Ex3 Café

SMS + Campaign Mgmt. Demo. Check it out!

 

One of the more exciting aspects of my job is tinkering around with new technologies.  The latest technology that I've been experimenting with is text messaging and SMS short codes.  These are the codes that are increasingly being used for mobile direct response marketing (i.e. Text: "OFFER", To: 12345).  I recently blogged about SMS short codes.

In my experiment, I signed up with a service that can receive incoming short code text messages (from all of the primary US carriers) and convert these messages into web URL's.  I then pointed the URL's at a campaign management application I've been working with (Brick Street eMA) that accepts web URL's as input.  Brick Street Software recently acquired eMA from Kana Software and is currently upgrading eMA's platform and is adding a number of new features.

The beauty of this campaign management to SMS integration (bi directional by the way) is the cell phone can now be used as an input device into the campaign management system.  And because Brick Street eMA has an extremely robust work flow engine, along with a direct connection to the Internet, the possibilities of what can be done are almost limitless.  Below are a just a few examples of what's possible.  Please note, these are fully functional demos, so take out your cell phone and give them all a try!

Event Registration

In this demo, there are 5 different event venues to sign up for at a fictitious financial services conference.  These venues could be posted on signage (digital or non digital) throughout the conference.  The 5 event venue codes are EPSEM, FPSEM, IPSEM, RPSEM and TPSEM. 

For example, let's say you want to sign up for the upcoming Financial Planning Seminar.  Here, you would simply TEXT: "REG FPSEM" TO: 41411.  In this case "REG" is the keyword that indicates that this text is for event registration and the "FPSEM" code tells the system that the registration is for the Financial Planning Seminar.  41411 is the SMS short code. 
**NOTE: Make sure to leave out the double quotes ("") in the text message.

When you get the response back read the instructions, as there is more you can do.

Get Offers

This demo showcases a use case where users can register, via their cell phone, to receive offers from a company.

To try this demo out, TEXT: "GETOFFERS" TO: 41411.  When you get the text message, make sure to reply to the message with the word "GO".  This will send a second text message back to you with "today's offer."

Get Song Information and Buy

To try this demo out, TEXT: "GETSONG SG1" TO: 41411.  Possible song codes are SG1, SG2 and SG3.
***NOTE: In this example, I pointed eMA at Amazon.com's music ecommerce site.

Join Social Networking Group or Fan Page

This demo showcases the capability to get info. and/or join a social networking group or fan page.

To try this demo out, TEXT: "FCBK" TO: 41411 (for SMS alerts) or TEXT: "FCBK (plus your email address)" TO 41411 (for email list).

Enter a Contest

This demo illustrates how one can enroll into a contest via SMS text.

To try this demo out, TEXT: "SKYBOX A234" TO: 41411.  In this case "SKYBOX" is the keyword to register to win free skybox seats at the next game (i.e. football, hockey,  baseball...etc.) and "A234" is the seat number of the contestant.

I could go on and on with the demos, but think you get the general idea.  The key take away here is SMS integrated with campaign management is a very powerful combination.  This combination extends campaign tracking and interactivity to off-line marketing channels (i.e. prints ads, digital signage, radio ads..etc) and remote locations (i.e. locations away from a PC) where direct tracking and interactivity were previously not possible.

I'll definitely have more to say on this topic so stay tuned.  In the mean time, have fun with the demos and let me know what you think.

P.S.
Feel free to share this blog post with anyone you feel would be interested.

An RFID Chip in Every Cell Phone by 2010?

   

This recent blog post from The RFID Weblog caught my eye.  Given that we are in the middle of 2009 and (to the best of my knowledge) none of the top cell phone manufactures currently have RFID chips embedded in their phones, the pace better pick up if we want to reach this prediction by next year.  Predictions aside though, I wanted to throw out a few marketing use cases that could be enabled with this marriage of cell phone and RFID.

