conversational mobile marketing - connecting marketers and brands directly to consumers

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Transforming Mobile Marketing™

Conversational Mobile Marketing Connecting Marketers and Brands directly to consumers

Conversational Mobile Marketing

2 | Private and Confidential

Contents

Executive Summary ............................................................................................................................ 3

Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 4

Unique Characteristics of Mobile Channel .......................................................................................... 4

Conversational Marketing ................................................................................................................... 5

The characteristics of conversational marketing on Mobile ................................................................. 5

Current Mobile Marketing Practices ................................................................................................... 6

Right technology to enable conversational marketing ......................................................................... 6

Mobile marketing technology evolution ............................................................................................. 7

Transformational benefits of Conversational Marketing ..................................................................... 8

NEON-3rd Generation Platform designed for Conversational Mobile Marketing ................................. 8



Executive Summary Against the backdrop of a highly volatile and competitive marketing landscape, mobile operators are at the cross roads. The market is saturated and voice tariffs are declining. Due to rapidly changing customer dynamics, success of new products and services is highly unpredictable. Increasing product portfolio with emphasis on innovation and strengthening customer relationship by personalised services are two essential ways to deal with these challenges.

Operators realise that the success lies in their ability to reach subscribers in a direct and intimate manner, addressing their unique needs and preferences. Mobile channel is gaining significance in an operator’s marketing plan. But the first wave of mobile marketing, mostly mass messaging didn’t give operators the expected results. Targeted mobile marketing is becoming the key to enabling the required growth and retention.

Unlike other channels, mobile is unique. Marketing on mobile is not similar to marketing done on any other channel. For the first time, mobile as a channel lives up to the marketers’ dream of conversational marketing, and thus connects marketers and customers in a direct and intimate conversational mode. Marketer can observe every customer’s action or inaction and thus construct and enhance relationships by comprehending customer’s preferences, responding to them with relevance and respecting his privacy.

The current mobile marketing practices by Operators do not leverage the unique benefits of mobile because they are dependent on generalist systems designed for bulk list-based messaging or off-line targeting. The shortcomings of technology have a significant business impact ranging from cost and efficiency issues through time-to-market and competitive response constraints, and ultimately to challenges with customer retention and ARPU growth.

Operators realise that the right technology is critical to transform their marketing agility and enhance customer loyalty. The technology should drastically cut down product delivery cost and time and improve marketing agility so that a marketer has clear visibility and complete control over every campaign. It should enable marketer to run 100s of highly targeted marketing campaigns every single day and give an instant and automated measurement of customer response and ROI. The technology evolution in mobile marketing can be classified into three generations. First generation started with customised tools for mass messaging. There was no targeting. Second generation tools were bolt on to BI/CRM systems which introduced off line targeting, but was mostly designed for statisticians to run long cycle campaigns.

Third generation platforms are designed to enable conversational marketing on mobile and bring significant agility and flexibility to marketing. They are characterised by their real-time transaction processing capability, usability for marketers and fully automated closed loop campaign workflows.

At Flytxt, our vision is to enable Operators to unlock the potential of mobile as a customer engagement tool with the aid of a third generation technology. Neon is a 3rd generation mobile marketing technology platform, which is designed for operators to enable conversational marketing on mobile.



Introduction

Mobile operators across the globe, are invariably, faced with multiple challenges such as declining ARPU and increasing churn rate due to aggressive competition. Factors like saturating markets, increasing pre-paid subscriber base and falling voice tariffs are compounding to Operator’s pressure. Further to this, customers are becoming more demanding and the regulatory bodies are tightening the rules for subscriber engagement and fair play.

Steady downward pressure on the basic call charges and commoditisation of voice services are forcing operators to explore new areas of growth through continuous innovation in technologies and services. Increasing capabilities of mobile phones, faster networks like 3G and interactive mobile applications like mobile video are fuelling the demand for content and data services. Operators realise the potential of content services and are shifting their focus from voice to VAS products.

However, traditional marketing strategies no longer hold good for new products and services rolled out by the operators. Most of the products have extremely short life-cycle and narrow customer segment appeal.

In the above context, the most relevant offer at the right time, to each individual is paramount to maximising overall revenue maximisation. Product centric marketing is replaced with dynamic subscriber centric marketing.

This paper emphasises on the unique characteristics of mobile as a marketing and customer engagement channel, conversational marketing as a business strategy that suits mobile, current mobile marketing practices and the type of technology which can enable conversational marketing on mobile.

