Adventures in Mobile Marketing

I’m heading into a meeting today to review a proposal on this, so I really shouldn’t post this morning about it (as will probably have more insight later today!) but read this in my RSS aggregator and wanted to talk about it: Ryan Deutsch of Strongmail’s post on EMM vs. ESP solutions for large event-based transactional messaging systems. What a mouthful.

He brings up some great points, namely the access to response data from each campaign and feeding it back to the system that is segmenting and issuing the lists. While there’s a lot of gut marketing out there, numbers prove the points, so having response data on each lifecycle series/ event email, and the goals of each, is vital to maintaining and expanding working programs.

One thing for me is that these systems don’t just “pop up” miraculously out of nowhere. They are a steady evolution from insight and lessons. It’s an organic, historical beast that came out of years of work from other marketers. Sure, there’s always the urge to want to wipe out the old and put in the new, but what we’re missing out on is all of that detailed testing that went into it.

On a contact strategy diagram I recently did, I took into account the inactive, former programs (with response metrics). I’m not surprised now that one of them is getting embraced again- as we all know in email marketing, things change. What was a problem 3 years ago could not be an issue now. What was a roadblock or obstacle internally due to various issues, could have dissolved.

Final note- while large, complex event messaging is great for so many reasons- better relationships created with relevant, timely messaging, they are very complicated, and the more information that goes into them, and the more you respect the existing framework, the better and strong they will be (and more understood, and better communicated internally.)