I'm Here, Start Spoiling Me Now

In this use case, a customer could associate their RFID enabled cell phone with their loyalty/rewards account for a particular merchant or service business.  Then, when the customer enters a participating location (and their cell phone is picked up by an RFID reader at the entrance) a personal greeter/assistant could be alerted to greet the customer upon their arrival.  A good example of this use case could be a "high roller" at a Casino.  Upon entering the casino location, the high roller could be greeted by a personal assistant who could pro-actively attend to their every need.  "Hi Mr. High Roller!  Here's your favorite cigar and drink.  Your table is already for you."

Tell Me More...

In this use case, a customer could hold their cell phone next to a product (with an RFID tag on it) to get additional information about the product.  The information could include detailed product information that's not on the product label or surrounding signage.  Other information might include:

• Complementary products.  For example, cheeses in a store that go with a selected bottle of wine.
• Nutritional information for a food or beverage
• Product ratings.  For example crash test ratings for a particular car.
• Any related discounts, rebates or coupons associated with the selected product.

Please Don't Make Me Dig For My Rewards Card

This is a common occurrence at any check out line where a reward/loyalty card is "swiped."  Here the customer has to find their rewards card in their wallet or purse.  If they can't find their card, they instead need to enter their phone number or other identifying information into a keypad to pull up their loyalty/rewards account.  This can be a bit of a hassle for the customer.  If the customer has a cell phone with embedded RFID associated with their rewards account though, their rewards account can automatically be pulled up when they enter into the check out area.  This saves the customer time and increases the likelihood that the rewards card will be associated with the customer's transaction.

These are just a few use cases, at the top of my mind, that could be achieved by embedding RFID chips into cell phones.

I'm not sure if every new cell phone will have an RFID chip in it a year from now.  What I am certain of is the marketing use cases that will be enabled by this cell phone/RFID integration will be game changing.

Service-to-Sales Sounds Great But...

It makes so much sense when you think about it.  The customer is already engaged in a conversation with your customer service department, why the heck wouldn't you seize the opportunity to cross-sell the customer a complementary product ("you want a new bank account to go with that brokerage account?") or up-sell the customer into the premium level product or service ("how about 10,000 additional text messages for only $5.00 more per month?")?  The devil is in the details though so make sure you come prepared when you pitch this "no-brainer" idea to the Customer Service department.  That said, the following are a few key questions and concerns you will likely be confronted with when you finally make your pitch.

This Messes Up Our Metrics

Because customer service reps are evaluated mostly on call stats (i.e. number of calls answered, average talk time, after call wrap up time, etc.) adding a sales pitch to every inbound call will most certainly effect all of these key metrics.  To address this issue, you should be prepared with estimated increases (or decreases) for each metric.  Here's a few examples:

• Number of calls answered per shift will decrease by approximately 20 calls
• Average talk time will increase by approximately 30 seconds
• After call wrap up time will increase by 1 minute

Of course, to offset the negative impact your proposal will likely have on the key metrics above, you will want to have the estimated increase in sales in your back pocket.

What's In It For Me?

This will most certainly be in the minds of the customer service reps and line managers.  To address this, you should have an incentive program in your proposal, otherwise there will be little motivation for the customer service reps to add a sales pitch to each call.

I know How to Fix Problems, Not Sell

Because most customer service reps are not sales people, you will need to provide a service-to-sales training course.  The course should focus on:

• Identifying cross-sell or up-sell opportunities
• Training the customer service rep how to transition from the customer service portion of the call to the sales portion of the call in a "soft" and unobtrusive manner (obviously stressing that the customer service portion of the call should come first).
• Training the customer service rep how to enter orders into the sales order system and/or enter leads into the CRM system

These are just a few key topics to cover in the training course.  The important thing to know here is service-to-sales training is essential for your program to be successful.  As such, you should have this covered in your proposal.

Having a well thought out and realistic service-to-sales proposal and implementation plan will greatly assist you in getting your proposal accepted as well as having a successful program launch.  Without this, your career advancing service-to-sales idea will likely turn out to be a service-to-headache disaster.

