Top 10 Key Learnings from MMA Forum SF

Last week, I attended the Mobile Marketing Association’s Forum in San Francisco. Here are my top takeaways from the event:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Demographic offers get good responses.  Behavioral based offers get better response.  Interest based offers get the best responses.
5. The mobile coupon ad unit standards committee released a State of Mobile Copuoning whitepaper with lots of insights.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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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