07/05/10 by Brian Bauer | Blog, Marketing Blog | No Comments »
If you’re reading this blog, you’re either a smart young professional or a budding business owner. Time is of the essence, and you’ve got lots of things to do, mountains to climb, and success to accumulate. Sad, but true – 60% of the public (read, people like you) still have either a flip phone or a feature phone (those smart-phone wannabe’s with full keyboards). And it’s time that number changed dramatically.
Here are my five reasons why you should run out right now, regardless of when your contract comes up for renewal, and purchase a new smart phone:
1) 40% of people already have. While that’s not quite half, the rate at which people are purchasing smart phones is only increasing.
2) There are amazing productivity gains to be had from a smart phone. In addition to checking email and quickly looking at mobile websites – things like integrated calendaring, a complete address book and syncing with your desktop will help you move the ball forward. It was only recently that I stopped writing down addresses, relying on my calendar and mapping software to instantly look up my next destination.
3)Apps, Apps, and more Apps. More and more companies are finding innovative ways to integrate with a smart phone. Whether its games, Facebook, Twitter or a more substantive business application – your phone becomes a one-device connection to your personal and work life.
4) Because my mom has one. Well, not really … but certainly there are plenty of people around you that squirm when you pull the old clunker out.
5) Mobile is passing you by. The mobile world is evolving quickly, and those not participating in it will be left behind. Whether you like it or not, your customers, employees and friends are purchasing a smart phone – and being able to anticipate how they could use it will only help you grow your business.
I purchased a Blackberry Curve two years ago, and am now finding myself feeling outdated and left behind. Like you, it’s time for me to upgrade. The big question for me is Android vs. iPhone, which seems to be a personal decision for most people. So join me this holiday weekend in jumping in fully.
01/31/10 by David Wachs | Blog, Industry Blog | No Comments »
Often, we at Cellit get asked the question “isn’t mobile marketing just like sending emails?” or “couldn’t Twitter accomplish the same thing as text messaging”? We certainly do not believe so. Each technology has it’s pros and cons, and can be dissected and analyzed along many different lines. In this article, we try to evaluate direct media qualitatively across three main criteria: immediacy, personalization, and engagement. We have attempted to visually place each media on a 3-dimensional chart, showing immediacy on the X-axis, personalization on the Y-axis, and sizing the bubble on the chart according to the relative level of engagement:
Let’s walk through each media, explaining our justification for its levels of immediacy, personalization, and engagement.
Relative Immediacy, Personalization and Engagement
- Print: Print’s marketing abilities cannot be understated. There’s simply no comparison for holding a marketing message in your hand, especially if it’s customized for your specific target. That print piece will live on beyond the duration of the campaign (if it isn’t tossed to the trash) and can be pinned to the family refrigerator, sit on the coffee table, or (for better or worse) litter the streets. However, on the spectrum of immediacy, print falls short. The piece must be designed, printed and shipped. Each step can lead to days or weeks of delay. As such, we give print a -5 on the relative immediacy scale.On the spectrum of personalization (the Y axis), print does “neutral to well”. Print can (for a price) be customized with the target’s name and specialized marketing message. However, this customization comes with a hard cost, as well as soft costs like delays in the printing and sorting process.Finally, on the engagement spectrum (the relative size of the bubble in the chart), print again falls short with the lowest score. In today’s junk-mail infused world, there’s simply no guarantee your expensive print piece will be read (or even opened). In fact, an often-touted good response rate in print is 1%! As such, we give print a neutral relative engagement.
- Email: Email, today’s marketing mainstay, is decreasing in value, as it goes the over-used way of print. On the immediacy spectrum, email scored well. While email is delivered instantly, it can sit in the user’s inbox for quite a while until it is read. This issue dropped email from first place to second in this category.On the personalization spectrum, email is top of the pack. There is now doubt that emails can be micro-personalized, it terms of content and layout, to appeal to the reader. Unlike a text message or a tweet, emails can include rich graphics and pages of content. There’s simply no rival to email in terms of customization.In terms of engagement, email does surprisingly poor, being only slightly better than a print piece. Email, for the most part, is a one-way street. The only interaction is potentially through a web link to online content. As such the size of email’s bubble is only slightly better than print.