Campaign Prioritization - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

So, you spent the last two years building a corporate wide, state-of-the-art campaign management system and you convinced all of the different marketing groups in your company to ditch their individual e-mail vendors and go through your centralized system.  The benefits of your campaign centralization pitch were certainly compelling:

• A history of all outbound customer communications can be stored, referenced and shared from a single location
• Centralizing campaign management operations for all product groups can create economies of scale for campaign design, execution and reporting
• Legal and corporate branding guidelines can more easily be adhered to
• Data for all campaigns can more easily be pulled from a centralized data repository thus reducing data errors and inconsistencies
• Recency and frequency of customer communications can better be controlled (via campaign prioritization filtering) thus reducing the chance of over communicating to customers and driving up optouts 

The last benefit often doesn't play out as well in reality as it does on a PowerPoint slide though, as internal clients can be disturbed when list counts are lower than expected due to prioritization filters being applied during the list selection process.  While this prioritization filtering is essential at a global/company level, to reduce the chance of over communicating to customers, tell this to a marketing program manager that still believes list quantity is better than list quality. 

To better deal with the inevitable backlash that will ensue when program managers see lower list counts than expected, I would recommend that you be prepared to respond with the following:

• The logic employed in the prioritization filter.  This helps program managers to better understand why certain people are suppressed from the final list.  This also helps to show that no favoritism is taking place when the prioritization filter is applied
• The danger of over communicating to customers.  This can drive up optout rates, thus reducing the number of "marketable" customers to market to in the future
• The concept of list quality versus list quantity.  If you have hard numbers available to demonstrate this benefit, this is even better

And if all else fails, tell the program manager to go complain to the CMO. :-)

Note to IBM: Please Make Data Mining Work for Mainstream Marketing This Time

With IBM's recent press release announcing a new consulting organization dedicated to advanced business analytics, I thought to myself, "I sure hope this new organization helps to incorporate advanced analytics/data mining into mainstream marketing this time around."  Because up to now, other than a few BIG exceptions (i.e. Amazon.com), the promise of integrating data analytics and marketing (in a scalable and repeatable manner) has yet to be realized.  It's quite frustrating, as data mining technologies have been around for a number of years and incorporating data mining into marketing seems like such a natural fit.  For example, customer exhibits pattern of behavior for product cross-sell opportunity so complementary product offering is dynamically presented to customer and add on sale is made.  Done.  End of story.  Not so fast.  Here's what's throwing a wrench into this seemingly straight forward scenario:

• The PhD's in machine learning and mathematics (in the Reporting and Analytics Division) and the MBA's (in Marketing) are wired completely different.  Here, the PhD's are concerned about accuracy (to the n'th degree), methodology, sample size...etc. and the marketers are concerned about "just getting the stuff out the door".
• For direct marketing, most marketers are still obsessed with list quantity versus list quality.  "You mean my list count is only 150,000, I thought it was going to be more like 2,000,000?"  In this case, if a list (generated via data mining) has a smaller count than expected, the marketer may request that the list be pulled using more traditional data selection/segmentation methods to increase the list count (completely missing the point).
• The raw data (to be mined) is never right.  So the data mining folks spend most of their time "getting the data ready to mine" versus actually mining the data.
• Very few companies have figured out how to integrate data mining and marketing execution efficiently (or at all).  As such, a lot of interesting discoveries are made, via data mining/analytics, but no direct action is taken to help generate additional sales from these discoveries.  For example, through mining its sales transaction data, an on-line retailer may have discovered that customers who purchase products in category A, are likely to purchase products from category B as well.  Unless there's a process/technology in place to alert the customer about products in category B (i.e. automated e-mail, website message...etc.) this discovery, while perhaps interesting, has limited or no monetary value.

