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Who Should Do Your Mobile Marketing?

Mobile marketing is muscling in on its counterparts. It can deliver fantastic results. Yet there remains some trepidation about it, which is reflected by the small slice of the marketing budget given to the discipline. So what needs to be done to put marketers at ease; should they outsource or insource their mobile B2B and B2C campaigns and data management?

Mobile marketing is muscling in on its counterparts. It can deliver fantastic results. Yet there remains some trepidation about it, which is reflected by the small slice of the marketing budget given to the discipline. So what needs to be done to put marketers at ease; should they outsource or insource their mobile B2B and B2C campaigns and data management?

Data management by the way isn’t just about buying lists from brokers. There’s more to it than that, particularly when outsourcing forms a major part of a campaign’s strategy.

Understand the pros and cons

There are advantages and disadvantages to both strategies. Quite often in the mobile space there is one third party or more working on a particular project with a client. But with mobile marketing dashboards, so long as you have staff with the right knowledge, skills and experience to manage a campaign, it is possible to devise campaigns that develop relationships and interact with customers in-house. The types of skills involved include data, team and customer management, creative design and thought-leadership, an ability to put best practice into action as a result of understanding the technology and its impact. Best practice particularly requires an understanding of legislation.

Where a company doesn’t have the resource or the wherewithal to gain the most out of delivering mobile marketing campaign in-house, it makes absolute sense to work with an agency and a third party service provider which brings with them such expertise as this. There are some cautionary tales though - particularly when it comes to a third party, hired by your firm, using your customer list on your behalf to send out SMS advertising messages or alerts.

How does the customer feel?

Remember, too, that a survey commissioned by the Advertising Standards Authority discovered that consumers disliked the anonymous nature of texts before they were opened. There were also concerns about them being charged for receiving SMS messages. However, this doesn’t sound the death knell of mobile marketing. What the respondents wanted was to feel empowered and more in control. It is a very personal communication medium after all. They suggested they’d like to have more functionality, more control of the advertising that is sent to their mobile handsets.

A couple of years ago one large branded retailer - which will remain anonymous - within the mobile phone, broadband and telephony sectors was taken to task a couple of years ago. A customer alleged, but the firm was later exonerated, that he had been sent one or more unsolicited messages to his mobile phone. A third party marketing services company had been hired to manage the campaign. It sent the SMS message to the complainant, and I believe this was following a survey - the man involved had participated in it. So it was believed that explicit consent had been given to communicate with this customer, and without a further need to ask his permission to be opted in.

Although the Direct Marketing Association’s ‘Mobile Marketing Best Practice Guidelines‘ talk about a soft opt-in, the law and other best practice frameworks require ‘explicit consent’ to have been given. While you can gain significant amounts of knowledge and expertise from working with third parties, this means that you need to ensure that that your partners are well trained, aware of the implication of invading a customer’s privacy, the need for opting in customers, and therefore they should work stringently with best practice data and customer privacy management at the forefront of their thinking. They are your customers after all.

Is McDonald’s ‘Lovin’ it’?

If you can’t oversee how your data is being used by an agency or a service provider, it could be quite damaging to your customer relationships and your brand itself. Good data management includes suppressing the details of those who’ve elected to opt out of the campaign, or any form of communication with your firm. McDonald’s also learnt a valuable lesson recently. Although this probably didn’t involve a third party of one sort or another, it’s still an invaluable case study. McDonald’s sent out SMS messages to customers promoting its new toasted deli sandwich.

But it didn’t include the STOP command within the text message, claiming that an opt-out was provided on its campaign website. Following some heavy criticism from the likes of the DMA, says New Media Age on 25th June 2007, regulators and the mobile industry, it relented and so now the command is now included, allowing customers to opt out without having to go elsewhere.

Customer forgetfulness

Nick Fuller, and the Chair of the DMA’s Mobile Marketing Council, raises an important point too when he says, “I have certainly had experience of consumers complaining about things, only to find out that they had already given permission”; they then say “Oh! I forgot about that!” It’s quite common for the majority of media owners to use third party aggregators in his experience, “as soon as a consumer complains, the media owner go back to the record of that consumer and specify what kind of permission they have and whether it is correct.”

“There should be no question of getting it wrong”, adds Opal Media’s Keith Dibble. So if you decide to outsource your campaigns, the Service Level Agreement (SLA) needs to establish the appropriate procedures and processes for managing both your customers and their personal data. The guidelines and the legal obligations established by UK and the relevant EU directives on electronic communication should be enforced when you manage the campaign internally. It should be easier to manage customer data internally though; compared to when a third party is expected to do so on your behalf. There’s always a greater risks that something could go wrong.

Still there are a number of players working together within the mobile ecosystem, adding a range of skills to the melting pot. Some outsourcing may form part of an internal campaign too. Even so, a mobile marketing dashboard can make the entire process of managing in-house campaigns and life that much simpler. Anyone can do it with just a few minutes of training. Compliance to best practice is the integral keyword.

About the Author

Lee Bowden is Director of Piri Ltd, a solution provider for mobile marketing. Email: lee@piriltd.com