It’s undeniable - the penetration of mobile usage in our society cannot be ignored. When you consider that 64% of decision-makers surveyed by MarketingSherpa and SurveySampling this year said they “reguarly view emails using a mobile device” it’s time to pay attention.
As a former email creative specialist, a lot of my focus the past two years has been strictly on email - email best practices, email design, email deliverability, email strategy, email trade shows, etc. All things email. And having that niche focus can have its advantages. But in the past few months my responsibilities have taken me outside of email into other one-to-one technologies, especially SMS.
Not that the two technologies - email and SMS - are that different. If done correctly, both can deliver relevant, personalized communication to a specific audience. SMS simply adds the characteristic of convenience. A recipient needs to be at a desktop or laptop to view an email, but a mobile message - SMS/MMS - can be viewed on any mobile device, anywhere, anytime.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that SMS will replace email. Each communicaiton vehicle, from email to IM, SMS to social networks, gets used differently depending on which groups are involved and volume. Email appears most often across all these forms of communicaiton. It is not going away as long as users depend on it.
Rather than replace technology, integrate. For example, use your email program for monthly newsletters, loyalty programs and other non-urgent yet valuable communication. Email’s ability to scale and the flexibility it offers to recipients to organize, retain and format makes it the right choice here. Use mobile for time-sensitive messages, like alerts and reminders. Together, they create a very integrated, user-friendly appraoch for both consumer and business models.
This is the core idea behind Premiere Global’s Communications Operating System. In the end, it’s about solving communication problems with the technology at hand. Don’t limit yourself to one channel. Becoming integrated opens up so many doors to creative ways to engage your customers.
Tags: andrew osterday, COS, data, data integration, data management, data mapping, data segmentation, email markeitng, integration, premiere global services