So, with the above realities in mind, my advice to IBM (if the company wants to be successful at selling data analytics products and services to marketers) would be the following:

• Figure out a way to bridge the communication barrier between the data modelers/analysts and the marketers.
• Set expectations for senior management on the process of data mining.  Many senior executives believe the process involved with advanced data analysis and modeling is likened to the Ronco "Set It and Forget It" Rotisserie Oven.  Here the assumption is that a magical software tool is turned loose against a sea of data and (miraculously) revenue generating discoveries pop out the back end with limited or no human intervention.  Obviously there is a lot more to data analytics/modeling than this, so senior management's expectations need to be managed accordingly.
• Make sure the raw data that's being analyzed/mined is complete, accurate and structured correctly on an on-going basis.  Otherwise you will have highly skilled data modelers spending most of their time doing manual, mundane data "grunt work" instead of the work they are hired (and paid handsomely) to do.
• Educate marketers on the value of data quality versus data quantity.  Here various tests could be set up to compare the marketing ROI between segments derived via data analytics and segments derived using more traditional data selection methods. 
  NOTE:  I find that numbers speak much louder than words when it comes to proposing new marketing techniques and technologies to marketers.
• Don't focus solely on analytics and discovery.  Make sure you also provide the customer with a scalable and repeatable method to "take action" when key, revenue generating discoveries are made.  In other words, help the customer fill the gap between marketing discovery and marketing execution.

If IBM is mindful of the above recommendations, I believe this newly formed consulting organization will be highly successful at selling data analytics products and services to marketers.

P.S.  Here's an interesting video I found that helps answer the question "what is data mining?":

QR Codes Hit Prime Time TV!

Check out this episode of CSI: NY that features QR codes:

Good PR for the folks lobbying to have QR codes become the standard for mobile direct response marketing.

More Innovative Ways to Capture Marketing Responses On-the-Go

After writing my last blog post on leveraging the cell phone and SMS text messaging to respond to off-line marketing campaigns, I discovered some other promising mobile phone applications that could perform this task as well.

StarStar® Service from Zoove

Developed by a company named Zoove, this service leverages the actual phone interface (versus say the SMS text interface) on a cell phone to capture customer responses.  Here the end-user simply dials an advertiser’s unique StarStar code—a series of numbers that follow the prefixed “**”—on their mobile phone keypad.  For example, the consumer dials “**12345” and presses the SEND key. 

In a nut shell, Zoove maintains that its solution is much more intuitive and user friendly than text messaging (leveraging mobile phone short codes) to capture marketing responses on-the-go.  This benefit sheet, from Zoove's website, describes the benefits of StarStar service over SMS texting in more detail.

Unfortunately, I was hoping to provide a video demonstration of the StarStar service in action, but I wasn't able to find anything on the Internet.

QR Codes

Already used widely in Japan, QR codes (or 2-D bar codes) are captured as an image, via a cell phone camera, and interpreted by a QR code reader application installed on the cell phone.  Here's a commercial from NTT DoCoMo (Japan's leading mobile phone carrier) that showcases how QR codes are leveraged in a retail advertising.

I experimented with QR codes on my cell phone (a Blackberry Curve) by installing a QR code reader from BeeTagg and reading QR codes I generated from an on-line QR code generator.  At first, the process of lining up my cell phone correctly to the QR code, taking the picture and generating the results was a bit cumbersome (and clunky on my cell phone), but after a few tries, I got pretty good at it.

Here's an interesting article in Business Week on Why QR Codes Could Help Save Print Advertising.

RFID

Mostly thought of for inventory tracking, RFID (radio frequency identification) technology is also being used to bridge the gap between traditional print and on-line media.  In fact, AMUSEMENT Magazine (in France) is claiming to be the first magazine to offer content linked both in print and online by embedding an RFID chip in one of its magazine subscriptions.  In this case, as soon the reader touches the chip to an RFID scanner, a request is sent to a remote server which gets the reader connected to the related online content.  More can be read about AMUSEMENT Magazine's RFID enabled article in this blog post from ForeverGeek.

