Adventures in Mobile Marketing

I got a real nugget of truth recently from a study by MarketingSherpa on iPhone consumer use. Got the link from MailChimp, a key blog by a real ESP.

For such a long time I didn’t read the tons of blog posts and information about mobile issues, even though I sat next to someone who had a bag of about 100 phones and talked constantly about phones rendering email. Why didn’t I care? I had one of those Nokias that cost -$5, yep, that your wireless provider pays you to get. So when I upgraded 2000% to an iPhone (slight exaggeration!), I suddenly was all ears. MarketingSherpa has clued in on this idea of “don’t-care-because-can’t-see-it”, a phenomenon that applies to many things in marketing, such as Image-Off Issues (“Why don’t you just turn images on?”). When I talk to clients about iPhone rendering issues, they say “send me a screenshot” because true, that is in almost all cases a great way of showing the issue and communicating the problem. But not with mobile.

- Our research reinforced what we’ve been telling readers for more than a year: If you haven’t yet, you need to go out and buy all of the widely used mobile devices. If you can’t buy all of them, at least get an iPhone and BlackBerry Curve and Pearl because of their popularity.

Why? You need to be able to see first-hand what you are marketing to when it comes to the mobile demographic, which usually has both disposable income and little time to waste.

MailChimp has a great video of iPhone accessing mail, too.