Phil Barrett

Phil Barrett is a Senior Director with Carlson Marketing Canada. Working with mostly Fortune 1000 companies, Phil leads the mobile and interactive practice providing strategic leadership and expertise in the areas of mobile, social media, usability, online media, SEM and email.

Phil has been designing, developing, working, and marketing in the interactive space since 1993 when he discovered during his interface design class at Cornell University that blinking text on a grey background was way cooler then anything they were doing in Director for CD-ROMs.

You can also read Phil's blog (with a mobile version, of course), Burning the Bacon, at www.burningthebacon.com.

6 Tips for building and managing consent for mobile marketing

Did you know that you can’t buy a mobile customer list for a mobile marketing campaign?

Unlike email or other channels, if you want to start a conversation with a current or prospective customer, you need their specific permission first.

You need mobile consent.

The downside of this requirement is that it can take more time and more money to reach the people you want to communicate with.

The upside is that response rates tend to be much higher. In many cases, we’ve seen response rates 3 times better or more than other channels.

So where do you start?

1. Leverage your existing customer database. Chances are you already have a customer list with permission to communicate in other channels. Ask them if you can communicate to them on their mobile device next time they reach your call centre or read your email newsletter.

2. Update your terms and conditions policy or statements. Although it can be expensive to update your policies to include a clause that allows you to reach customer through mobile, this is an effective way of getting enough consent to at least reach out once using mobile. Many companies are already in the process of updating their T&Cs to reflect the new “do not call” list law – so leveraging that process to add a clause on mobile would be cost effective…. And if you’re really lucky completely covered out of somebody else’s budget!

3. Update your website. Update your customer profile page to include a line specific for mobile numbers. Many sites have a field for “other” phone numbers but they aren’t specific to mobile. On the same page, give users several mobile opt-in options. For example, opt-in for contest or promotions and alerts or reminders specific to your product or service. You can even have alerts for when content is available in other channels – like a reminder that your cable bill is due and can now be viewed online.

4. Leverage events and sponsorships to drive acquisition. Text and you can win promotions at events are a great way to engage and acquire new customers (especially if the offer is really relevant), so be sure to include an opt-in SMS message after entry. Keep it simple.

5. Create awareness. You can have the best mobile channel offer in the market, but it’s only good for those who know about it! Be sure to promote your mobile services and options through other channels. For example, POS, statement stuffers, website, email and your above-the-line media. Remember when you had to convince your Art Director to include a URL on that Ad? Now that you have that practice, convince them to include a shortcode or mobile web address too - with a call to action. Better awareness will mean more opt-ins…which means it will be easier to justify the investment you just made in mobile.

6. Be sure to deliver exactly what they asked for! Once you have consent, you want to ensure that you keep it. By giving customers or prospects exactly what they opted in for, you can harvest your mobile customer list well beyond your initial campaign.

7 Things You Should Know about the Mobile Web

1. A lack of fixed or cheap data plans has been a key barrier to mass adoption of the mobile web in Canada.

All three Canadian major carriers have significantly dropped their data rate in the last 6 months. You can now get all you can eat data plans for as low as $7 / month and $60 all you can eat data plans for your fancy bandwidth sucking PDA devices. Mobile data is now affordable to many more Canadians.

2. A lack of devices that came with a decent mobile web browser was the other barrier to mass adoption of the mobile web. With consumers replacing their mobile devices more frequently than ever before (over 1 billion mobile devices were sold globally last year alone), the majority of actively used mobile devices now have solid mobile web capabilities – including those in Canada.

3. When developing a mobile website, you must create a user experience that is optimized for the mobile web. Just as we initially thought designing for the web meant taking a print brochure and putting it online, we can't take a website and simply make a micro-version of it for the mobile web.

It's a different channel, and therefore the information architecture and user experience must reflect a more personal context that leverages the device and how it's used - more so than pragmatically engineering web apps to work on mobile. Unlike the desktop experience, mobile users are frequently on the go and have many distractions. They don’t have time to navigate or figure out your site…so build an experience that is relevant and specific. Dead simple helps too.

4. Mobile widgets may replace the mobile browser. Building on my third point, we are now seeing a trend (led by Yahoo) away from a mobile browser experience that mimics the desktop browser experience where a user must first open a browser, secondly type in a URL and thirdly navigate to the point of interest. A mobile widget allows the user to access specific and relevant content on the mobile web immediately through an easily identifiable icon on their mobile “desktop” of icons.

5. Choose your mobile domain strategy carefully. Although you can now easily add scripts to your “desktop” web site that will auto-detect mobile browsers and therefore serve up a mobile web experience, there are several considerations for creating a uniquely identified mobile site. Some brands have simply added an “m” to their domain – like m.facebook.com. Others have added “mobile” to their domain – like cnnmobile.com. A third option is to register a dotmobi domain name that clearly identifies the site as mobile ready. Examples are rbc.mobi, fordca.mobi, and nba.mobi

Until the majority of sites have a mobile friendly equivalent, consumers need a recognizable indicator that the experience is optimized for them. My preference is to register a dotmobi (.mobi) domain and ensure an auto-detect script is in place to auto-redirect users to either the desktop or mobile site.

6. Keep the mobile experience mobile. A common mistake I see are mobile websites that add links to content that is not optimized for the mobile web. There is nothing more frustrating to a user than going from an optimized experience to a broken one. The same goes for mobile ads – if you are including them, make sure the click through goes to a mobile optimized site.

7. Know what works. JavaScript, tables, frames, horizontal navigation and flash are out. Know the current W3C standards for the mobile web. It’s like desktop web design circa 1995. There are ways of building mobile websites to ensure that the experience is a positive one on all devices.

With over 3 billion mobile devices live around the world compared to around 800 million Internet connections, the mobile channel will (not if) become the dominant digital access point for consumers.

Isn’t it time you incorporate a mobile web strategy as an extension of your overall interactive strategy?