Waterfall’s own Matt Silk outlines best practices for mobile marketing in an exclusive opinion essay for DMNews that posted today.
DMNews, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, is acknowledged as one of the top trade publications in the direct marketing space. This is Matt’s second post for DMNews’ “InDirectly” blog.
You can check out Matt’s post here.
Last week, this court ruling reminded me of a great decision Waterfall Mobile made in its early days.
It was February 24, 2006. Waterfall’s product team was sitting in our just-built conference room discussing consumer privacy. The conversation hinged on this critical point: that the mobile phone is one of the most personal effects a person has. As a point of ethics we knew we needed to respect that fact, so we unanimously decided to do whatever we could to build a product with built-in privacy protections.
Back then mobile companies were popping up left and right – and many of them weren’t bothering to follow the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA)’s strict campaign guidelines (pdf). Also at around that time, Waterfall had received some suspect requests from would-be clients.
After getting a few of these fishy new business opportunities, we opted to form a compliance team, one that still exists to this day. At least one member of each department (Product, Client Services, Sales & Engineering) sits on the committee.
Waterfall’s compliance committee reviews all major campaigns and collateral, approving all the items on this checklist:
In addition, we’ve created a very strict list upload policy, which ensures that the client has obtained its list of user numbers legally, and takes responsibility for same.
The result of all this? In a handful of cases, the committee has made decisions that resulted in Waterfall asking the client to take their business elsewhere. That’s a tough pill to swallow, but I wouldn’t have it any other way – because Waterfall has built a hard-earned reputation as a company that follows the rules.
The MMA, CTIA, mobile carriers and aggregators have made excellent progress coming together with simple and unified campaign regulations, and now take the step of routinely auditing active campaigns. These auditors check the message flow and the marketing collateral, and both are scored.
It’s always a pleasure when Waterfall receives an audit from a carrier or our aggregators. Why? Because most of the time we get perfect scores.
It is my distinct honor to send these high scores along to the rest of the Waterfall team, and a personal source of pride for me – because I know we’re doing our part to maintain the integrity of the mobile ecosystem.
I’m glad we made the right call on February 24, 2006.
I love getting messages sent to my phone. Makes me feel cool when I’m standing in line at the post office or at the airport and my phone buzzes with a new message. I feel in the know, informed about things that are relevant to my life.
I’m also an avid golf fan. I respect the meticulous exactitude required to be successful at the game, and appreciate those in the professional ranks for their ability to overcome nerves and execute with such precision.
As a way of combining these two interests, I have signed up for two different tournament leader board alert services over the last year. One from NBC Sports, powered by Simplewire, and one from PGATOUR.com, powered by Turner Broadcasting.
In the interest of best practices, user experience, and ultimately, me feeling cool at the post office, let’s dig a little and try to understand both by deconstructing each service.
First, lets get a feel for the alert content. For this I chose an update from both services from the end of the first round last week at the St. Jude Classic in Memphis, Tennessee.
Four elements comprise a successful alert campaign. Let’s break each category down, using these two messages as examples.
1. Initial Call-to-Action:
I signed up for NBC alerts because the network’s golf broadcasts contain clear and concise onscreen calls-to-action (“Text GOLF to 51515”). That, and the announcers remind viewers to sign up every hour or so.
To sign up for the PGATOUR alerts, I had to dig around on their website and came across a page with all sorts of confusing calls-to-action to different alerts.
The PGA could improve this experience (and increase sign ups) by either having a widget on the FanZone page that accepts my phone number and maybe a selector for which alerts are available, or make one keyword that returns a menu to the user to let them select which they want to sign up for. (Doing this also allows for more powerful branding of a single keyword across other channels.)
Just to note, I also tried to sign up for CBSSportsline golf alerts, but at the moment they don’t exist. Odd, since CBS covers more tournaments than NBC does.
2. Timeliness:
By nature, score alerts are most useful when they arrive in a timely fashion – when the round ends, or during a break in the action.
In our example, the first round ended around 3:30pm PT. But both alerts arrived to my phone almost two hours later.
