Show Me the Data!

In the marketing world, good data is not easy to come by. Many marketers operate according to their guts. Those who are visually creative, or just plain gifted, can often get away with that. For the rest of us, the scramble for data is a never ending quest. We work with mobile and we see the positive effects that mobile marketing has on for our clients-- and we know our existing clients are happy because they are always coming back for more campaigns. But how do we convince those who have not yet dipped their toes in the ocean of mobile marketing that mobile produces results? Quantifying which ideas are working, and how much better they are than the last campaign, is often difficult. Last week I shared some macro-data about SMS usage among the general population. This week I’ll provide some thoughts and data on mobile marketing campaigns that have been chronicled in the past year or so.

First up is the Pizza Hut campaign which ran in Pittsburgh in April 2009. More than 12,000 texted in after a television spot prompted viewers to use text for a chance to win free pizza for a year. Here we see the importance of a traditional advertising call-to-action –mobile marketing is one part of the marketing mix. In this case the interactive portion is blended with the traditional marketing format (broadcast television) with great results. (For a variety of reasons, the most important of which is that we want to maintain our stellar record of carrier compliance, Unwired Appeal does not offer "Forward" campaigns to our clients.)

Next is the brick and mortar campaign run by “Faith” in the UK in February of 2010. The perhaps risky thing about this campaign is that double opt-in was NOT used – all of the messages that were sent out were sent using an opted-in mobile database. Though we don’t find out whether any customers complained about the service, we do find the a promising short-term metric: Revenues during the promotion period. Apparently revenues were up 47% during the Friends and Family promotion.

The last case study was for a car dealership in Jacksonville, FL. In this case, double opt-in *was* used. We find data gold in the double-opt in acceptance rates: Just under 10% of the text message recipients opted to continue receive additional alerts. Those 10% were the equivalent of lead gold for the dealer’s salespeople – here is the ultimate target demographic: People who asked, twice, to receive more information about new cars, and people who willingly gave their phone numbers in order to be contacted for more info.

The devil is often in the details in any marketing campaign, and mobile marketing is no exception. In these case studies, so generously provided by Mobile Marketer, we get a rare glimpse into tactics that the mobile marketers are using. Sharing data like this makes the industry, as a whole, stronger.