OK, I admit it.  I am not a fan of Mobile Marketing.  There I said it.  As a user, I hate using my Android or my wife’s iPhone to do anything on the Internet.  Don’t get me wrong, there are some mobile apps that I LOVE like Google Navigation, Barcode Scanner, and Amazon Kindle.

However, when it comes to the web experience—not so much.   So, I thought I would share my top 3 mistakes of Mobile Websites:

1.  Where’s the button for that?

Most websites offer a mobile version now, but too often it’s difficult, if not impossible, to find certain tasks.  For instance, ever tried finding Fantasy Baseball on the Yahoo Mobile App?  Forget about it!  Or finding scores on a particular game through ESPN GameCenter.  Not fun.

While I completely understand the reasoning behind having a scaled-down mobile platform optimized for a smaller screen, there are two key takeaways:

1.  Provide a customized user experience based on unique customer segments

2.  Offer an easy-to-find option for accessing the complete website

2.  I didn’t mean to click on that!

Many of the ads are placed adjacent to action or navigation buttons.  For those with fat fingers, like me, you’ll frequently open an ad for Dollywood instead of slicing the Fruit Ninja Watermelon.  This probably seems clever to some (Wow, look at how many clicks we got for you), but all this does is frustrate the user (bad experience) and the advertiser (no sales).

Make sure there is a clear border around your ads and try not to have navigation buttons close to your ads.

3.  Why did I get an ad for that?

Speaking of ads, too many mobile apps are serving ads that are not tied to the user’s interest.  If you aren’t capturing basic contact information, you should and if you aren’t using that information to target relevant ads, you should.

Relevant ads targeted to an active audience are a necessity to getting the ROI most marketers require.  Rather than serving an auto ad to every ESPN user, how about serving one to the top 10% of ESPN users likely to purchase a car in the next 90 days.  You can do that?  You betcha!

What are your suggestions for mobile websites?

We’ve all heard the analogy of using a “rifle” approach to marketing as opposed to a “shotgun” approach. In other words, make sure your message, though broad in its reach, resonates with the most targeted group of people possible. How can we apply this to direct mail? Well, it may mean you are sending out different offers, or even different collateral, rather than the same piece to everyone on your list.

Here’s an example. Customer A spends more with you than Customer B. You want to reward the loyalty of Customer A while enticing Customer B to spend more. The solution for most marketers is to send a 20% off coupon to everyone. While this will probably make both customers happy, a more effective approach would be to justify it differently with different terminology. Customer A would get a piece thanking them for their loyalty and offering the discount for such. Customer B would get a piece that tells them you want to see more of them, hence the discount. Both customers get the reward, but the message would be specific to the individual.

The problem is making it easy to identify each customer, and is how much they spend the best way to divide them up? Other ways to identify customer segments, and therefore potential offers, might be:

• How long have they been a customer
• Income levels
• Home owners vs. renters
• Urban vs. suburban residence
• Age
• Presence of children
• Education level
• And many more…

At Altair Customer Intelligence, we specialize in helping you reach your customers and maximizing your message to each segment. We can analyze your customer database and break them into segments that make sense. You can then target your message to your customers in a unique way, so that each customer gets a message that means the most to them, increasing the likelihood they will act on the offer.

According to a Q4 2010 survey by Unica measurement, analysis, and learning is the most frequently cited bottleneck for marketers.  In the same survey, turning data into actions was a top priority of marketers.  This makes it clear that as the pressure to turn data into action mounts, the bottleneck of measurement, analysis, and learning will become even greater.  The marketers in this survey overwhelmingly agreed that additional technology would ease their pain.  Additional technology is like buying the cool Snap-On tool set and expecting the ability to fix your car to come with it.  This panacea proves to be dangerous because an Econsultancy survey reports that only 2 in 10 US and UK companies have a company-wide strategy for collecting and integrating data analysis with business objectives.

The real problem isn’t the technology.  I’ll leave software and hardware out of the equation because we all agree it is there.

The phenomenon of data collection and measurement not being part of the business objective is rampant in every vertical I’ve run across.  What’s worse, it is likely the most valuable asset you’ll have.  It doesn’t matter if it is banking, insurance, retail, entertainment, or healthcare.  They have reams and reams of data collected and stored in the hopes of one day turning it into the golden egg.  The famous, or more likely infamous, “Now what?” question:  We have billions of data points – Now what?

To make sense of the data first you must bring it all together.  In some instances that is easy enough, and in other instances you may need the help of someone with experience bringing together data from different sources and compiling the file for analysis.  At the same time, you’ll want to transform many of the elements into categories or groups that allow for better insight.  For instance a report that has dollar amount frequencies from $0.01 to $150,432.45 doesn’t help you, but buckets in denominations that make sense for your business will.

Once the data is together, you can see all the elements/variables you have available and you can also bring in additional variables that will always play a key role.  It’s important to remember you will have tons of information about what the consumer does with you, but not the outside world.  Third parties will have that data and can append it to your file.

Now you have a file that can generate as many reports as you have time and technology to handle.

Who hasn’t seen a P90X infomercial and Tony Horton talk about muscle confusion to remove the plateau effect of weight training?  The concept is you change your routine to not allow your muscles to adapt to the effort and therefore continually improve.  Customer Intelligence removes that plateau effect or lag within a company’s marketing, product development and business strategy.  Customer Intelligence crosses business silos using data from throughout your company in conjunction with external information to derive insights and strategy that keep pace with your customers.  Keeping pace with your customers requires vigilance in updating the data, analyzing it and making decisions in the most automated fashion possible.

Automation of this process is a key contributor to the success. It removes the plateau/lag you see in traditional measurement solutions.   The Information Age is a two-way street; your customer is better informed than ever before.  What this means is if you aren’t communicating via the channels your customers use in a voice they will listen to you will not have their attention.  Customer Intelligence informs you on channel, the behavior of customers within that channel as well as the benefits and features they are most likely to care about.  With every change in technology the consumer has seen an exponential jump in the number of marketing touches they experience in a day.  These touch technologies require information gathering, analysis and decisioning.  Your CI system will be the repository and engine behind your success.

Once in place your CI system will improve acquisition results, grow your customer’s product usage and retain customers longer.  This shift is exactly like the example P90X uses to show you the effects of their training system.

Remove the plateau