Using mobile marketing to build your digital databases

Incorporating the cellphone into traditional marketing is fast becoming the smart way for businesses to build cost-effective, ethical and relevant digital databases. Digital databases in the current environment typically refers to their customers cellphone and e-mail addresses, but increasingly can also include Facebook, LinkedIn or other social network spaces.

For businesses though, the digital database campaign goals need to be established in an ethical way to ensure that the campaign does not infringe on the various (and growing) consumer privacy laws, and fits with best practice guidelines as laid out by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) or WASPA (the industry body that governs the mobile world). For example, asking your customers to enter a competition using their mobile phone, and then simply taking their mobile numbers and dumping them into the folder called 'General Marketing' is not ethical. Nor, in my opinion, is this data going to be relevant or cost effective moving forward as you will be marketing to someone who is not necessarily interested in your products - they simply entered the competition because the liked the prizes on offer. 

So how can companies use the mobile channel to build databases cost-effectively using their existing media spend? Simply ask! In existing print, radio, in-store or on pack advertising - simply ask the consumer to sms in their contact details and preferred way they would like to be notified when new products are launched, new sales are planned or new stores are opened. It is that simple. By asking costumers to give you their preferred method of communication and what they want to hear about, you are going to receive data which can be used intelligently, cost effectively and with the customers consent. You are already spending your media budget on traditional advertising, so by simply adding a mobile call-to-action, you will be cost-effectively building the databases you want. 

In the past, many companies or marketing departments evaluated their databases from a bigger is better perspective. Nowadays, given that there are costs in sending out un-targeted bulk sms and email lists, companies are starting to view these various databases more critically. Are these databases still relevant? When were they last updated? With e-mail lists, annual churn (ie obsolete data) can reach 30 per cent per annum and with mobile lists, this can be as high as 40 per cent (last time I checked, SIM card starter packs were going for 99c). 

The need to be current, relevant and ethical is vitally important as you start to think about building digital databases and the best way to go about building these lists is by incorporating the cellphone components into traditional media spend.

Chris Rolfe

CEO, Mobilitrix