Your Customers Have Mobilized. How About You?

Guest blogger Carrie Scott is Director of Product Marketing at Message Systems, Inc. She writes on marketing topics at the Message Exchange blog and dispenses shopping wisdom on her personal blog, Smart Woman $$ave. I like to shop. More than that, I like to find bargains for high-end designer clothes and handbags that I might not easily afford if I had to pay full retail. So I subscribe to a lot of the online closeout retailers that feature designer products at discount prices – sites like Rue La La, Gilt Groupe, Ideeli, Hautelook and several others. One of the great things about shopping online sites like these is that they send daily alerts to keep me informed about merchandise updates and new arrivals. Every morning I open my email inbox and voila: all kinds of great stuff to check out. The problem, though, is that I live in San Francisco, thousands of miles and three time zones from Manhattan’s Garment District. By the time I fire up my computer and check my email most mornings, it’s 9 a.m. on the west coast, and oftentimes the daily sales start around 9 a.m. east coast time – three hours before. Which means I get to the websites and everything I would have been interested in has already sold out. Aha, you might say, just check your email earlier in the morning when you first get up. Great idea, but I’m one of those old fashioned types who primarily uses email on my laptop, and text on my phone. If I could get an SMS message every morning with a simple list and clickable text linking to items I’d like to learn more about, now that would work – I could glance through the morning sales while I’m riding the bus to work. So I just need to let the retailers know my preferences, and they’ll send me a text rather than email, right? Not so fast. Here’s a screenshot from the Account Preferences page from one of my retailer accounts: I get multiple choices in how and when I can receive email, but SMS text? Not an option. Not to be harsh on these retailers that I love so much, but they’re not mobile enabled. A very large segment of their clientele – shoppers on the west coast, and to a lesser extent shoppers in the mountain and central time zones – would be in a position to send a lot more business their way if only they could access deals through the mobile SMS channel. But these retailers aren’t taking advantage of the mobile channel. I think (and hope) that’s going to change in the near future. Delivering the right message to customers at the right time and place is a time-honored direct marketing precept, yet achieving right-time message delivery has always been an elusive goal. New technologies are changing that equation. With the growing popularity of smartphones, social media and messaging channels choices (email, SMS text and IM), customers are literally becoming moving targets. Yet mobile networks and devices are also providing marketers with a framework – finally – to reliably reach customers when and where they’re most receptive to marketing messages. The trick is a) knowing your customers’ device and channel preferences at any given time and b) having the ability to send message content through whatever channel your customer prefers at that time. We have a name for this kind of contextually correct messaging: Message Convergence. As mobile communication evolves, so will customer expectations. (Obviously, my expectations have already evolved: I’d prefer to get shopping messages via SMS text from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. weekdays, email after 9 a.m.) More to the point, customers will award their business to those organizations that meet their needs. Satisfied customers will make bigger purchases and even buy more often, and companies that enhance the customer experience will experience less churn and greater lifetime value. There are ways for retailers – and many other industries – to reorient themselves for the new mobile marketplace, and in tomorrow’s post we’ll explore them.

Social Pro Daily

Your Customers Have Mobilized. How About You?

In this first of two posts, guest blogger Carrie Scott introduces us to “message convergence” — what it is, what it can mean for consumers and marketers, and what companies can do to overcome message delivery challenges.

Neil Glassman

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Neil Glassman