Optism™

This week marks our final Permission marketing in the news roundup for 2011. What a great year it has been! To send us all off to year-end celebrations in the right mood, we have reports on Mobile Marketer’s “Marketer of the Year” as well as some inspiring video of mobile campaigns from Mobile Marketing magazine. Also, we hope you will indulge us with our first two pieces, which feature our own recent publications.

Hot off the press, we’d like to draw your attention to a new article by Optism’s Lisa Ciangiulli, published on MobileGroove. In “Why Starbucks’ Mobile Strategy Sets The Bar(rista)” Lisa commends Starbucks for demonstrating their “respect for us (the customer) and a deep understanding of what we need on the move.” Lisa believes the most “effective advertising delivers us value.” And for Lisa, an on-the-go multi-tasking mom and marketing expert, Starbucks delivers the perfect mix of “utility and familiarity.”

Recently named the “Best iPhone Lifestyle App in the U.S.”, the Starbucks app enables people to use their smartphones to make mobile payments, track their Starbucks rewards and send e-gifts to loved ones. In her article, Lisa explores how Starbucks has succeeded by “paying meticulous attention to…the Three Rs of mobile marketing: respect, reinforcement and repeating.”

This week also marked the conclusion of our review of Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing. The series was conceived as a fitting way to celebrate Optism’s one year anniversary. Over the past several months, we’ve featured a chapter-by-chapter review of Seth’s seminal book and analyzed how changes in the mobile and advertising marketplace have impacted the recommendations in his book. We hope you have enjoyed this series. For us, it’s been an opportunity both to be impressed with how innovative Seth’s original work was and to see how far we’ve come as an industry. At Optism, we are firmly committed to permission-based mobile marketing. 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, Eight, Nine, Ten and Eleven.

In Chapter 12, Seth answers frequently asked questions about permission marketing. Not all of these apply in today’s world or to mobile marketing, but we can learn valuable lessons from many of them. The sections below cover a few that are particularly relevant for mobile marketing.

Do you need a website?

No you don’t, says Seth. Permission marketing, he goes on, “works in any medium where the consumer can be engaged in dialogue.” Clearly, mobile fits the bill. In fact, mobile is ideally suited to dialogue. In addition to the obvious choice of voice, virtually every mobile phone on the planet supports basic (SMS) texting. As we’ve highlighted many times in this blog, SMS can be a very effective way to build relationships with people. The one-on-one connection between brand and consumer that a permission-based mobile marketing campaign offers aligns perfectly with Seth’s doctrine of delivering messages that are “anticipated, personal, and relevant.”

Mobile marketing is also effective at what Seth calls “curriculum marketing” – slowly educating the consumer about your product and services through an ongoing conversation. “You can use interactivity to gain information about your prospects in a dialogue.” As you each learn more about the other, the relationship deepens and you can increase the relevance of the information you provide. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s another week of good news on the mobile marketing front, with lots of proof that the importance of mobile marketing is growing worldwide. We start our roundup with an article by the MMA’s Michael Becker that analyses why permission mobile marketing is so effective. And we finish this week with some excellent examples of how brands have made mobile work for them.

RCRWireless U.S. featured an article by the Mobile Marketing Association’s North American managing director, Michael J. Becker on why permission-based mobile marketing is a win-win for consumers and brands. Michael writes, “For most businesses, getting customers is important, but keeping them is what’s generating long-term value and profitability.” Done right, mobile can help businesses build meaningful relationships with their customers.

For Michael, permission-based marketing goes beyond “a simple binary of opt-in/opt-out.” Marketers need to allow the customer to control how the mobile relationship evolves, “enabling them to overtly identify the branded communications they consider valuable.” The extra effort is well worth it in the end because consumers are more inclined to trust the messages they receive and to pay attention to them. Citing Alcatel-Lucent research, Michael notes, 63% of the young people surveyed said “they would be more likely to purchase products and services from preferred brands that use permission-based mobile marketing.” Read the rest of this entry »