Statistical Methods in Customer Relationship Management

9.3 Mobile Marketing

In recent years, mobile marketing has emerged as a new marketing channel for firms to reach out to customers on an individual basis. For marketing managers, this is an effective channel to convey their message to the customers that they want to target. To devise the most effective CRM strategy, it is important for managers to have a good understanding of the key benefits and make the best use of this new communication channel.

Mobile marketing is conducted and communicated through hand-held mobile devices, such as mobile phones, PDAs, smart phones, and portable tablet computers using 3G technologies, such as iPads. Mobile marketing has become a new marketing paradigm because of the superior benefits it offers compared to other communication channels. First, the most important benefit of mobile marketing is that it works even when the intended recipients are on the move. This is not the case with traditional marketing media such as billboards, TV, print, and radio that can only be accessed through certain networks and only from a certain location. Marketers thus can reach out to their customers anytime, anywhere, almost instantly. Mobile platforms therefore provide a fundamentally different type of consumer experience. Second, another interesting feature of mobile marketing is the opt-in feature. The opt-in feature allows customers to indicate their willingness to participate in the call-to-action when they see the firms' advertisement. This feature also enables ...