The technology for all of the above solutions is here now.  The question though, is which technology will become the standard for mobile direct response marketing?  Heck, with all the new mobile phone hardware and applications hitting the market today, the answer may yet to be developed.  Whatever the solution turns out to be though, the potential for mobile direct response marketing is enormous and mass application and user adoption (I believe) is right around the corner.

The Holy Grail for Capturing Responses From (Off-Line) Marketing Campaigns is Likely in Your Hand

If you read my last blog post on digital signage, I believe the holy grail for capturing responses from off-line or "digital out of home" (DOOH) marketing campaigns and promotions is the cell/smart phone.  My belief was further confirmed when I was at the movie theater recently and I saw something, in one of the beverage vending machines, that caught my eye.  In the machine, I noticed a message on each Coke bottle that read "text code under cap to 2653."  This piqued my interest because I realized that this was a real life example of using the cell phone to respond to an off-line marketing offer.  It didn't pique my interest enough though to pay $5.00 for for the Coke!  So I waited until I got home and purchased the Coke from my local store.  The video below shows what happened next:

NOTE:  To learn more about the "short codes" I mentioned in the above video, check out this article in Mobile Marketer.

In short, the cell phone (or more broadly, mobile marketing) is the ideal platform to bridge the gap between off-line and on-line marketing.  I believe this is the ideal platform because:

• Virtually everyone has a cell phone
• A cell phone is portable
• Almost all newer cell phones have text messaging capabilities and text messaging is on the rise (and not just for the younger generation)
• The newest cell phones all have open platforms for new application development
• Cell phones facilitate networked, bi-directional communication (voice and data)

Other prominent companies (or popular TV shows) that have leveraged the mobile platform include:

• Dominos Pizza: Mobile coupons
• Starbucks: Store locator, "text your zip code to..."
• American Idol: Vote for your favorite contestant

This article from e-marketer further confirms my believe that mobile marketing is on the rise.  And to see the power of mobile marketing try texting "Ex3solutions" TO: "368266".

Demo of Cisco's Digital Signage Solutions - WOW!

In my last blog post on digital signage, I mentioned that I was going to The Digital Media Systems Demo Center, at Cisco Systems, to get a first hand look at Cisco's digital signage solutions.  Well, I went to the demo center last week and was not disappointed.  The demo started in one of Cisco's TelePresence rooms.  Cisco's TelePresence solutions are developed in the same product division that the digital signage solutions are developed in.  I'll leave the details and marketing benefits of this part of the demo to another blog article though, as I already have way too much to say about digital signage.

The next part of the demo focused on Cisco's digital signage solutions.  Here, the demonstrator walked through a number industry specific applications showcasing digital signage solutions in financial services, retail, health care, government, entertainment, higher education and safety and

security industries.  We spoke at length about marketing specific applications for digital signage in the retail industry.  Some of these applications included:

• Displaying brand messaging next to products grouped together by brand (i.e. showing video clip of famous person using or talking about a particular product or brand)
• Displaying targeted, dynamic advertisements associated with a specific product brand and/or product category
• Displaying information about a specific product by simply "waving" the product in front of the video screen
• Displaying complementary product recommendations.  For example, a customer could wave a dress shirt in front of a monitor and the monitor would dynamically display an assortment of ties (in stock of course) that go with the shirt.  This would be the modern version of children's Garanimals outfits with the mix-and-match tags!
• Generate dynamic, in-store coupons, for complementary products, that are redeemable at checkout

I could go on-and-on here, but I think you get the general idea.

