Feature: Mobilise your sales promotion

Today’s mobile phone is the entry ticket for the impatient clubber queuing at the door, it’s the “red button” in the hand of every TV viewer, it’s the instant-response path for every poster. And it’s the voucher in the pocket of every shopper looking for a discount. The mobile marketing sector is enjoying rapid growth, and offering new ways for brands to engage with their customers. Two forces are at play here.

First, marketers are realising the role mobile can play in their plans. When campaigns are permission based, mobile is an excellent direct-response channel: our handsets are with us 24/7, in home and out of home, which makes them an instant, real-time response channel for any other media channel – ads on TV, press, radio and outdoor, direct mailers, in-store and on-pack promotions. Mobile is the glue which holds together the integrated media strategy. We’re using our mobiles for ever more varied purposes, whether entering text-and-win competitions, ordering brochures, or accessing mobile internet sites. Second, new technologies are pushing the boundaries for mobile’s inclusion in the sales promotion mix, transfomring the way we use our mobiles for mobile commerce.

What can mobile bring to the £20 billion sales promotion sector? The key to running effective mobile campaigns lies in the bounce-back messages you send in response to the incoming call-to-action text message. Bounce-back messages determine the degree of engagement you offer participants.

The bounce-back message may ask customers for their house number and postcode in order to dispatch a product sample or a brochure. Postcode information also allows them to locate their nearest stockist. It may ask for their email address in order to send an email with details of the promotion they’ve just seen, and a hotlink to your website.

Mobile is a powerful enabler for text-and-win competitions, allowing immediacy and instant consumer gratification. Soft drinks and snacks brands including Walkers Crisps and Coke Zero have used mobile to great effect as their young target audiences are heavy text users. If you enter a text-and-win competition, you know if you’ve won straight away. If at first they don’t succeed, many try again! Text-and-win competition winners may be selected via a prize draw, or by answering skill-based questions. Experience shows shoppers are prepared to spend up to £1.50 per entry via premium-rate SMS if the prize is sufficiently enticing. This provides a new revenue stream and achieves response levels of five to six per cent. Reverse auctions reward the lowest unique bid for the prize, with entry costs covering the price of the prize.

For a rich media experience, you may send a “WAP push” message which enables subscribers to open a mobile website via their mobile browsers. Four out of five mobile operators now offer unlimited browsing of the mobile internet for a fixed monthly fee. This will remove a major barrier to mobile internet browsing in the same way broadband boosted internet usage. Ofcom’s report on the mobile sector (July 2007) showed that 82 per cent of handsets sold in the first quarter of 2007 were mobile internet ready and that 44 per cent of people know that the internet is available on their mobile phones. As a result, 15 million unique users browse the mobile internet. The mobile internet has come of age.

As an added bonus, mobile enables brands to gather valuable customer information including mobile numbers, postcodes, email addresses and the consumer’s response level (ie. whether the message has been opened, forwarded to friends etc). This is when things get really interesting – as you datamine this information you can serve up relevant, targeted one-to-one messages to up-sell, cross-sell and build long-term customer loyalty.

The mobile channel provides a complete audit trail: different promotional channels (on-pack, in-store, direct mail, online and above-the-line media) can carry unique key words, allowing us to track the responses generated by each channel.

Sales promotion works better when used to sell product rather than raise revenue through premium SMS (PSMS). An example of a successful campaign is the Masterfoods Pedigree promotion. Mars ran a text-and-win promotion for the chance to win a year’s free supply of Pedigree Complete for Small Dogs and one of three digital cameras. The promotion was carried on 300,000 mailers, each carrying three coupons.

Customers were invited to text SMALLDOG to 82222 to enter the competition. Text reminders were sent to customers who texted in initially, reminding them to enter each month and encouraging them to redeem their vouchers for that month.

There were 6,655 unique texts received during the first four weeks of the campaign, with over 600 sent on the first day alone. This represents 2.2 per cent of those who were sent the direct mail piece, despite the call to action being low profile.

But the really important fact was that people who received the text reminders were 4.6 times more likely to redeem the vouchers included in the mailer than those who did not. In total, 36 per cent of customers who texted in to win redeemed at least one voucher, compared with eight per cent of the rest. Two-thirds of customers who redeemed a voucher in the first month went on to redeem one or both of the remaining two. On the basis of these results, Mars is planning to include mobile as a response mechanic in its future campaigns.

Another good example is Unipart’s on-pack winter windscreen wash text-and-win campaign. This PSMS campaign was so successful that Unipart’s entire winter stock had sold out before Christmas.

Looking to the future, there’s a great opportunity for mobile to make in-roads in the couponing and ticketing markets.

All types of barcode, whether one-, two- or three-dimensional, can be sent (pushed) over the air to an ordinary mobile phone, from where they can be scanned with certain existing hardware used by a retailer or front-of-house staff at an event.

The key advantage of barcodes is that they are machine-readable and negate the need for an operator to key in a long number. However, there are also a number of other advantages. Mobile barcodes also offer the retailer/venue instant communication with customers, they are cost effective, reduce waste by avoiding the need for paper coupons, have good redemption rates, provide quick results and can be linked to other promotions and campaigns, such as loyalty schemes.

Today there are a modest number of mobile scanners distributed in the retail sector but mass-scale barcode redemption will not take off until more retailers invest in updated scanners.

For subscribers, mobile barcodes offer all the advantages of paper coupons without the need for a physical copy of the barcode as the screen of the handset is read by the scanner. They are almost as easy to use as text messages and are deliverable to nearly all handsets. They offer businesses a cost-effective and ubiquitous redemption mechanism that makes life simpler for the customer. They can also be used to drive traffic online through offering customers the chance to redeem online discounts or enter online competitions.

Quick-response (QR) codes are designed to be scanned (pulled) by the mobile phone. They appear on posters and in magazines, and the camera on the handset is used to scan the barcode to launch the brand’s mobile internet site (instead of requiring the consumer to text to a shortcode or enter the URL directly).

In Japan, QR codes are a regular feature on billboards, in magazines and in-store. Examples include Northwest Airlines promoting airline ticket offers or food manufacturers providing detailed product information about where the products are grown and how long it takes to get them to the retailer’s shelves.

Mobile tickets containing the branded logo of the promoter, venue or event have also been in use over the last couple of years. A text message containing the ticket details and a unique 2D data-rich barcode is sent to customers and then scanned upon entry to the venue. In Japan, customers also use 2D barcodes as phone wallets in retail outlets because they are secure and unique and therefore allow the user to be identified.

However, for a mobile phone to scan a barcode it needs a special application downloaded in advance or installed by the manufacturer in the factory (as is the case with the Nokia N95). So, while QR codes are prevalent in Japan and South Korea, they are still a novelty in the UK.

Bluetooth technology allows brands to push content to shoppers who are close to Bluetooth units. These units can be static or carried by sale promotion staff. Content is free to receive, and charged to advertisers based on the number of downloads completed. This is an effective method to reach tech-savvy 16- to 30-year-olds. The content can be adapted from other parts of the communications mix and include an embedded HTML link which takes the recipient through to the WAP site. An offer of something useful from the WAP site will again help conversion numbers, such as free ring tone, music or a game.

What started as a trickle two years ago – with early-adopting companies from the entertainment and leisure sectors cautiously dipping a toe in the mobile channel – has rapidly turned into a stream of blue-chip brands now embracing mobile. Whether companies want to send information reminders to their customers, launch exciting competitions or drive sales via intuitive mobile customer-relationship management programmes, what is clear is that mobile plays a key role in the entire customer journey – from acquisition, to retention and long-term customer loyalty.