Optism™

We start off with a look at how SMS continues to offer retailers an effective means to engage with their customers. As you’ll read in several other articles we’ve collected for this week’s Permission Marketing, some of us are even going to be able to pay for our holiday purchases using our trusty mobiles.

Mobile Marketer had advice for retailers on how to incorporate SMS into their mobile commerce activities this holiday season. Author Giselle Tsirulnik notes, “The personal nature of SMS makes it a great recommendation tool. Consumers trust their friends and family, and will likely open a text message with product information from a loved one.” Tim Miller of Sumotext in Arizona agrees, adding, “SMS is inherently viral because it’s inherently unobtrusive.” Companies like Gilt Groupe, Amazon, Best Buy and Target are taking advantage of this by including a feature on their mobile sites that lets people easily send product recommendations to friends.

According to Wilson Kerr of Unbound Commerce, SMS can also be combined with short codes to drive traffic to mcommerce sites. And SMS is an effective tool for encouraging people to sign up for loyalty programs. Kerr adds, “If a shopping cart is abandoned, SMS can be used to ping the customer who did not complete their transaction, to remind them that their cart is full and they forgot to check out.” Read the rest of this entry »

Optism provides permission-based, mobile marketing services. Providing the opportunity for mobile subscribers to opt-in to advertising messages based on their preferences is the core tenant of our service. Our blog series Permission Marketing in the News has been highlighting mobile and other permission marketing news for the past year. The leading proponent of permission marketing is Seth Godin who coined the term in his book Permission Marketing in 1999. To celebrate our one year anniversary, we are running a series of blog posts summarizing his book chapter by chapter and analyzing how changes in the mobile and advertising marketplace have impacted the recommendations in his book.

Here are our summaries of earlier chapters: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven and Eight.

Seth starts Chapter Nine with a look at the impact the Internet will have on the world. In 1999, the Internet – or at least broad public access to it – was still very new. Still, it was already making billionaires out of the visionaries who figured out quickly how to make the most of this new phenomenon.

Seth identifies six key benefits that the Internet offers direct marketers – many of which we can now also claim for mobile marketing. With some paraphrasing and modernizing of Seth’s original text, these benefits are:

1. No postage costs
2. Testing any campaign or initiative can be completed very quickly
3. Response rates are high
4. You can educate people about your product and build their appreciation for its virtues over time (referred to by Seth as “curriculum marketing”
5. Once you’ve made a connection with someone, you can keep the conversation going with little or no additional cost
6. Printing is free (printing is done by the consumer, not you) Read the rest of this entry »

This week, we’re serving up great permission marketing news from Coca-Cola, Jamba Juice, Dominos and Chipotle. For dessert, you can read about the new mobile privacy guidelines from the MMA and a cool new mobile data tool from Google. Bon appétit!

We start with Mobile Marketer’s coverage of the Mobile Shopping Fall conference in “Coca-Cola exec: Mobile does not work as an island.” Several executives participated in a “Getting Your Mobile Campaign Off the Ground” panel discussion. Coca-Cola’s Tara Scarlett understands the importance of SMS and how it enables marketers to reach the widest possible audience. Commenting on Coca-Cola’s marketing strategy, Scarlett notes, “For us to not be using SMS would be silly.” What’s most important, she says, is that marketers use the best tactics for the specific audience they are trying to reach – including permission-based mobile marketing. “We want to make sure that we are able to be where our consumers are and that they want to engage when they want to engage with us.” With SMS marketers can reach the widest audience possible. Scarlett also notes that the marketing landscape is constantly changing and marketers need to stay agile to maximize the benefits of mobile and social marketing. Read the rest of this entry »