (of content) against two distinct non-overlapping subscriber subsets

* create during the campaign execution a new pool of subscribers based on the dialogue setting of predetermined attributes.