Mobile marketing is still a burgeoning industry, but the conceptual similarities it shares with email marketing can help mobile marketers understand what the future holds.
The email marketing industry was in the same position 10 years ago that mobile is in now, and the valuable lessons learned since then are easily applicable to the present mobile marketing industry. An excellent article on DMNews covers most of those similarities, and details the guidance email marketers can now provide their mobile counterparts.
Take for instance the concept of best practices and user-privacy that evolved as the email marketing industry began to take shape. In the days before spam laws and opt-ins become mainstream, the act of “batch and blast” email campaigns were prevalent, effectively giving email marketers a bad name in the process. As the mobile industry has matured, the same best practices, rules and regulations have also matured, and have become even more important given the highly-personal nature of mobile.
“Email has come a long way since then and has turned into an important tool for building genuine and lasting relationships with consumers,” the author states. “In fact, email’s legacy is the importance of crafting and delivering highly relevant messages that provide value for consumers. Now mobile is following right along in email’s footsteps and marketers have learned some important lessons along the way.”
Through the use of email marketing, consumers have become accustom to sophisticated and highly targeted promotions, and email is most successful when marketers leverage customer data and add relevant content to their messages. “For mobile, being able to connect cell phone numbers to a 360-degree view of individual consumers in order to provide relevant, useful content will be the industry’s great leap forward.”