Building a Contact List with Mobile Marketing: Capturing Customer Information

In our last article, we discussed the necessity of building a contact database so that your company could market effectively to its existing customers.  We discussed the necessity for doing more than reaching out to those who spent time on personal computers, because consumers are spending an increasing amount of time on their mobile devices.  Smart businesses are finding ways to reach existing customers while they are on their mobile devices.  They are smart in doing this because statistics that indicate that their attention is likely (90% will open a mobile message) and their response is immediate (they are likely to act in90 seconds).

Given this favorable outlook to using mobile technology, we want to know who to apply it to the four essential functions of using a contact list.  These four functions are essentially the same whether you are building a direct mail list, email list or mobile marketing list.  They are:

1.) Capturing Customer Information
2.) Communicating With the Customer Base
3.) Rewarding  Customers
4.) Referrals and Endorsements

In this article we will focus on the first function which is Capturing Customer Information.   As this article moves forward, you will need to think about how your business interacts with its customers.  When you do this, you will be able take the principles that are discussed and build your own system to capture mobile customer information.

One way to capture the customer’s information is to collect their mobile number in an SMS Database.  As discussed above it provides you an opportunity to garner an immediate response.  Working with a marketing professional, you can easily set up either signage or direct employees to tell customer to text a code to a certain number and send it. To do that you will have to make it desirable for them send the code.

That normally means that they will need to have some kind of desirable freebie or discount.  When the customer acts by sending the code, they are then part of a dataset of mobile device numbers that the business can contact with sales, specials and company news.

Yet another way of capturing the mobile customers contact information is to seek their email address.  This almost sounds contradictory to the statistics quoted above.  However, there are consumers who would still rather use email to read and communicate.  And it is to your benefit to reach them while they are on their mobile device.

However, to do this, you will need a website that looks inviting when seen on a smartphone, TabletPC or IPad.  Most websites were not designed with these mobile devices in mind.  You will still need to have a compelling reason for your customer to want to give you their email address.   So there is a need for careful thought about what to offer someone who comes to the website.

Some companies use QR codes in order to entice people to come to an email singup form that fits well on a mobile device.  Although this would fall into the attraction category it is important to mention here, because the scanned code makes it easy to navigate to the page.  Whatever is promised, again, must be compelling, to make the person scan the code to get to the page.

Our company is skilled at helping companies build their contact database.  We know that is the key to building a good business and that it may have many facets: mobile, email, SMS or QR code.  Call us today so that we can determine the best options for your business.

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