In these cash strapped times, frugality has never been more fashionable. So it should come as no surprise that (according to a Juniper Research survey) 3 million people are now using mobile coupons in the UK. And with a redemption rate 6 times higher than paper, giving out mobile coupons is a marketing trend set to continue, even when we’re back to maxing out our credit cards.

Hunting around for discounts is already popular on the web. In fact, Hitwise estimated that searches for discount vouchers went up 47.5% in the past year. Coupons are great for email marketing too, with reports that open rates for emails with coupons average 25% compared to 16-18% for emails without.

So, as the figures show, coupons can be a great way of attracting people to your website and getting your emails opened. But when it comes to mobile, coupon marketing offers so much more…

Mobile – the ultimate personal marketing channel

Let’s just consider some of the benefits mobiles offer to marketers:

• Most people have one (many have two)
• They offer a direct route of contact
• They’re normally switched on and close to hand
• People can use them to respond impulsively to marketing
• The success of campaigns can be measured to the exact text message
• They have a built in payment mechanism

And all these benefits without the need of a touch screen!

When you consider the immediacy of mobile it’s no wonder coupon campaigns can be so effective. Here are two great examples:

Coca-Cola’s 200k giveaway

Coca-Cola recently ran a promotion (comprising of point-of-sale advertising, door posters and shelf blazers) letting people know they were only a text message away from a free drink. Participants simply had to text ‘YES’ and their date of birth to receive a promotion code for a free bottle of Fanta, Sprite or Dr Pepper.

The promotion helped distribute 200,000 free bottles to 100,000 people, without the need to fill in a form or cut out a coupon. The campaign had a very high redemption rate of 87%, and provided Coca-Cola with valuable data on coupon hotspots.

Planet Funk’s 377% campaign ROI

Uber trendy US clothing retailer Planet Funk is currently the poster child for mobile coupon marketing. In the run up to Christmas last year it sent 2000 coupons to text subscribers and people who’d texted in response to posters and ads on its website.

Planet Funk’s campaign received a 91% redemption rate – contributing 28% to their December sales and a 377% return on the cost of the campaign. As an added bonus, 15% of coupon redeemers (not wishing to look a gift horse in the mouth) opted into future Planet Funk mobile campaigns.

As these two examples show, coupon marketing, whether by email or mobile, can be a very effective way of attracting a burst of sales and filling your database for future campaigns.

So, instead of Christmas cards, consider sending coupons to your favourite customers this year. It’s a gift many will be happy to receive.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Email services provider Campaigner recently surveyed 259 small businesses of which 46% said they used email marketing and 36% plan to start in the next year. So am I impressed by these findings? Does nearly half already using email sound a lot? Well, to be honest, it should be a lot more.

If only 36% plan on starting email marketing campaigns that leaves 18% who’ll continue to miss out on one of the best marketing tools around. Whether you’re a landscape gardener or an international retailer, email is a great tool for relationship building, attracting people to your website and notching up sales.

So for those 18% of small businesses who don’t see the need to use email (and anybody else’s who’d like some advice) here are a few tried and tested types of email marketing:

Informational

Arguably the most effective use of email (well, we certainly think so) is as a relationship building tool.

Sending out a newsletter packed with useful advice, product tips and industry insight is a great way of building rapport and trust in your brand, and, dare I say it, ‘thought leadership’. These typically receive high open rates and click throughs (but only if you’re providing great content, of course).

Newsletters can be quite time consuming to put together. But the beauty is that you can reuse the content in other marketing materials, such as your website’s blog (here at bda we do it the other way round).

Inspirational or entertaining

Consider sharing customer success stories and case studies of how your product/service has helped solve a problem. If you can write it in an interesting way (rather than like a backslapping press release) you can show off your expertise and reflect your business’ personality at the same time.

Promotion

Another popular way of using email is as a quick fire sales tool.

Whether it’s announcing a new product or offering a discount on an old one, email can be used to quickly spread awareness on your special offers. Email is also great for sending out coupons, which you can track to gauge the success of your campaign.

However, with many people weary of the amount of salesy emails they receive these days, response rates for promotional emails are typically low. You can, however, dramatically increase response if you can personalise your messages.

Personalisation power

Thanks to modern one-to-one marketing techniques, the days of carpet bombing the same message are over. Now it’s possible to personalise every email for each recipient.

And I don’t just mean changing the name. An email’s content can be customised based on all sorts of criteria, such as the recipient’s company’s size, their industry, purchase history and any other nugget of info stored in your database.

You can then create a flexible template in which you can drop customised content with a single mouse click. Personalising emails means you can cross-sell offers based on a customer’s purchase history, deliver case studies relevant to their industry and increase the value offering of each message.

With email fast becoming a mainstream marketing tool, it’s vital to ensure your messages are more relevant and valuable than your competitors. Personalisation (and great content) is what can make your emails ‘must reads’, rather than banished to the junk folder.

