The History of Serious Mobile

Although you can debate what started the mobile-first revolution, almost everyone agrees the rise of the smartphone—both Apple and Android—was the gasoline on the fire. When we began to carry around serious computing power (like a Cray supercomputer's worth in an iPhone) in these small devices that also have GPS capabilities, some really cool things started happening.

Before that, mobile communication was about short message service (SMS)—and most people never even knew how that worked—at least, marketers certainly didn't in the early days. But the rise of the GPS chipset signaled a parallel rise of location-based startups around the 2005–2006 timeframe. Think early innovator Foursquare who rose from the first generation of location-based startups and continues to innovate its way into the directory and recommendations space.

One of the early user experience limitations for mobile was the same genius that led to its rise: that hot new GPS chip. The problem was that the chip required a ton of power to keep on all the time while waiting for the user to do something relevant like check-in or visit a specific store. Once the operating system makers sorted out the wrinkles there, location-powered events started to become mainstream data points for users and marketers alike.

As such, we have multiple tiers of GPS data today, users have the privacy controls to individually select which apps can or cannot track locations, and Apple's iOS 8 even has an always-on “Recent Places” list buried deep in the settings that some of the smartest app developers are leveraging for location-level data.

Now that location is as easy to track with a mobile app as virtually any other value about a user, of course marketers are beginning to factor for it in their queries and audience segmentation. It might play out like this in the marketing automation world:

Jen is an email marketing manager for a ski shop and is trying to drive cross-sell between her online store and her 10 retail locations. Not everyone who shops online is close enough to a physical location to be a candidate, so she's interested in location.

Her first indicator is simply known users with their addresses on file, who are easy to include in her standard queries to drive email messaging. However, there's a completely separate group of users who may not have a completed profile but who are walking down the street in front of (or across from) her 10 stores. By leveraging her mobile app's location capabilities and some basic geo-fencing programming, she's able to work with her agency to build an app-level notification program that triggers every time one of the app users walks by.

Jen may make the exact same offer she would to her email recipients (10 percent off or a free ski tune-up) or she may do something even more timely and compelling—like inviting people to stop in on a rainy day for hot chocolate. And, yes, pulling local weather information from an API (application program interface) in real time to change a normal message to the hot chocolate invitation is completely doable.

In fact, she might have an all-new cross-channel query that looks like this:

1. Anyone who's visited her site at least twice in the last six months
2. {AND}
3. Anyone who's spent at least $50 in the last 24 months online
4. {AND}
5. Anyone who's spent less than $20 in the last 24 months in-store
6. {AND}
7. Anyone who walks by the store

The result could be her best possible offer—20 percent off any one item in the store and free shipping for their next online purchase. This is exactly the kind of channel synchronicity most marketers would love to drive—and while executing it still requires some specialized players, all the pieces of the puzzle are widely deployed across the mobile spectrum.

And I haven't even included the most compelling location-based technology that's coming to market widely in the next two to three years in this user story: beacons. I don't want to devolve this into a technology for technology sake's discussion, so I'll just say that beacons will do the same thing for in-store location (imagine which aisle or which section) that the mobile phone did for map-level location. It's going to refine the meaningful distance down to two feet instead of 200 feet, which will make for yet another revolutionary moment for marketers.

Email versus SMS versus Apps

So now that we have anywhere between 2 and 20 communications methods baked into our smartphones, marketers must make a seriously momentous decision when it comes to behaviors: which communications lever do I pull when I track a behavior? You can make excellent arguments for all three options, so let's do a quick dive into each one's particular strengths:

1. Email: Regardless of how much people complain about being inundated by it, email is still an amazing channel to drive both sales (think cart abandon campaigns) and user re-engagement (think about the “We haven't seen you in awhile” message you get from your favorite online retailer). It has its challenges in the mobile world—particularly if you've ignored the fact most consumer brands now see more than 60 percent of their opens on mobile devices—but it's so pervasive that it works. Email's downside lies in our need to depend on external entities (Internet service providers) to deliver it to our customers. They play a gatekeeper role in that delivery because of an insane amount of bad actors generating SPAM in the trillions per day. It's also an opt-in based channel, so we can lose the ability to email a great lifetime customer based on a single screwup on our end that leads to them opting out.
2. SMS: Although it's always been a challenge for marketers to implement good SMS programs—or maybe because it's always been a challenge, so it hasn't risen to a commonplace practice—SMS has remained a bastion of interaction. Some marketers I know report 90 percent open rates on text messages. Its power lies in the combination of its simple but interruptive nature. I don't want to get too esoteric here, but you should think about SMS as the first-ever version of app notifications—with the phone being the app. If done well, I expect the app notifications we'll discuss next to enjoy an interaction quotient more like SMS (∼80 percent opened) than email (∼20 percent opened). SMS is also important because it's universal across almost all cell phones regardless of whether it's the latest Samsung Galaxy model or a Nokia 7200 from 2002.
3. App notifications: Finally, the newest communication channel within mobile is the app-level notification. Although there are currently some pretty serious constraints—for instance, you have to have a specific company's app downloaded to enable the function—I expect the use cases to get friendlier with the rise of connected devices like watches and other jewelry-oriented form factors. App notifications share the same interruptive nature of an SMS message, but also provide some really cool differentiators from traditional email. In addition to the pop-up notifications we normally think of, some app developers are moving to a world with in-app mailboxes. This mimics a typical email box, but with a few key differences: (1) it can also have a pop-up notification with the message; (2) there's no separate opt-in required and we don't have to gather some user-entered information to know where to send the message—although providing some user controls and outlining the rules of the app inbox in your terms and conditions are solid best practices; and (3) perhaps most important, you can expire a message in an app user's mailbox as easily as you sent it. Imagine the flexibility this provides to online sellers who have limited items for sale or someone who wants to cap limit the number of coupon redemptions on a specific item based on a co-marketing deal with the manufacturer.

Just by looking at these three message types within mobile communications, you can see how complicated using them together could become. SMS has an almost universal application, but hard-core marketing is typically very carefully limited by each user—and typically is limited to two to three of their best friend brands (more on this concept in Chapter 15).

Where might this go over the next two to three years? Odds are that marketers will offer our customers the choice of where they want to be contacted—and about what topics. So they might pick newsletters for their email inbox, sale notifications by SMS, and discount offers by app notification. Or they may opt-out of SMS, or not download your app so there's no inbox to send to. Whatever ends up happening, giving the customer the choice will keep interaction and response rates more productive.

The Fragmentation of Communication Itself

If you want to imagine the real future state—and understand why you should be thinking radically about behavioral marketing and mobile technology right now—it seems that communication is in the process of being sharded into a million tiny pieces. And the end deliverable is not going to be an email newsletter with the same six stories that goes to everyone on your list. Every person will have his or her own interest graph that's powered by a combination of what they say and do.

I imagine that information will be chopped into such small pieces that we'll be able to drive incredible relevance in terms of when and who we deliver it to. Data points that car-buying services charge us money for today (average price paid for a Chevy Camaro in Omaha, Nebraska) are going to be a simple search you set up once and you get notified any time there's a change. You also get notified every time you enter an auto dealership—and if it's a factory-owned location, you also get the car's invoice pricing included. It won't be some clumsy attempt by a car manufacturer to send you a brochure; it'll be timely, dead-on relevant information delivered to you at the exact moment you need it by a semi-objective third party. (I'm also convinced that paid listings and sponsored content will be much harder to get rid of.)

You can ignore my future analysis or marketing and communications if it helps you sleep better at night, but you should keep your eye on one trend that will define exactly how fast my future world comes to fruition: wearable computing. Google Glass was an overly geeky first attempt at integrating content into a wearable device, and anyone thinking logically about human interaction probably could have predicted its demise. The next generation of watches and virtual reality headsets are much more likely to be the hardware behind this new revolution in communication.

Conclusion

Although mobile has likely been the biggest challenge for even the most traditional marketers over the last couple years, it's pretty clear things are only going to get harder. We'll look back and laugh at the days when the discussion around responsive design for HTML emails was the issue concerning everyone. That's because we'll be back to trying to refactor our most dynamic channel yet again based on a new use case or device.

In fact, mobile might actually be the ideal place for a marketer to take on behavioral marketing for two very clear reasons: (1) it's so hard you're probably going to outsource most of it, so why not include behaviors from the beginning? and (2) there's not going to be a single platform more likely to generate the types of behaviors you can absolutely bank on.

Someone opening an email or calling a call center is nice—and you can use that data to incrementally improve follow–up communications. But knowing someone walked into a retailer and had looked at the same item on the website yesterday, and delivering a pop-up offer on the spot is a killer use case. If you think your desktop selling strategy was exploded by mobile only in terms of what device your messages were opened on, wait until you see your entire marketing effort deconstructed into tiny bits that are delivered in real time and convert at 50–60 percent. The next 10 years are going to be a wild ride as marketing goes native on mobile, and I'd suggest a minimally viable strategy is playing around the edges of the game while things are blowing up at an epic pace.