Mobile Marketing

Years ago, email changed the way that we communicate, and live our day to day lives. The ability to communicate faster with one another, increased our productivity and launched us further in to the information age. Today, communication with each other is instantaneous, and we can do so while we are on the go, with mobile phones.

Communicating via text message is the most effective way to reach your targeted recipient whether you are looking to get in contact with the person for personal reasons, or for business. Because of this, SMS Marketing is one of the most effective forms of marketing today. There are several benefits to being able to reach your target audience, instantaneously, no matter where they are, or what they are doing, which in itself is a benefit.

The efficiency gained by being able to communicate via SMS provides a great benefit. The speed and reliability can help employees be more effective communicating with multiple people at once, which can save a business a lot of time, and in turn, reduce costs. Rather than making multiple calls and having to leave voicemail messages, an employee can be sure that their SMS message was received and read by the recipient(s).

Another great benefit of SMS Marketing is the ability to know the delivery status of each and every message that you send. Delivery reports can be simple, or provide all types of analytics, but the most valuable piece of information would have to be knowing as to whether or not your message was received by your recipient. Ninety-six percent of SMS messages are read by their recipients, so if the message was delivered to the mobile device, then you can be sure that the recipient will read your message if they have not done so already.

SMS Marketing is a great way to retain customers as well. It typically costs less to retain customers, than it does to acquire new customers, so staying in contact with your existing customers can be extremely valuable to your business. Rather than just focusing on acquiring new customers, businesses should always monitor their retention rate, and work at increasing it. SMS Marketing is a phenomenal way to increase your retention rate, and requires very minimal work. Simply have your existing customers opt-in to receive mobile alerts, and you can send them all coupons with a special promotion with a single click and drive sales immediately.

There are several aspects of a business that can benefit from a guaranteed, fast means of communication, and SMS Marketing is the best way to do just that. The benefits are numerous, and the results are proven. With over 2.5 billion text messages sent each day in the United States, text message marketing is the "email", of the new, faster, information age.

Mobile marketing takes advantage of the mobile phone market in reaching out to your consumer group. Today, there are more mobile phone users than there are television, radio and computer owners. This means that by targeting mobile phone users, you are reaching more people than a television or online ad can reach.

TV advertising, print ads and even online advertising can be very costly. If you have a small to medium sized business, you can't afford to allocate a large amount of money for advertising alone, much less on an advertising that wouldn't reach a wider audience and give you immediate and positive outcome in terms of sales and brand awareness. So why risk your money for an ad campaign that may not work? You don't have to.

A mobile campaign is an affordable advertising technique that allows you to take control over the ads you send and the time you deliver your ads to your customers. By being able to control the information and the time you send your messages to your clients, you'd be able to make full use of your advertisements. Let's take restaurant marketing as an example. In Restaurant marketing, it's very important to inform your clients of your lunch and dinner specials on the time of the day that they need this information. In a mobile campaign, you can easily send your promotions off of your lunch and dinner menus to your clients during lunch and dinner hours. A mobile campaign makes restaurant marketing very easy especially for new restaurateurs.

Choose a marketing method that is effective and worth every dollar. Conventional advertising is great but why pay more when you can have a mobile campaign that is affordable and more effective than your traditional marketing campaign?

Baskin-Robbins takes OOH route

The one of the world's largest chain of ice-cream specialty shops, Baskin-Robbins, recently rolled out an out of home (OOH) campaign to celebrate the festival season in India.

The OOH campaign of Baskin-Robbins aims to promote its chocolate flavours through the Choco Fest initiative. "Our brand is known for chocolate flavours and they are our hot sellers," says Ashwin Uppal, who came on board early this year as general manager, marketing, South Asia, Baskin Robbins.

This is the first time that the brand has used the OOH medium in India since its entry into the country 17 years ago. "Through the OOH campaign, we are trying to get a sense of how our brand responds to this particular medium," says Uppal, who adds that the response to the Choco Fest campaign in seven-10 days has been phenomenal.

The campaign, executed by TDI International, has been rolled out in four cities including Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru and Hyderabad. In every city, the company has chosen 10-12 sites. It has also undertaken bus and bus shelter branding with BEST in Mumbai.

"Ice-cream is basically a product which is bought on impulse and we realised that if you ensure that the visual of ice-cream is carried along with the offer, it can create a desire to purchase," Uppal explains.

Therefore, the objective of bus and bus shelter branding was largely to give a visual appeal to the product and thereby create a 'drool factor' that would, in turn, initiate a desire in customers to buy the product.

The company is also using other media such as newspaper inserts, SMSes and the Internet (Facebook) to promote the Choco Fest campaign.

The company mainly targets youth in the age group of 15-28 years in SEC A and A+. "There is a huge customer base building for us in SEC B," Uppal elaborates.

The company sees about 20 lakh people walking in every month in its stores across the country. "There are months when this figure doubles," Uppal adds.

Baskin-Robbins currently has about 408 stores in India, with a strong presence in the western region, followed by the South. "We are yet to make a serious dent and huge opportunity lies for us in the northern region of the country," Uppal states about spreading the footprint of the chain in India. The company plans to add about 80-100 stores every year.

In the last six months or so, the company has become fairly aggressive in terms of marketing the brand. This is mainly because it witnessed a period of lull in the past seven-10 years, where the only kind of marketing the company did was to tie up with movies.

"We realised we need to go beyond that and since the beginning of the year, we have taken marketing to a different level," says Uppal.

The company started with a very aggressive promotion on scratch and win and later did a radio campaign, where it tied up with Radio Mirchi to celebrate its 65th birthday in July. Subsequently, the company also tied up with another radio station to promote a flavour and co-branded it with the programme on the radio channel.

OOH and radio gets the lion's share in its marketing budget, followed by BTL (below-the-line), print and digital. "We want to acquire new customers and try out new markets, so radio and OOH are the two main media that we want to focus on," Uppal tells afaqs!.

Tata International launched footwear brand - TASHI

Tata International, the global trading arm of the Tata Group, is today announcing its foray into footwear retail with the launch of Tashi, a specialty footwear retail chain. The company will unveil its first retail store at Linking Road, Mumbai.


The brand will feature products for men, women and kids. It will also include a full range of accessories -- bags, belts, wallets, jackets and foot care products.

For the record, Tata International is a supplier to global brands such as Betty Barclay, Peter Keiser, Marks & Spencer, GCI, Mango, Pierre Cardin, Hush Puppies, Escada, Gabor, Naturalizer, Zara, Grenson, Ambiorix, Samsonite and Danier; and Indian retailers such as Westside, Shoppers Stop and Raymonds. It has design studios in Italy, Spain and India.

The Indian footwear retail market is estimated at Rs 16,000 crore and is growing at over 15 per cent CAGR. With the increase in per capita consumption, changing lifestyles and greater fashion consciousness among Indian consumers, the organised footwear retail space is on the threshold of expanding rapidly.