More broadly, it would be interesting to see the ROI analysis of replacing in-store print ads and promotions with digital signage.  Just think of the potential savings that could be realized by eliminating printing and shipping costs associated with print ads (not to mention the "green" benefits of eliminating shipping and paper usage).  And how about personalization?  Try getting an estimate from your printer to create a personalized print ad campaign deployed nationwide for 10's, 100's or even 1,000's of stores.  The quote would likely be astronomical!  And, oh, what if the printer used the wrong logo or put the incorrect discount percent on the ads?  Ouch!  This would require reprinting and reshipping all of the ads.  Even if the printer absorbed the entire cost for the mistake, you would likely incur a significant loss in potential revenue due to the error.  The key takeaway here is digital signage should allow you to more easily and quickly change or update in-store signage, thus eliminating the time and cost for printing and shipping.  The other added benefit here is marketing content can be more timely, personalized and relevant at the store and/or individual customer level.

One potential hurdle that could impact immediate and mass adoption of digital signage (from a purely direct marketing standpoint) is tracking, as it looks like the primary method to gauge marketing ROI is indirect tracking.  This method of tracking is becoming less desirable, as more and more CMO's and upper level management are demanding more direct/tangible methods to gauge marketing ROI versus indirect methods.  Here's an excerpt from a blog post in the Digital Signage blog that further describes this challenge:

ROI Calculation: This is perhaps the most difficult, but important aspect of any advertising campaign. Internet campaigns through organic search as well as PPC have the ability of giving very precise ROI numbers, an aspect of internet marketing which advertisers absolutely love. Not only do they love it, but now they demand it, which is why some companies have searched for unique ways to calculate digital signage ROI. This still remains difficult, however. Impressions don’t talk, cash does. And, until the signage industry is able to put more precise numbers on effectiveness, they will be handicapped by incumbent advertising mediums.

This potential hurdle will likely become a moot point though, as most of us carry a device that has great potential of becoming the holy grail for redeeming dynamic offers and tracking marketing ROI from digital signs and other similar media channels... OUR CELL PHONES!  I won't go into too much detail here (as I will save this for a future blog posting) but suffice-it-to-say, with the features & functionality that are now standard in most cell phones and the emerging technologies that leverage these features, our cell phones could soon be a marketers device of choice for capturing and redeeming offers and tracking marketing effectiveness for digital signage and similar media channels.

As a final note, I wanted to thank the good folks at Cisco Systems for taking the time out of their day to show me all of the awesome products from the DMS division.  I was truly "wowed" and inspired with what I saw and look forward to monitoring the progress of these emerging marketing solutions as they continue their debut into the marketplace.

At the Gas Station, the Coffee Shop... They're Everywhere...

I'm seeing these things everywhere.  I go to the gas station to fill up my car and there's one at every pump.  I run into the grocery store to pick up a few items and they're all over the store (including the check out stands).  I go to my local coffee shop to get a cup of java and there's one next to the barista station.  And I go to the ice cream store to grab an ice cream cone and there's one there.  And I make all of these sightings in less than an hour!

If you can't tell from the pictures, what I'm talking about is flat panel monitors or "digital signage" displays that are popping up at businesses across multiple industries and locations.  For the most part, these monitors contain some type of dynamic content (i.e. news, weather, traffic info., sports, entertainment...etc.) along with advertising or branding messaging.

After doing a bit of research, I discovered the key benefits of digital signage include (but are not limited to):

• Enhanced customer experience
• Elimination of the high cost of creating and distributing print ad campaigns
• Dynamic, relevant content that's easy to change and grab customer's attention
• Promote, cross-sell/up-sell to customers "in store"
• Ability to generate ad revenue from suppliers and other interested parties

I suspect a big reason for the explosion of digital signage is the perfect storm of increasingly cheaper hardware (i.e. flat screen technology, servers...etc.), increased network capacity & connectivity and the availability of inexpensive and easy to use software to produce, manage and distribute content and manage targeted ad buying and distribution.

To learn more about digital signage including the benefits, applications, products...etc., I'm heading out to the Digital Media Systems Division at Cisco Systems (which develops and markets digital signage solutions), so stay tuned.  Until then, feel free to share any experiences (or better yet) any interesting sightings that you've made of digital signage displays.