Is mobile just another channel to factor in to the mix or does it stand head and shoulders above all other channels because it promises deeper insight driven from detailed analytics that no other channel can provide? Does mobile offer us marketers the chance to achieve ROIs on campaigns that we thought previously were dreamed up in fairy tales?
Forrester believes 2010 will be a key transition year at the start of the mobile decade, and we see this as businesses just implement one mobile technology, dipping their toes in the mobile marketing waters. Farsighted companies, however, will see mobile marketing as deeper than one track, i.e. SMS, mobile internet, and as an integral part of their multi-channel mix.
However, it is the channel's lack of integrated data analysis and insight that is now a hot topic. Everyone is asking, "Where is the ROI?" and "How is this impacting my customers behavior and impacting my other channels?" These are obviously very important questions, even more so in these cash stricken times, and as many companies scramble to integrate mobile marketing technology into their media mix for metrics, executives will likely begin calling marketers to the carpet and asking for success metrics and deeper insight. Marketers have invariably struggled to capture the right information from which they can make campaign decisions or measure ROI; mobile is after all the personal channel, especially as it has the potential to provide additional insight into non-mobile channel.
While most mobile technology providers already have in place various mobile website analytics tools, what's been missing is an integrated analytics dashboard so you can track click-throughs from SMS messages to those mobile websites and link that with such things as coupon campaigns. Previously, marketers could send out SMS messages and report on the number delivered. But then what? If you're including a link to a mobile website, how do you know if the recipient clicks on it or where and when they redeemed the coupon? It is also important to distinguish where mobile site visitors are coming from. Are they coming from another mobile website, mobile search, direct URL type-in or from a text/multimedia messaging campaign? Especially in large organizations where multiple mobile campaigns are going on concurrently, it's critical for marketers to be able to track and analyze how all channels are performing relative to each other and understand customer behavior to bring in location aspects of the campaign into play.
This year we will likely see a new wave of data analysis providers focusing on what will become the prime channel for commerce and marketing within the next 5 years from a global perspective. These technologies will give marketers a sense of where users are coming from and going to as they make their way from a text message to a mobile website to the call to action on that mobile site -- but they will not provide true insight and analysis. True insight comes from understanding an individual's behavior and response to each type of interaction through each individual channel, whatever that channel is, so that you, as a marketer, can maximise every customer interaction through the relevant channel at each stage.
Based on what we've heard from our clients and the market the next few years there will be significant demand for customer insight on mobile not only because of it being a key channel but because of the level of insight that will be achieved due to the unique characteristics of the mobile channel.