- Twitter: Twitter has one of the more interesting placements on the chart, which may be surprising at first. However, I think you’ll agree with our final analysis.First, in terms of immediacy, Twitter is somewhere between print and email. This is for two reasons:
(A) For most, people receive their tweets when their Twitter app (such as TweetDeck) is open, or they are visiting the Twitter web site. While people may do this with some frequency, we believe people can nearly be guaranteed to have their email open.
(B) Due to “tweet overload” your message may never be read. When we look at who’s following Cellit on Twitter, we find our followers also follow thousands of other people. Thousands! As such, we find it hard to believe that these users would read most of these tweets. Additionally, unlike email that basically informs you of how many unread emails you have, unread tweets fall off the display never to be read again. Our findings were recently backed up by a potential client (a Fortune 100 retailer) that mentioned their Twitter-only offers get about a 1% redemption rate–the same as print.In terms of personalization, Twitter is the worst in the pack. While Twitter has introduced the concept of list management, each sent tweet is the same and not customized. As such, it receives our lowest relative ranking.
Twitter is, however, second-best in terms of engagement, due to the unique “re-tweet” culture, where users repost tweets. Additionally, Tweeter followers can respond to Tweets, although there is no real mechanism for managing the back-and-forth interaction.
- Text Messaging (SMS): Lastly, we have text messaging. Not surprisingly, Cellit (a company dedicated to mobile messaging) scored the medium highly across all three dimensions. However, we did so trying to be as honest as possible with the technology:On the immediacy scale, text messaging is the clear winner. Each text is delivered directly to the user’s phone, causing the phone to beep, blink, and vibrate. A little flag stays visible on the phone until the text is read. Unlike emails, which come in so fast a furious most people turn off their audible notification, for most, the notification stays on for text. There is no doubt that texting is the most immediate method of communication available.Regarding personalization, texting also fares well. While not as robust as email, text messages can be customized with specific content for the end user, including their name, custom coupon tracking codes, and requested content. While email takes this much farther, with images and formatting (features not available via SMS), text messaging is firmly in second place in this category.In terms of engagement, text messaging is the clear winner. Our text messaging platform creates an engaging, back-and-forth “conversation” with the participant. Text messaging isn’t about “outbound blasts”. Through these back-and-forth conversations, we are able to run surveys, play games, collect data, and more. Additionally, engagement is high with text messaging for some of the same reasons as on the immediacy spectrum: text messages are hard to ignore. Because of the beeps, vibrations and flashes, people tend to notice the texts and interact with them. This leads to much higher response rates. Our mobile coupons, for example, often get a 20-30% redemption rate!
While each format has its own benefits, one thing is clear: to say that Twitter, texting and email are all the same is simply not the case. Each format should be used appropriately, and no one technology should be considered a replacement for the other. It is because of this, that the job of today’s direct (or interactive) marketer has gotten harder. With the growing list of mediums out there, each marketer must know when to yield which marketing axe. We, at Cellit, are here to help you with that decision. Please feel free to call upon us to determine how best to reach your customer. We’re happy to help you with your entire planning process, and help you execute on the mobile messaging part of the resulting strategy.
11/13/09 by Brian Bauer | Blog, Marketing Blog | No Comments »
As email has evolved from text only to graphic-heavy, branded communications – the technology behind them has grown increasingly complex. Marketers have included tracking links, served ads and complex tables to better organize the massive amounts of data we cram into emails. To further complicate this, consumers are managing how and where they read their emails – providing marketers with a host of limitations to this influx of technology.