By comparison, the average shot and score for an online leader board is posted about 3-5 minutes after the score is recorded. So if the round finished at 3:30pm and the final scores are in by 3:35pm, then to be effective the alert should be arriving no later then 4pm, right? By 5:16 and 5:20 PM (when I received the alerts), I already had watched a broadcast of SportsCenter and knew who was in the lead.
Now I could have still been away from home or internet, and appreciated receiving the updates then, but overall the delay rendered the alerts less effective.
One cause for the delay could be that hundreds of thousands of gold fans have subscribed to each service – but I doubt it (and can’t confirm either way, because no publicly accessible stats are available).
Bottom line: NBC and PGATOUR could and should find a way to speed this up.
3. Character count:
The maximum allowed characters for an SMS message is 160 characters. Not a lot, but enough to get critical information out. Let’s see the character count for these two services:
NBC – 113 chars
PGATOUR.COM – 107 chars
Both services are well under the 160 characters, but both pack in some good information. I do think both could have filled the extra characters with something else here. While each needs to be concerned about the length of the leaderboard names, and how the character count can alter any other included content, there are ways to solve these issues (such as truncation and dynamic filters). More on that in the content section.
4. Content:
Content is king, right? To start, let’s dive into NBCs alert:
The first line tells us who the alert is from, NBC and what tournament and round it is, St. Jude Classic, Round 1. So far, so good.
Next, we easily see the top four golfers and their scores and the (F) indicates that is their final score for the day. Again, exactly what I want to see. Good.
Last, a link is provided to the mobile NBC sports website. It’s a nice up-sell, and sometimes I am almost compelled to click it.
Overall, well presented. NBC also includes an up-sell for another service with their in-round updates. For example, the alert I received from them at 2:02pm PT had this up-sell at the bottom: *Reply TENNIS for NBC tennis news/alerts.
(Smart of them to up-sell their own services. Since I like golf I must also like tennis and probably drive a BMW too.)
The alert I received at 11:02am PT had this up-sell at the bottom: *Free Baller Tones http://mvp7.us/3y. Random inserted ad, but nice to see at least they are offsetting their message costs by inserting ads. The SMS industry needs more solid examples of this to demonstrate traction.
Now, let’s look at the PGATOUR’s alert:
The first line tells us who the alert is from (PGATOUR) and the second tells us what round. They fail to mention which tournament this alert is for, so a point off their score for that.
Next, we also see the top four golfers on the leader board listed. They must think we have poor vision, or are very excited to alert us, as each golfers name is in ALL CAPS. This is annoying so let’s dock them another point.
Also, notice there is no indication if the golfer is finished (F) or say on the 15th hole (15) of an in-round update. Standard leader board practice is to give an indication of last hole finished. Another point docked, that’s three so far.
Next is a link to their full website, pgatour.com, which strikes me as odd, since I’m on my phone and not a computer. Why not promote the url of their (admittedly pretty nice) mobile site @ mobile.pgatour.com instead? Fourth point off.
Last, let’s look at the information on how to unsubscribe. This is important and required by the carriers so I’ll give them props for adding it, but reply STOP PLB? Why not reply STOP instead? There is a good chance I won’t remember the exact keyword (PLB) I signed up to. And as we all know, making the process more intuitive means I’m a happier subscriber.
In Summary
Overall, I give NBC an 8 and PGATOUR.com a 6 (out of 10).
Two ways NBC can improve their score (and increase their subscriber count) are:
Ultimately, I will still stay subscribed to both (I’m in the business, and enjoy these kinds of things) but every time I see these issues, I hope they listen to their subscribers and continually look to improve the experience. After all, a better end user experience is healthy for the industry, the subscribers and the PGA Tour itself.
Ok, back to the Golf Channel. :)
(Craig Stoe runs Product and Operations at Waterfall and can often be found playing an early round at Harding Park before work.)
According to Internet Retailer’s new survey of retailers and manufacturers, a variety of innovative e-mail marketing tactics are increasing the effectiveness of the medium. Following up on a recent blog entry about the importance of CRM, these tactics are all fantastic additional ways to further extend your company’s relationship with its customers.
