Last week, I attended the Mobile Marketing Association’s Forum in San Francisco. Here are my top takeaways from the event:
- Data-driven campaigns will become the norm in mobile: In other forms of digital media, companies match offers to interests. This will increasingly happen in mobile.
- Mobile response rates are skyrocketing. Not only are consumers more likely to response to mobile offers, they are more likely to buy. Ticketmaster cited a stat that with only 200,000 mobile pushes they generated $500,000 in ticket sales – that’s $2.50 per push! As a point of comparison they needed 110 million social media impressions for to generate the same revenue.
- Offers need to be tied to and make sense in the context of a consumer’s brand relationship. A free night works well for a cruise line, vs. 2-for-1 if you’re a shirt company.
- Demographic offers get good responses. Behavioral based offers get better response. Interest based offers get the best responses.
- The mobile coupon ad unit standards committee released a State of Mobile Copuoning whitepaper with lots of insights.
- Text messaging still works great for top-of-the-funnel customer acquisition. Any phone can use it, companies like HipCricket have it down to a science.
- Marketers are moving from the old paradigm of “we have an offer, who do we send it to” towards real-time scoring of offers against unique customer profiles. Getting the right offer in front of the right consumer was a recurring theme.
- It is crucial you make a customer feel in control of their mobile alerts, otherwise they will delete your app. The industry needs to do this in order to avoid a legislative and consumer backlash.
- Marketers are looking for apps that can be “event” apps – Superbowl, Father’s Day, Back-to-School etc. They also want more than a simple game – they want a mobile social experience that can engage the consumer with the brand.
- 2013 is the year of mobile! This is the year where spend goes mainstream, where marketers go full-scale on mobile.
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