The consumer is ultimately in control – especially when it comes to email. These individuals can choose whether to read their email via an online interface, through Outlook or Entourage, or have that same email forwarded to a smart phone. And there’s very little one can do to track or change those habits, as many (including myself) do all of the above at some point throughout the day. The simple solution is to allow consumers the option of an HTML or text only version … however, that presumes I want the same experience for every medium. So what is a marketer to do?
Mobile Marketer recently had a great article on this subject, and I decided to add Cellit’s perspective – as we’ve done some consulting work on behalf of our clients in this area. Here are some high level thoughts on how you can optimize email for the mobile device:
Quickly get the end user to an alternative format: we’ve all seen the saying “can’t read this email, click here”. The problem is that oftentimes the verbiage is included after a header graphic, or includes a tracking link. It literally should be the very first bit of code put into an HTML email, which will ensure that it’s the first thing a user reads.Make the link short: there’s no reason to collect user data on the link to an alternative version. The inconvenience and degradation of the user experience far outweighs the incremental value. By creating a human readable link, you more quickly get the end user to the content – which is the real value.Create an optimized Mobile version: the alternative version doesn’t have to be just text .. in fact, it can be just as awesome as the original version. Just because a phone doesn’t render email in HTML doesn’t mean it can’t do so on the web. That being said, each phone has a different screen size and capabilities – so you’ll want to work with a vendor to use mobile user agent detection so that you can appropriately scale and format the content to meet these changing requirements.Email doesn’t have to be hard when viewed via mobile device. With a little bit of thought, you can avoid many of the mistakes and create a good user experience that covers the gamut of places users check their email.
04/25/07 by Cellit Staff | Blog, Industry Blog | No Comments »
While sleep may remain safe from work for now (for those of us who actually sleep now and then), its tenuous grasp on isolation from the daily grind has slipped another notch with the concerted effort to allow cell phone usage on airplanes.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority says that it has enabled a limited evaluation of GSM mobile phones and GPRS devices on a commercial aircraft. The evaluation, which is limited to one aircraft for up to 12 months, will be conducted by the national carrier, Qantas. The evaluation will be conducted on one Qantas passenger aircraft operating only on domestic Australian routes. Qantas has decided to commence the evaluation with email and text only, disabling voice services. ACMA and other government bodies will then consider the potential for permanent regulatory arrangements for the service once the results of the evaluation are known.
Furthermore, starting in July, Air France will conduct a six-month trial in which customers flying on the Airbus A318 will be able to send text messages and emails from their cell phones. For the last half of the trial passengers will also be able to use voice services. The service is expected to initially cost between $2.30 and $2.50 for making in-flight calls. For texts and emails, no formal pricing plan has been released by the airlines.
Air France said it is aware of the potential annoyance of in-flight mobile phone conversations and so, at the end of each flight during the trial, passengers will be given a questionnaire for feedback on the service.
BMI and Ryanair have also explored the possibility of enabling mobile services on their aircraft, but have been delayed by certification procedures.
With wireless signals become more and more ubiquitous, now working in most indoor spaces and even in underground spots such as subways, airplanes are one of the last places that people cannot use their mobile phones. Although email can still be used, the lack of voice communication has forced some of us to relax and take a much-needed break from the 24/7 work week. It has also allowed those of us without a mobile device attached to our hip a brief respite from businessmen and teenagers who seemingly have no regard for how disruptive and annoying they can be, especially those who haven’t realized that cell phone technology has progressed to the point that one no longer needs to shout into the handset to be heard. If your company, your friend, or your significant other cannot exist without your constant input for the length of a flight, then perhaps that relationship is too demanding in the first place.
Hopefully these trials will be so annoying to those on the plane that the airlines will be forced to abandon the project. Yet, I seem to remember everybody saying that reality television was on the way out about five years ago because most viewers thought it was annoying, and if you need any further proof that this death knell was premature, I just saw an ad for the casting of The Real World 20. At least wireless carriers haven’t penetrated our dreams; yet.
