I’ve been meaning to make this illustration for a few weeks now since some discussion regarding sending SMS bubbled up here and here.

This is a very good topic for newcomers and so I’ll tag this in the Starter Kit so that folks getting their feet wet with Mobile Marketing will know to avoid using email as the sending engine. Though it can be accomplished in house by having your developers set up your application so that SMS is firing out of your email server that’s not really how you want to approach sending SMS messages.

Failing to have any kind of contractual agreement with the carrier is the primary reason you want to avoid the urge to simply fire your SMS campaigns from your own email server. You want these things getting sent from an organization that has agreements in place with the carriers so that your campaign isn’t looked at as potential spam that should be shut down in its entirety which might include blacklisting your email server for entire carrier network.

This is how the carrier is thinking and with no agreement in place you have no guarantee that your campaign will be delivered. That puts your conversion plan and the campaign at an unnecessary risk when you can engage a Mobile Marketing partner to deliver the message for pennies.

Sure, the Carrier is not stopping all messaging that comes through via an email server. In fact I just tested a Mobile application last Month and advised the company to change their sending strategy as soon as possible. The point though is that they very easily could and so you should not risk it.

Greg Harris from Mobivity posted this great answer in LinkedIn regarding the same question. It’s one of the best I’ve come across.

Share This

This is the third installment of the Mobile Marketing Starter Kit Series that I kicked off in July. All of these posts are filed under Starter Kit if you need to get caught up. The goal is to continue adding helpful resources for professionals in the mobile marketing community. There is no set order, if I write about a new topic I’ll generally issue it a new Chapter number. However, I may go back and install additional posts within a previous chapter or allow a guest writer to do that same.

So if you’re in the mobile marketing space and want to get some exposure on a topic for this series contact me. I will let you talk about your company (are you listening mobile marketing geeks) in these posts provided that the majority of your post is contributing to the Starter Kit theme for the mobile marketing community.

The theme for this installment is obviously testing. Testing is really important for mobile marketing folks; it’s absolutely critical that you test your campaigns and content to see how they’re received on various devices prior to launch or your campaign will never get off the ground. What you don’t want to do is launch and then discover 35% of your audience is using a device that is not capable of rendering your content. The root cause of this type of failure is going to be lack of testing and that will really reflect poorly.

So with that said here’s a web site that can help you test your mobile web site, free.

dotMobi has a fairly exhaustive emulator that will run your mobile web site through 35 tests to determine how it will appear on a mobile handheld device. I recently installed a wordpress mobile edition plugin for my blog so I thought I’d use it as my test for this post.

Here’s how the emulator impersonates my site on a Nokia N70. Oh and you have the ability to cycle your mobile site through several other types of emulators too which didn’t get any better for me.

My blog is average at best according to their test emulator… yikes. So, if I were planning on launching a mobile awareness campaign to promote my blog I’d delay until I addressed the issues that have been identified.

Overall, the test summary indicates 21 passes so perhaps I’m slightly better than average in my mind but there are 4 failures and so it’s a good idea to understand what those are.

An area my site didn’t fare so well in was Compliance Testing… whoops, maybe I am just average, these are important.

The valid markup is something that I might be able to address, in my particular instance I’m running wordpress and so I’m not really interested in monkyeing around with the markup. However, in a campaign setting I’d have to address this issue or my content might not appear as I had originally intended.

XHTML Mobile Profile (XHTML MP) is a content type declaration that appears to be missing in the mobile version of my blog. I might be able to address this by reviewing the suggested XHTML MP Doctypes that dotMobi has made and plugging that into my system. However, in my case I’m using a wordpress plugin so I’ll alert the developer of the plugin and see if he can implement the upgrade not just for me but all of the folks that are using this plugin.

Here are the suggested XHTML MP Doctype declarations that dotMobi has made for me.

If you’d like more information on XHTML MP, Wikipedia has a nice reference on the topic and the evolution of mobile web standards.

