Choosing Mobile Marketing Technology Is Not An Operational Decision

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Pravin Vijay Director – Product Marketing, Flytxt shares his view on mobile marketing technology according to him, choosing the right mobile marketing technology is a strategic decision as it has a direct impact on revenue generation and customer experience.

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For mobile operators it takes several years and lot of hard work and investment to attract and acquire their customers. Some mobile operators in the emerging economies still have steep subscriber growth but even here the game is changing quickly and priority in marketing is shifting from acquisition to value maximization.

Now, when you choose a technology platform that directly interacts with millions of subscribers through messages and offers, you can’t take a chance, can you?

A single mistake could lead to dissatisfaction of your subscribers and erosion of your most precious asset as we have seen in the first wave of mobile marketing evolution.

The stakeholders and decision criteria

Though marketing teams are primary users of mobile marketing technology, they are not the sole decision makers when it comes to choosing the technology. In most of the procurement processes, we see multiple departments talking to us and at multiple levels, everybody is interested. For operators, mobile marketing technology is not just an operational platform. It is rather a long term strategic tool for revenue growth and customer retention. Hence it attracts considerable interest from many CXOs. Most of the data a marketer needs is scattered across disparate systems owned by the IT team. Similarly, the network team is also involved, as marketing campaigns need to be transmitted through network elements like SMSCs.

In our experience, it is important to evaluate the technology from the perspectives of all key stakeholders, namely CXO/ Top Management, Marketers/ Business Users, IT & Systems View. The following highlights the key view points and decision criteria for selecting the right technology:

CXO/Top Management View – Short and long-term Impact of the technology

• What impact will this technology have on top line?

• Can this technology reduce total marketing costs?

• Does this technology enrich customer experience?

Marketer’s/Business Users View – Agility in marketing processes

• Can a marketer without IT skills design, execute and fulfill a campaign in minutes?

• Can the system expose marketing inventory to partners and advertisers?

• How scalable is the technology to leverage large volume of subscriber data across multiple systems and locations?

• Can it provide marketers with real-time subscriber intelligence for targeting?

• Can the marketer control all steps of the closed marketing loop in real time in a single interface?

• Does the Marketer have real-time visibility to the ROI of all campaigns?

• Can it help marketers to serve contextual offers and fulfill them in real-time?

IT & Systems View – Implementation experience and ease of deployment

• Does the vendor possess deployment expertise when it comes to large mobile operator environments?

• Can the platform be operational within 4 weeks?

• Can this platform address all mobile marketing needs?

• How easy is it to integrate this technology into existing infrastructure?

• How easy is the maintenance of the system, post-deployment?

• Can it manage marketing inventory and campaign traffic?

Mobile marketing technology choice is strategic, not operational

As you can see from the checklist, the objective of a mobile marketing platform is not to improve operational processes. The objective of a mobile marketing platform is to transform marketing agility and scalability to allow for sustained subscriber value maximization.

From a CXO’s point of view, the technology should improve customer experience by managing customer lifecycle proactively, increase revenue by effectively using all selling opportunities and save costs by bringing in a fully integrated and automated platform. From a marketer’s view, it should bring in marketing agility by giving them total control over campaigns in real-time. From an IT or network team’s perspective, it is important to see how easily the platform can be integrated and how efficiently the marketing inventory and traffic can be managed, leading to a low TCO.

So mobile marketing technology choice is not just another operational decision, but a strategic one as it has direct implications on an operator’s sustained revenue growth as well as on customer experience.

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