What is Mobile Marketing?
Mobile marketing is the use of wireless media as a means to deliver content. This can be paired with traditional media to create an unparalleled level of interactivity.
How Effective is it?
A cell phone is an individual’s most personal device. It keeps them connected to friends, family, and in recent years, to their favorite brands and businesses. The use of mobile has grown exponentially in the past decade, and SMS marketing has become a powerful tool to communicate and activate consumers.
- There are 285,610,580 mobile phones in the U.S.
- The average number of texts has gone up 566% in just two years, far surpassing the average number of calls, which has stayed nearly steady
- 7 trillion texts were sent worldwide in 2011 from 4.8 billion phones
- 60% of 45 year olds were found to be just as likely to use SMS as they were to make voice calls from their mobile device.
- If only able to take 1 item with when leaving the house, more than one-third of mobile users would choose their cell phone over their wallet, keys, laptop or digital music player
Sources: Nielson’s Customer Value Metrics, ABI Research, Tekelec Survey, CTIA
What are some of the Key Terms for Mobile Marketing?
Short Messaging Service – (aka SMS) allows the sending of short message, normally with text only content; often referred to as a text message.
Multimedia Messaging Service – (aka MMS) allows the sending of a message that includes rich content like a photo or video.
Wireless Application Protocol – (aka WAP) is a now outdated protocol used to enable access to the mobile web from a mobile phone or PDA. A WAP browser provides all of the basic services of a computer based web browser but simplified to operate within the restrictions of a mobile phone. Occasionally a mobile website is still erroneously referred to as a WAP site.
Mobile Application – (aka App) is a program that runs locally on a mobile device, storing frequently used data (i.e.usernames, geographic location, favorites) and is designed to take advantage of the unique characteristics of that particular smartphone model (i.e. geo-location, camera, accelerometer).
Who Regulates the Mobile Space?
The mobile space is regulated by several governmental and non-profit organizations who strive to continue to make mobile marketing a powerful form of communication between businesses and consumers.
Mobile Marketing Association is a global non-profit committed to the healthy growth of mobile marketing amongst all market players. Their frequently updated Best Practices document is a useful resource to ensuring a successful and legal mobile marketing campaign.
CTIA is an international association for the wireless telecommunications industry. Their CTIA Compliance Monitoring and Enforcement Playbook is also helpful resource for designing and implementing a compliant mobile marketing campaign.
Federal Communications Commission is an independent government agency in charge of wireless communication regulation. They have stated that SMS spam messages to mobile phones are illegal under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and the CAN-SPAM Act.