01/12/11 by Trevor Oldak | Blog, Development Blog | 3 Comments »
Cellit Studio is the most robust mobile couponing, mobile marketing, and interactive text messaging platform in the world. As an engineer at Cellit, one of my primary tasks is to add new features and capabilities to Cellit Studio and its underlying platform. Here are a few of the many features that we have added to Cellit Studio over the past six months.
Real-Time Charting
Now, when you launch a mobile campaign, you can see real-time data and statistics on what your users are texting in, and what they’re receiving back as responses. This data is updated as it happens. Try it for yourself! Log in to Studio, click ‘Review’, and then ‘Keyword Activity’, and then text in one of your keywords. The chart should update almost instantaneously.
What’s even cooler: Click on any day on the chart. You’ll be able to drill down to see hour-by-hour activity. All of this information is exportable to XLS, CSV, or PDF.
Mapping
When someone texts in, we can gather some basic information about them from just their phone number, such as the state from which their area code originates. Now, in Cellit Studio, you can see a map of where people are texting in from, or where the most people are redeeming mobile coupons. Are the majority of your participants from Massachusetts? Arizona? What kind of text-message marketing and mobile advertising are you doing in your most successful areas?
What’s even cooler: Click on any state in the map to zoom in and see what area codes within the state are yielding the best results.
AND/OR Rule Groupings in the Campaign Launcher
Let’s say you want to message people who were sent your last message, or people who texted one of your keywords in the past three days. Most text messaging platforms, if they can do either of those, can’t do both at the same time, and you’d have to set up two campaigns. And then you would have to worry about people who could be in both campaigns and receive the message twice. Now, Cellit Studio lets you create complex campaign recipient rules with speed and ease, so you can better target your campaigns in the most effective way possible. This saves you time and energy and increases the effectiveness of your mobile marketing campaign.
Target by Time Zone or State
Another new feature of the campaign launcher is that you can now send a message to people with area codes in a specific state. That way, your ice cream discounts can go to those in Texas, while your Alaskan subscribers receive the hot chocolate coupon. Or, you can have a campaign that goes out at 8AM AST to those in the Bahamas, 8AM HST to those in Hawaii, and 8AM in the respective time zones of everyone in between.
In-line expiration dates
Now, you can create coupons that expire at a time relative to when the subscriber receives the message. That way, someone who receives a coupon on December 6th can have it expire on the 13th, while someone who receives it on the 12th may have until the 19th. This is especially powerful when incorporated with our coupon redemption software, Widgit.
12/16/10 by David Wachs | Blog, Marketing Blog | 1 Comment »
Today’s Mobile Marketer features an article about the need for companies to promote their mobile marketing initiatives. The article focuses on a study by Burson-Marsteller that mentions that only 39% of companies with mobile offerings highlight them on their website.
This is of no surprise to us at Cellit. In fact, Commitment is one of the Four C’s of a strong mobile marketing strategy (the other three being Content, Cadence, and Compliance). (Ok, so we used to have 3 C’s; we just added Compliance. You heard it here first.)
Commitment is so obvious, but so often lacking. Let me give you some examples from our clients.
- We have a strong presence on Broadway, powering many of the mobile initiatives on the Great White Way either directly or through one of our marketing firm partners. For one major show, we were told by the client (a marketing firm), that despite having a three-story tall billboard smack-dab in the center of Times Square, they were only getting about three texts a day! “Clearly texting (and mobile marketing) does does not work!” I was perplexed. I asked if we could take a walk by the billboard, which we did, and sure enough, there was a three-story tall billboard smack-dab in the middle of Times Square! And then I saw the problem. While the billboard was three stories tall, the call to action to text in was about 6 inches tall and barely visible! While this may seem obvious to us, the ad firm and the Broadway show didn’t even think that without promoting the mobile initiative, nobody would text in. Live and learn.
- We work with a major “big box” retailer. In the last 2 years of working with us, they’ve built up a list of only a few thousand subscribers. With over 600 stores nationwide, and millions of shoppers a year, this seems unbelievable. We walked into the stores to see why, and looked high and low to find evidence of their mobile program. Nothing. Nobody who worked in the store even knew about the mobile program! We can push and push, but in the end it’s up to the client to execute.
For those that do commit to mobile, the results can be drastically different! Here’s some examples:
- A major specialty retailer started with us a few months ago. They plastered mobile calls to action all over their stores, in their FSIs, and on their web and Facebook pages. Wouldn’t you know it, just 2 months later this client now has over 250,000 subscribers!!! Mobile works… you just have to commit.
- For a small sub shop (a single location in Sacramento), the owners required the clerks to ask each and every customer to sign up. Within 2 months, they had over 2,000 subscribers. (This is more than the entire big-box retailer had after two years!).
So, as we end 2010, and start 2011, you should consider your mobile strategy. How do you want 2011 to look? Can you commit to mobile? The costs of doing so are minimal, but the results can be dramatic.
11/09/10 by Cellit Staff | Industry News, News | No Comments »
With the holiday season quickly approaching, Sam’s Club revved up their marketing engines this summer to prepare for the launch of a mobile microsite, holiday microsite and an application for iPhones, Blackberry and Android phones.
With 40% of their customers using smart phones, Sam’s Club saw the mobile microsites and application as a way to interact with their customers in the way they wanted to be interacted with.
“We wanted to create a multichannel experience so our members can interact with Sam’s Club in the way they want to interact, and with eValues, they can access the coupons any way they want to get them, including from their mobile device,” said Jason Jackson, Senior Director of Member Program Development at Sam’s Club.
To read more about Sam’s Club’s holiday mobile marketing solutions, click here.
11/08/10 by Cellit Staff | Blog, Marketing Blog | No Comments »
I’ve written before on the process a business should go through in determining whether or not a mobile application, mobile website, or sms strategy is appropriate for the specific business needs. Despite the social pressure and media focus on applications, they are not for every business. There are many aspects to consider in making the application/no application decision, not the least of which is cost and overall benefit. But I recently realized that there’s another consideration that is a by-product of the huge success of applications that has been here-fore not been addressed. That consideration is discovery.
Let’s just assume that you’ve made the decision to go ahead and build an application. You’ve carefully considered your clients needs, usage habits and put in lots of wonderful features that take advantage of the unique gizmo’s and whizbangs that only the latest HTC blah-blah-blah offers. You’ve decided on the mix of platforms that make sense to develop on, weighing penetration and available features for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows7. Several months of development later, and tens of thousands of dollars, you’re ready to make it available to the world. With one click the application is uploaded to the application store of your choice and the world is a better place.
Now what?
Your wonderful addition to productivity, entertainment or user experience now competes with tens-of-thousands or hundreds-of-thousands of other applications to be found. Unless your company is very lucky to show up on the ‘most popular’ or newest pages for a significant period of time, users will only discover your application if you 1) tell them about it, and 2) help them find it.
There are some services out there that will help your business navigate customers to the application. One I recently read about was GetJar, which provides one link that a customer can click on. When a customer does so, the service automatically detects the platform and serves up the appropriate download page for your smart phone application. I’m sure there are others, and feel free to post a link below on any that you’ve seen that would be of use.
However, in my opinion, the bigger issue is informing customers about the application. Each business has limited marketing means – if not in actual dollars that can be spent, then in meaningful touch points through which they can engage the customer base (ie – email newsletters, in-store signage, homepage space, etc). With the many messages that need to get out (Sale today! See our new products! Sign up for our loyalty club! as examples), this is just one more message that will compete for attention.
To sum it up – it’s not just enough to commit the time, energy and resources to make an application, it’s also important that a company commit the time, energy and resources to inform consumers about the application.