And the best part – the tactics mentioned in the article don’t need to apply exclusively to e-mail marketing. Rather than wait two years for someone to publish the same results and guidance on mobile marketing, I’m going to go out on a limb here and propose that these very same tactics can hone your mobile marketing as well!
Each of the tactics mentioned in Internet Retailer’s survey would also increase ROI for mobile marketing efforts and require very little effort to execute:
If you’d like to learn more about how Waterfall Mobile can help your campaign leverage some of these tactics to extend your company’s relationship with its customers, hit me up at msilk@waterfallmobile.com.
For marketers, mobile widgets are interactive tools that enhance a marketing strategy. The flexibility of mobile widgets maximize screen space and allow marketers to create and build a direct-to-consumer subscriber lists for strategic targeted marketing. Mobile widgets change the way marketers approach a marketing campaign.
What is a Mobile Widget?
A mobile widget is simple code (flash or html) placed on a site, company page, Myspace, Facebook or marketing banner. Customers enter their mobile phone number and receive a text message. The text could be a mobile opt-in to receive mobile alerts, WAP site to a mobile internet page or channel to send multimedia content to subscribers’ mobile phones.
Here are a few great examples of mobile widgets designed by Waterfall Mobile partners and a few considerations to help deliver on your strategic mobile marketing objectives.
“Today, SMS messaging is really the only viable, interactive means of reaching people on a massive scale around the nation. The mobile channel also represents an enormous untapped potential for changing health behavior on a massive scale.”
“(Mobile marketing) has the opportunity to help make the healthcare system more efficient, to help agencies make better use of existing data, to help reduce costs and to help consumers improve their health and their lives through a medium they understand and embrace.”
The healthcare industry is beginning to leverage the advantages of mobile marketing. Healthcare professionals and marketers look for innovative ideas to increase communication and enahance relationships with loyal patients. With text, voice and WAP mobile marketing, healthcare marketers can extend branding reach, create two-way relationships with patients and provide interactive customer support and follow up.
For more information on text, voice and WAP mobile marketing, please contact your account manager or email sales@msgme.com.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer, is reaching out to shoppers with a cost-savings message with an interactive channel and introduced the Walmart Holiday Mobile Alerts program.
Shoppers can sign up on Wal-Mart’s Website to receive alerts on their mobile phones outlining the weekly price reductions.
Wal-Mart’s mobile marketing strategy provides bargain hunters discount alerts and news on in-store and online bargains. Subscribers receive multiple alerts during the week, about three or four, to keep them updated as the holiday nears. The alerts are a great way to build its subscriber data base, strategically target shoppers, drive traffic to its retail stores and track sales after each sent alert. Wal-Mart is in a position to maintain mobile marketing outreach frequency up as the retailer has a too many items to count. With more items, consumers dont mind receiving multiple weekly alerts, especially when the holiday nears and last minute gift solutions can be solved at Wal-Mart.
Securing a safe learning environment and campus community is a top priority for emergency administrators and safety officials. During an actual emergency, how can emergency administrators ensure everyone will remember their roles? AlertU recommends system administrators send emergency alert notification test messages once a quarter to their college campus subscriber base.
AlertU System Testing
System testing reminds your campus community they are subscribed to the college emergency notification system. During an actual emergency, subscribers will receive the text message and will understand how a campus emergency alert notification is communicated.
Updating School Database
Text alert messages allow subscribers the option to remove their mobile number from the college AlertU database. Text alert messages to subscribers should contain instructions on how to unsubscribe from AlertU, as subscribers may have left the college.
Stay Familiar with Procedure
Proactive and scheduled emergency alert notification system testing allows AlertU administrators and account managers to stay familiar using the AlertU platform. Regular testing allows administrators and account managers to practice accessing and setting up alerts so when the need arises, they are flawless in executing alerts during an emergency. It is important to note: more than 9 out of 10 support calls to AlertU are from administrators requesting username and passwords.
If you have questions or would like additional information on text emergency alert notification systems, please visit AlertU or contact sales.
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