Unique Characteristics of Mobile Channel

Unlike any other channel, mobile has many unique attributes. While an intelligent use of these attributes contributes to value enhancement, an improper use of the same will have a negative impact. A thorough understanding of these attributes is essential to roll out successful customer engagement programs through mobile. Mobile is Intimate: Today mobile is not just a technology for talking, but a personal infotainment media which people carry wherever they go. More than a gadget, for majority it is an extension of persona – reflecting their attitudes and preferences. As mobile is a very personal device, it evokes strong response, either positive or negative, for every action. Response is Immediate: The response to any action on mobile is immediate. However on other marketing channels like web, direct mail, e-mail or television, instant responses are highly improbable.

Since mobile is personal and ubiquitous, the customer tends to react quickly to any incoming message. Even deleting or ignoring a message is a response. 100% Trackable: On a web portal, it is not possible to identify and track a customer unless he/she logs on; same is the case with most traditional channels like television, PC mail or print media. On mobile, any customer action like buying a ringtone, browsing a news portal, or purchasing a game can be tracked in real time. Reach is unmatched:

The mobile channel is unique in many aspects. Firstly, the mobile channel enables access to 100% of the operators’ subscribers. No other channel comes close. A mobile phone is perceived as being a critical possession. The loss of a mobile phone is treated with more urgency than even the loss of a wallet. Being a constant companion, calls and messages on mobile are attended rapidly than any other digital communications.



Conversational Marketing Conversational marketing is all about interacting with customers in real time in a personalised way, always listening to them and taking their feedback, tracking their actions or inactions and catering to their specific needs and preferences based on this. Conversational marketing is a continuous process that helps in building a long term relationship with the customers. It is as direct and as intimate as a marketer shaking hands with his/her customer. Conversational marketing helps a marketer win over a customer without compulsive selling. Mobile enables conversations because of its unique attributes Mobile, because of its many distinctive attributes can connect a marketer and a customer in a conversational mode and helps marketers to get

intimate with their customers. First step towards doing this is to understand the customer’s unique tastes and preferences. Mobile channel makes tracking customer’s action at every level a reality. This helps in responding to the customer with relevant products and services.

Every customer action or inaction on a mobile device is like raising a hand. The marketer sees the hand, reacts promptly and responds with

relevant offer. The response encourages the customer to raise the hand again, in other words, whenever a customer query/ need is responded with a relevant message, they are inspired to respond favorably in the future as well.

The characteristics of conversational marketing on Mobile The characteristics of conversational marketing on the mobile are discussed below mainly from the perspective of a marketer. Direct connect between marketer and customer Mobile gives marketer a perfect tool to reach customers directly sans intermediaries. This enables marketers to constantly track changing customer requirements in various phases of customer’s lifecycle. Operators can effectively manage customer lifecycle and plan communications around that. For instance, a Top Up offer can be sent if the customer’s subscription is nearing the expiry period. Engage in intimate conversation A marketer has to understand a customers’ context i.e., his specific needs at a given point of time, coupled with other criteria such as his interests and preferences to have a meaningful conversation with them. Every customer action on mobile takes marketer a step closer to understanding them. With this information, it becomes easier for a marketer to engage in an intimate conversation with each and every customer. Customers tend to be more receptive and respond favorably when the messages are more relevant. Run 100’s of campaigns in a day Products and services for mobile are characterised by their extremely short lifecycles while consumer trends and customer preferences are equally fast changing. In such a scenario, the marketer should be able to quickly test 100s of campaigns per day. It should be possible to design, execute and track a campaign within minutes, while being able to track and analyze each of them with maximum efficiency. Mobile will give that flexibility and scalability for marketer. Instant Tracking of every campaign Conversational marketing enables tracking every customer action or inaction, either in response to a campaign or otherwise, a reality. This capability enables a marketer to have clear picture in terms of their marketing campaign not just in terms of monetary value or ROI, but also in terms of responses or lack of responses. Insights drawn from each campaign could help marketers to ensure higher success rate for future campaigns. Respect customer’s privacy On Mobile, everything is personal and intimate, and evokes a strong reaction, be it positive or negative. Any message that excites one subscriber will probably annoy another. Unsolicited marketing from irrelevant sources and lack of control over frequency of messages can easily annoy customers and stimulate increased churn. Since customer is at the centre of Conversational Marketing, their preferences and privacy norms will be honoured in any mobile campaign.



Current Mobile Marketing Practices

Though mobile is increasingly getting popular as a marketing and customer engagement channel, conversational mobile marketing is yet to take off. Current mobile marketing practices can be summarised as below: Open Loop Mobile marketers, today, are concerned with just delivering the campaigns. They have limited capability to track the delivery or the responses thereafter. Most of the mobile marketers track customer responses offline and have some abstract metrics in place to measure the success of a marketing campaign. These immature and inaccurate measurement and tracking processes substantially reduce their intelligence gathering capabilities. Every campaign is stand alone in nature, there is a little scope for garnering intelligence from it to make future campaigns more relevant. Therefore open loop campaigns are essentially a hit or miss marketing practice. Disjointed Current mobile campaign workflows are disjointed and loosely coupled with different processes spread across multiple departments. Different steps in a mobile campaign like customer data capture and analysis, target list creation, campaign definition, execution and tracking are all done in isolation. Moreover, it could involve people from multiple departments, like IT personnel, data analysts, network integrators and marketers to run a single marketing campaign, making the whole process a completely disjointed, slow and error-prone effort.

