As businesses ramp up their marketing budgets in hopes of getting their messages on our mobile screens, the evidence suggests that these efforts are working.
Recent research points to a growing number of consumers using their mobile devices much more often when trying to make purchasing decisions. In fact, more than eighty percent of shoppers now use their smartphones inside of stores. Just as many rely on these devices to search for information about the products they are evaluating.
But aggressively targeting consumers with mobile messages isn’t a practice to be taken lightly.
So how do you protect yourself from unwanted or illegal mobile marketing practices while still giving consumers a pleasant, engaging, and effective mobile marketing experience?
Michael Becker of the Mobile Marketing Association and author of Mobile Marketing for Dummies says the most important thing to be aware of is “the collection, use and engagement of data.”
What this means for your business is that you need to acquire and manage permission from your customers to contact their mobile devices.
In other words, before you can launch a mobile marketing campaign, you must have permission from the customers you wish to target. Seems pretty straightforward, right? Well, according to countless experts in the field, the importance of “opt-in” mobile marketing is still poorly understood by many business owners, but especially those new to marketing in the mobile channel.
For mobile marketing to be compliant with best practices and regulations, consumers must give their consent to mobile marketing.
In order to be entirely transparent, you should ensure that these disclosures are made consciously by your customers and not as part of agreeing to something else (in the fine print, so to speak), mobile marketing veterans advise.
So what steps can you take to make sure you are being as transparent as possible in your mobile marketing efforts? Becker suggests these four simple steps.
- Choice. Give you customers a choice to “opt-in” and to “opt-out” if they no longer want to be a part of your marketing list.
- Transparency. Make sure you customers know how their information will be used before they give it to you.
- Control. Similar to “Choice,” make certain that consumers have complete control over how, when, and in what format they receive your alerts.
- Security. Make sure your customers know that their data will be protected, and then make sure that it is protected in every way possible.
As long as your business is completely honest and forthright with customers who want to be included in your mobile marketing efforts, the impact of your campaigns will be positive and free from concern that you’re committing any form of serious mobile marketing malpractice.