There are few unique features in the dotMobi test system that I’ve not seen anywhere else, two of which are illustrated in this scorecard I received on my blog. The first two scores across the top show my stinky score and overall file size which appears to be lightweight (good thing). Look closely at the two features across the bottom though. These are unique. Estimated cost by Country and estimated speed by network technology.

This is spectacular information; I wish it could be expanded to include other Countries. Marketers would be thrilled to know what the cost of receipt estimates look like while testing campaign variations. Who knew campaign optimization would include something like lowering the cost for the end user! This is another reason why mobile marketing is different, end users have data plans of one type or another… they’re paying to look at your stuff, so why not take advantage of a tool that can help you make optimizations in this area.

Look at the level of detail that is implemented, this is impressive; here are the checks that my blog was measured against. I do have a Google sitemap and I believe my plugin assigned it a nutty file extension like sitemap.xml.gz and so I’ll bet it’s not finding that.

Green=pass; Red=fail; Silver=comment; Orange=warning.

In the event of a failure or warning in any particular area a hyperlink’d shortcut is offered to help you individually address these issues. The shortcut takes you off to a new window to prevent leaving your test.

To sum it up here are the 35 tests that the dotMobi emulator will execute against your mobile site.

• Multiple device selection
• File size check
• Estimated cost
• Estimated speed
• Mime types
• Character encoding
• Pop up windows
• Alt Text
• Image maps
• Specify images sizes
• Measures
• Page title
• Use of stylesheets
• Stylesheet dependency
• Objects or scripts
• Auto refresh
• Redirection
• Default Input Mode
• Provide defaults
• Page size limit
• Large graphics
• Tables
• Nested tables
• Tables for layout
• Access Keys
• Caching
• External resources
• Avoid free text
• Structure
• Google sitemap
• Form submit buttons
• XHTML mobile profile
• Valid markup
• Second level domain
• No frames

You can test your mobile web site at dotMobi. Leave a comment if you have some other really useful mobile website testing tools that you use.

Share This

Welcome to the second installment of the Mobile Marketing Watch Starter Kit Series. The purpose of this series is to help new Mobile Marketers looking to enter the Mobile Marketing space. If you’re new to the space like I am then you already know that resources and information are not that easy to come by and so I hope I can save you some time in researching some of this information yourself and in the process provide ideas and resources that can be of some value to your organizations’ Marketing efforts.

In this edition I’m going to introduce you to some Mobile Marketing firms that specialize in Mobile. What I’m not going to do is hit you with a list of 500 Mobile Marketing Agencies or firms. I’m a one man blogger and couldn’t possibly talk to that many organizations. So, as I do these posts I’ll work with anywhere from one to five companies and if you’re a Mobile Marketing company that I didn’t cover in this post, email me, I’m building a database of Mobile Marketing firms that I’m going to make available to my readers.

This is also a good time to remind everyone of my full disclosure policy. So let me quickly state that the companies I’m covering in this post were either approached directly by me or responded to my call for mobile marketing agencies. I don’t get paid to blog about the companies I cover and there are no affiliate marketing links in my posts. My disclosure policy is published on my About page.

So with that out of the way, why should you consider a partner? Can you go about it on your own? Sure, but like anything else there comes a time when it makes sense to strategically partner with someone that has strong abilities in specific areas. Mobile Marketing is one of these areas; there aren’t many folks that know how to guide an organization through these types of campaigns due to the landscape differences. If you don’t believe me go pop your head into the office of the Marketing folks in your organization and ask them about some of the latest trends in Mobile Marketing and which of those makes any sense for your organization. I’m gonna guess that 8 or 9 out of 10 are going to go ‘we should talk about that’? It’s because the medium is mobile… it’s different, not everyone is aware that it exists or how it can be leveraged.

