The wonderful world of mobile marketing can present a wealth of new opportunities for direct marketers – especially if they’ve become numb to the 2% or less response rates on typical email marketing campaigns.  And because mobile marketing is quickly becoming the “next big thing” for businesses across the country, it’s more important than ever to take note of what has worked, and not worked, in the past decade with email marketing.

At first glance, email and text message marketing appear to be closely related.  Both center on highly powerful and motivational marketing messages.  Both are opt-in based (right email marketers??), and offer targeted and personalized messages.   Both are integral strategies for businesses looking to expand and cultivate close relationships with their customers.

But that doesn’t mean one should approach mobile marketing in the same way as email marketing. In fact, one of the biggest mistakes that direct marketers make when undertaking a mobile promotion campaign is that they apply email marketing know-how to the world of mobile marketing.  As iZigg has pointed out before, this kind of mistaken confidence can end up backfiring.

While email marketing does have its merits, there are plenty of mistakes that many email marketers make that unhinge the success of a direct marketing campaign.  What’s more, these mistakes can directly translate to SMS marketing if you aren’t careful.

So when making the transition from email to text, what should direct marketers watch out for?  iZigg reveals the following:

  • Keeping in touch with clients is one thing; bombarding them with text messages is another.  While there hasn’t yet been a word invented to describe junk text messages, it’s still considered spam.  What’s more, a customer is more unforgiving of junk messages sent to their mobile phones than their email inboxes.

Lesson learned:  Use your judgment to determine how often you should keep in touch.  Ask yourself “would I like to get that message on my phone?”  And pay careful attention to response and opt-out rates to gauge how well your mobile promotions are received.

  • Make sure that your mobile promotions combine a mix of promotional messages (i.e. ones that sell your product or service), and high-value messages that offer content for free.  Email marketers often spend too much time promoting, resulting in irritated customers and/or higher opt-out rates.

Lesson learned: Mix up your texts by offering members-only benefits and freebies along with your promotional messages.  Your client will be more willing to purchase your product or service if you value their time enough to make it worth their while.

  • Always answer a consumer complaint or comment in a timely manner.  Email marketers are often guilty of leaving their clients hanging, simply because they might not have the resouces required to keep up with feedback, or the feedback gets lost in the “email black hole”.  Remember that customers have an extremely long memory when it comes to poor service.

Lesson learned: Make sure that you have someone or a team in place that can respond promptly to customer feedback via text messages.  Text message marketing is all about “instant” response.  So you can bet that your mobile marketing database will expect the same kind of instant response to their questions or concerns.  With iZigg, you can also easily setup an automated response system that lets clients know when they can expect a personal reply from you.  (A great solution to a smaller business with fewer resources)

While email marketing has certainly paved the way for text message marketing, direct marketers can greatly improve their mobile marketing prowess by applying these hard-earned pearls of marketing wisdom.

If you have other “lessons learned” from email marketing, please share below.  Stay up to date with iZigg activities and announcements, text “iZigg” to 90210!