Mobile marketing: why you need to opt-in it to win it

Textlocal’s new Mobile Customer Experience Report reveals some surprising and motivating messages around opt-in mobile marketing from over 330 companies of all sizes.

Despite its youth as a media channel, opt-in mobile marketing is already used by nearly two-thirds of businesses; perhaps a surprising level of uptake, but one that is rewarding marketers with SMS open rates of over 99% and exciting campaign response rates averaging over 30%.

These are bold results for mobile, but marketers are reporting benefits beyond these: especially the ability to create and use highly segmented data lists around age, location, gender, previous campaign response, customer loyalty, communication preferences and any number of personal likes and dislikes. This degree of data collection is both the cause and result of the success of opt-in mobile marketing – and, unsurprisingly, uptake in both opt-in mobile marketing and more sophisticated data collection and usage is a high priority for over half of businesses over the next few years.

Where does your business fit in with the opt-in trend? Here we break down the findings of the report to give you a detailed idea of the shape of mobile marketing now and mobile marketing yet to come.

Marketers’ uptake of opt-in mobile marketing
Almost 11% of businesses already view mobile as the most effective marketing channel, and a further 11% expect mobile to become the most effective channel. More than one-quarter of businesses stated that mobile complements all other channels. All in all, mobile is viewed as an effective or soon-to-be effective channel by almost 50% of businesses today.

Given that online took more than a decade to achieve widespread acceptance among businesses as a marketing channel, mobile’s rise has been meteoric in comparison. Opt-in marketing is the most popular mobile strategy for businesses across the UK, with 55% of businesses claiming they use the service – and an additional 10% of businesses having an opt-in database for picture messaging, as well as third-party services. Interestingly, there are almost twice as many businesses using opt-in mobile marketing than have launched a mobile site (33.2%), and almost three times as many businesses than have developed an app (20%). This is somewhat surprising, given the hype around apps especially, as well as the mobile internet. Businesses have clearly identified the effectiveness and power of opt-in mobile marketing.

Database is king
For the majority of businesses in the UK, capturing mobile details has so far been something of an after-thought. But the encouraging development is that the majority of these businesses are now actively addressing this abundant lack of critical customer data.

Around 45% of businesses surveyed have a total database of less than 1,000 entries; just over 40% of businesses store between 1,000 and 100,000 entries; 5% have between 100,000 and 1 million; and 8.3% have over 1 million.

Interestingly, 42% of businesses have a mobile number for more than half of their total database, compared to one-third of businesses that have mobile numbers for less than 20% of their total database.

But a quarter of businesses do know age, gender, location and preferences for their consumers, and a further 16% of businesses are presently developing their database to capture this information. 13% of businesses have asked a number of questions during the opt-in process, and 5% will add occasional questions of likes and dislikes to their database. Just 6% of businesses use profiling fed into a CRM platform directly from campaigns to develop an in-depth and contextual ongoing understanding of their mobile customers.

Encouraging data sharing
To build a mobile database, 17.7% of businesses incentivise a data exchange and drive customer retention with a competition or a giveaway, 12.8% have a loyalty scheme, and 2.8% have a mobile-only loyalty scheme. One-third of businesses believe they are a trusted brand and that this is incentive enough for customers to opt-in and accept their communications.

Segment for success
So how is this data being applied to campaigns?

The majority of businesses (51.4%), as might be expected, segment their database dependent on the campaign; whilst 31% of businesses claim to segment their database by location, 21% by demographic, 18% by data acquired during the opt-in process, 17% updated from previous campaigns and 10% by gender. Just 21% of businesses do not segment their database.

Whilst 19% use the same segmentation techniques across their total database, 11% will use more simplified segmentation techniques on mobile. A little under 10% of businesses use advanced targeting to maximise their mobile marketing campaign performance.

But there is a growing trend to deliver targeted campaigns, as 25% of businesses said that they intend to segment their mobile database for future campaigns, leaving a little over one-third of businesses with no intention of segmenting its mobile database. This could mean that over 50% of businesses will be using advanced targeting segmentation techniques for all mobile marketing activity in the near future.

One of the clear take-outs from the research is that the majority of businesses understand the need to develop an opt-in database that continually updates each mobile customer’s profile. While only a minority of businesses could be said to be using such techniques, the next wave of businesses have commenced their journey to capture customer data.

Read the full Mobile Customer Experience Report

By DMA guest blogger Darren Daws, member of the DMA Mobile & Connected Marketing Council, Managing Director and co-founder of Textlocal