Marketing in the mobile medium isn’t nearly that same as marketing in the web medium and requires a different type of strategic partner. I’ll give you an example. In the web medium, as an example, organizations might bring in a search marketing firm to achieve their web based marketing goals and this can involve some things like search engine optimization or link campaigns to help increase visibility in Google, Yahoo and others; and I’m not trying to simplify it either I’m just talking at a high level. What we don’t see an abundance of is the search engine marketing crowd filling mobile marketing needs like they do in the search marketing arena. Rand Fishkin, SEOMoz partner alluded to this in a recent blog post and Rands’ firm is one of the best in the field charging a minimum of $10,000 per month. Here’s what Rand had to say regarding a Mobile Search interview he did with Joe Whyte at searchnewz last Month.

I also did an interview about mobile search (and came across as not particularly educated on the subject because I’ve really only dipped my toes in the space) and now see that there’s $22 billion worth of transactions set to take place over mobile devices by 2011.

Mobile is different and you’d be smart to bring a partner into the mix that understands the challenges. I’m highlighting six that specialize in the Mobile SMS space. Combined, this group has over 17,000 Mobile Marketing Customers, robust platforms with great features and a low barrier to entry to help get your organization started with their programs.

I’ve come up with 38 Mobile SMS Campaign features that you should be considering when determining what you’ll want in a strategic Mobile Marketing partner. I’ve asked each of the companies to indicate where they stand on these features and they’ve all done so and I’m publishing it here to help you hit the ground running with your Mobile campaign efforts.

The companies covered in the report are:

• Clickatell
• InfoNU
• Interactive Mediums
• mobileStorm
• Mobivity
• NPowerMobile

The report is available in 2 formats:

• PDF
• Google Doc
• Excel for Office 2007
• Excel 93-2007

Thanks to Jared, Greg, Jonathan, Anders, Nathan and Jeff for providing information.

Update: Wordpress doesn’t like Excel Spreadsheets, I’ll upload as something else tomorrow, it’s late and I’m calling it a day.
Update: Hit me up from the contact page if you want the XLS or XLSX version. I’ve posted a Google Doc.

Share This

The first thing you should do to get your Mobile Marketing Campaign off the ground is to define your objectives. This is really no different than any other task you’d set out to accomplish. Basically, don’t get started until you have clearly defined your objectives or you’ll be going back upstream somewhere about ¾ of the way through your project.

Here’s a fun way you can get started. Pull your team together by sending them a Text… “Killer Marketing Session in 5 minutes. Don’t miss it… whiteboard room”. Hand everyone that attends a marker. Tell your group to start writing ideas for their next Mobile Marketing Campaign on the whiteboard and the person that has the most at the end of 10 minutes gets a $25 gift card to their favorite restaurant.

I guarantee you within 10 minutes you’ll have some ideas that you can drill down on and put to a vote.

Here are some sample objective ideas that I’d be writing on the white board that you can use to help get started.

When building your objective list try to think things through in terms of how you expect to measure ROI for your ideas.

For example, assume for a moment that your objective is to get consumers to attend a movie during non peak hours and you have access to 5,000 consumers in your database that live within 15 miles of the movie theatre.

So what we’re actually attempting to do is:

• Drive attendance to a specific event. This is track-able because the movie theatre has historical data on how many tickets sell on average at these movie times. An upward trend should be easy to spot.
• This campaign also attempts to increase revenues during a slow period at the movie theatre when it’s more difficult to staff due to lower volume of customers.

You could employ a mobile commerce type campaign that goes out to the 5,000 customers with a valuable offer.

Exclusive Mobile Offer from AMZ Movies!
2 Tickets, 2 Drinks and 1 Large Popcorn for $10 for any Movie starting before 12PM am.
Click to reserve your Seats and Showing. Good this week only.

The mobile purchase event is something that also tracks back nicely to your ROI for two reasons, the discounted price and the mobile campaign triggered purchase.

This is the first in a series titled The Mobile Marketing Starter Kit. I’ll tag these under Starter Kit. I hope that I’ve given you some ideas to start your objective list and that you find this series useful. Please feel free to add any of your own objectives to the comments. If you’d like to publish your own article in the Starter Kit series please contact me and I’ll set you up to do a guest post.

The next article in the series will give you ideas on locating a partner/agency to help you deliver your campaign.

Share This