Generalist Tools Current mobile marketing practices are open looped, disjointed and mediated since marketers use generalist technology tools. Most tools used were actually designed nearly a decade ago for traditional slow channels like PC, e-mail, direct mail, and call center campaigns. For such systems the technology and architecture are designed for slow campaign cycles and do not expect real-time transaction processing and two way interactive communications. In addition, such systems are designed for IT personnel or statisticians and not for marketers, because most are add-ons to CRM or BI systems. These tools are least matured in terms of functionality like real-time targeting, tracking, measurability and privacy management as well as usability for marketers. The implications of these short comings are not immediately evident, but we have to understand that

Re-purposed solutions for mobile are limited in process scalability, always behind the innovation curve and have hidden ongoing IT costs

Disintegrated solutions don’t drive the organisational objectives and process changes to do conversational marketing and are not scalable to new revenue enhancement opportunities such as mobile advertising.

Right technology to enable conversational marketing

Transition to conversational mobile marketing is possible only with a specialised third generation mobile marketing technology. Such a technology platform should provide integrated suite of mobile marketing applications that makes marketing simpler while drastically cutting down the campaign delivery time and cost. It should utilise the unique attributes of mobile channel to enable a direct, relevant, interactive and immediate communication between marketers and customers. It should help marketer run 100s of personalised campaigns a day to millions of customers without the help of intermediaries. The choice of a right technology for conversational mobile marketing is a critical step towards a revenue generation and customer retention strategy.

Today’s 3rd generation technology is a specialised mobile marketing technology designed keeping in mind the distinct features of mobile as a marketing channel, and the aspirations of non technical mobile marketers. Technology should empower marketers with creativity and agility.



Mobile marketing technology evolution

Technology evolution in mobile marketing can be classified into three generations. The early approaches to mobile marketing technology are list-based bulk messaging tools. These first-generation engineering tools neither support relevant targeting nor tracking. These tools do not use any of the extensive subscriber data held by the operator, devalues the medium and over time does considerable harm to the channel.

The second generation of tools improves upon the above through offline targeting. These extended traditional multi-channel campaign management systems are intrinsically not transactional and are designed for long cycle campaigns like direct mail and email. Lack of real-time database and poor usability severely limits their value to mobile marketers.

The third generation systems are built specifically for mobile market to leverage the unique attributes of the mobile channel. The third generation tools are designed to be used by marketers without relying on intermediaries. Marketers can run end-to-end large scale campaigns in minutes. Such systems are characterised by real-time transaction processing, native communication interfaces and seamless integration with live subscriber data.

Marketers can run hundreds of highly targeted campaigns, track the customer reactions and respond to them in real-time, enabling conversational marketing. The response and feedback can be tracked in real time and the information can be used to make future campaigns more relevant and effective.

“The campaign management market is evolving toward access and capabilities geared to the business user and the marketer, rather than toward IT and statisticians”

Adam Sarner - Gartner MQ for CRM Multichannel Campaign Management, published 24 April 2009


Transformational benefits of Conversational Marketing Increased Revenue

Through increased Response Rates With instant Contextual Marketing on Events Monetise unused Network Capacity

New revenue streams

With Mobile Advertising By monetising Subscriber Touch Points

Save costs

Through reduced messaging volumes Through Marketing Automation

Reduce churn

Through Subscriber Lifecycle Marketing Through Loyalty Programs Through Privacy Management / DND / SPAM control

NEON-3rd Generation Platform designed for Conversational Mobile Marketing

Neon is a third generation mobile marketing platform designed specifically for mobile marketers. It has been developed by mobile marketing experts with hands on experience in this field for over a decade now. The technology has been designed taking into account the distinctive attributes of mobile channel and transforming them to an operator’s advantage. It is a scalable, stand alone and fully integrated platform that enables conversational mobile marketing. Neon brings the transformational benefits of conversational marketing by connecting marketers

and consumers directly and enabling an intimate conversation between them. Neon helps operators to leverage the unique characteristics of mobile while empowering their marketers with agility, flexibility, scalability and creativity.

Flytxt Technology Pvt. Ltd. 2nd Floor, Amstor Building, Technopark, Trivandrum, Kerala, India - 695 581 Phone: +91 471 270 0101 Fax: +91 471 270 0202 www.flytxt.com

Copyright © 2009 Flytxt B.V. All rights reserved.

conversational mobile marketing - connecting marketers and brands directly to consumers

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