One Step at a Time

Guy Talmi, Senior Marketing Director at Pontis, outlines how companies can benefit from a staged approach to mobile marketing

Mobile users only accept marketing offers, or purchase new content, when the offers are highly personalised and delivered to them at the right time. What’s more, if users are bombarded with offer after offer, there’s a risk that they will be seen as spam and create customer dissatisfaction. To avoid this risk, mobile marketers should adopt a personalized multi-step campaign strategy, rather than a series of generic ‘one trick pony’ campaigns.
A well-managed, personalised, multi-step, campaign will increase user acceptance of marketing offers and sell more digital services and content. In order to achieve this, marketers need to plan a series of synchronized offers, that will initially be targeted based on the usual segmentation criteria and subsequently be based on each user’s actual response behaviour.
The marketer must first define the business objectives of the campaign, and then determine which broad segment of users to target with the initial offer, such as new users or occasional users, for instance. The offer must address the entire pre-defined segment and be relevant, appealing, clear, and simple, for example, offering a discounted first purchase of any song download to potential new users of a music service.

Sub-segments
After the initial campaign is completed, there are naturally two new sub-segments: those who responded and those who did not. The marketer needs to devise and implement effective subsequent offers to these two sub-segments.
People who did not respond need to receive an even better offer than the original, possibly an initial free music download, in order to motivate them to make a positive response.
People who responded positively to the initial campaign need to receive a personalised offer, based on the type of content they have consumed. Mobile marketers should use these responses to form the basis of the next stage of the campaign, by observing which artist the user downloads, and offering a discount on similar content in the future. These ‘derivative offers’ must contain variable content based on the behaviour of the respondent. The communication method and timing of the subsequent offer may also vary, for example, based on the time of day the service was used.
The third stage is to group actual users of the service according to their spending, the type, number and frequency of content downloads, and the revenue and profit generated. The aim is now to motivate the service user in each sub-segment to consume ever more content. For instance, a user that downloads their favourite songs onto their mobile could receive an offer to buy two songs and download a ringtone of their choice, free of charge. This approach is ideal for motivating users to consume new content that they may not be aware of, such as mobile games, videos or podcasts.

Automated process
Finally, this whole process needs to be automated, not only to gather the data on usage and consumption, but also to ensure that each well-defined customer segment then receives relevant offers, at the right time, communicated through the right channel. The arrival of new solutions, specifically designed for marketers within this sector, is now providing the capability for them to do this, by monitoring usage of services or products in real-time, to enable behavioural-based targeting; an approach that, until now, has simply not been possible.
These tools can be used by marketers to drill down to the most granular level of information on their customer, enabling marketers to ensure that the vital components, such as the content of the messaging, the communication method and the timing, deliver optimum results.
By following these steps, marketers can motivate their users to make a positive response. As with all campaigns, however, each part of the process matters; if the campaign is rigorously planned with a flawless execution, followed by intensive monitoring, it is more likely to succeed.