Retailers and consumer goods companies looking to take their mobile marketing programs from text message through post-purchase analytics have a new alternative with the launch of expanded Mobile Customer Relationship Management (mCRM) services from Sybase 365.
“We have focused on the customer lifecycle and putting in place a set of tools that are tied into analytics and data management,” explains Scott Miller, Director of Product Management for Sybase 365. “What is really important is having the ability to track how customers progress through the lifecycle and how their purchasing decisions change over time.”
In addition to Sybase mobile marketing, mobile advertising, and mobile messaging capabilities, Sybase 365 has integrated specific capabilities to complement cross-campaign marketing initiatives and customer relationship programs, including:
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- Mobile Coupon/Voucher Module: Enterprises are able to reach any customer on any mobile operator network through SMS-based mobile coupons. The solution requires no additional hardware and integrates with all payment systems.
- Mobile Loyalty Module: Enterprises can now leverage a more advance tracking capability which analyzes and reports the usage and redemption of mobile coupons and marketing programs. Customers can easily manage point allocation, tapping into loyalty points systems from existing programs for easy integration across all marketing channels.
- Mobile Research Module: Customers will be able to execute surveys and other interactive customer campaigns to build valuable customer profiles, which can be used to determine lifestyle preference and drive targeted product recommendations.
- Mobile Payments Module: Customers can immediately act on offers they receive by purchasing goods/services, redeeming offers, or processing loyalty offers – all at the point of sale as well as on their mobile device.
Early Stages of Adoption
Although Sybase and others may be ready to go with offerings that can facilitate end-to-end mobile commerce, the U.S. market may not be fully ready for deployment until sometime in 2011, says Miller.
“There is still a fair amount of infrastructure work to do,” says Miller. “I see 2010 as more of a tire-kicking year. I would not be surprised to see a lot of mobile payment pilots this year, but I think we’ll see that 2011 is a bigger deployment year. Broad-based deployment and revenue generation is still a couple of years out.”
Companies like Sybase are preparing to be ahead of the game when retailers are ready to deploy, because it has been providing message aggregation services for a number of years, internationally as well as in the U.S. “If you have access to text messaging then you can reach all of your customers no matter how challenged the phone service may be in a given area.”
The challenge in the U.S. market is that text messaging for marketing purposes is strictly regulated. “Carriers all do it differently,” notes Miller. But Sybase 365 simplifies this process for customers by doing all the back end work. “We sit between the brand, the retail enterprise and all the operators. You send us the message and we will take care of getting it out to the target audience.”