Offer a mixture of the above

So which type of email do you think is best? Well, they all certainly have their merits. But the best strategy is to mix all three.

Email marketing can take time to bear fruit. But one of its benefits is you can track every open, click through and sale. Watching how people respond to your messages helps you to identify what they’re interested in and which types of emails work best. You can then adjust your campaign accordingly.

Golden Rule = Get permission. Don’t spam

But before you run off to start penning your first email, whatever you do don’t buy a list of email addresses. Sending unsolicited email is akin to door-to-door selling in many people’s eyes. As well as being blocked or deleted, your message risks being flagged as spam, which will leave your credibility and campaign in tatters.

So do the honourable thing and start your own list by asking for email addresses at every opportunity. It might take longer to build your database. But you’ll have a list of permission based leads keen to hear what you have to say.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region

With Christmas fast approaching, there will be plenty of people hoping for smartphones in stockings this year. Amongst them will be Google, who’ve just shelled out £449 million on Admob, a mobile advertising company. Dumping such a huge pot of cash on mobile has been seen as preparing for mass market adoption of smartphones. It’s expected that soon there will be millions more smartphone owners eagerly consuming content, and the ads to go with it. But in all this anticipation for smartphones, are some companies missing out on a mass market mobile marketing opportunity that already exists?

Now don’t get me wrong: I’m as excited as the next marketer about the opportunities offered by touchscreens, mobile apps and miniature web browsers. I just think that, in all the excitement, many companies are ignoring a way of engaging people on mobiles that’s popular, is already proven and offers one of the most immediate response mechanisms around.

What am I talking about? Why, the humble text message of course.

Marketing with short codes

Whilst some wait eagerly for the age of the smartphone, many smart marketers are already taking advantage of everyday, run of the mill text messaging technology.

You might by now be used to seeing five digit text numbers on TV shows, like X Factor, and on print ads (e.g. the Times’ 7am delivery ad on the London tube). These numbers are known as short codes, and they’re earmarked for massive growth (irrespective of what’s happening on smartphones).

These are just some of the benefits:

• More easily remembered than a telephone number or website address, particularly when the numbers spell out a word e.g. 62262 = OBAMA
• Virtually all mobiles can text
• People can take part in polls, receive coupons, register for news alerts and respond immediately to marketing messages
• All responses demonstrate interest
• Mobile numbers can be fed into a database for follow up activity
• Low deployment costs and fast delivery make short codes particularly suitable for time sensitive campaigns

But do people really want to receive floods of texted coupons, special offers and marketing messages I hear you ask? Well, according to research released by the Direct Marketing Association – yes, they do.

The DMA’s survey, of 270 people, found that 70% would be happy to receive messages from brands and 55% would welcome texts of sales and special offers. However, these findings shouldn’t be seen as an excuse to open the floodgates and start flooding people with text messages. Being useful and timely, rather than an annoyance, will be the key.

So whilst some companies sit watching the horizon for the dawn of the age of the smartphone, you can be engaging people with a simple technology that virtually everyone can already use.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Cynical, fickle and easily bored, these are just some of the reasons why teenagers are difficult to market to. In the past, marketers have struggled to reach this younger segment, but, thanks to the amount of time they’re spending online, the opportunities for engaging with teenagers are growing.

Persuading them to listen to you is tricky though because teenagers have grown up with marketing; they’re savvy enough to ignore anything that’s inauthentic, has nothing to offer them or tries too hard to be cool.

 So how can you deliver market that appeals to teenagers, rather than comes across as an embarrassing dad? These tips should help:

1. Teenagers get bored very quickly, so messages need to be short and simple

2. Be authentic because marketing savvy teens can quickly turn cynical ploys and shallow attempts at engagement into an online backlash

3. Despite how they’re often depicted in the media, teenagers are interested in serious social issues. So aligning your marketing with a campaign they care about can pull them in. Just make sure it’s a campaign you also believe in as well, otherwise you risk falling foul of tip 2

4. Teenagers change their clothes, hair styles and how they present themselves all the time. So you’re message needs to keep evolving along with them to avoid seeming dated and stale

5. Whatever you do, don’t try to be cool. Teenagers hate being patronised and will ridicule any clumsy attempts at teen speak. Trying to come across as cool is one of the main reasons why teen campaigns devised by 30+ year olds fail

6. So how should your campaign speak to teenagers? Well, one way is to consider who your audience’s role models are and then mirror their language and tone

7. Word of mouth is very important. Teenagers like to be seen as early adopters, but part of the crowd as well. So you need to get them talking about your product if it’s going to become a national craze

8. Consider marketing messages as pieces of entertainment and how you can create messages teenagers will want to share. Making them laugh, whilst tricky, can be a very effective way of making your product a topic of conversation during the school lunch break

9. When it comes to direct mail, your messages need to:

a) Be personalised to treat teenagers as individuals

b) Offer them something they can share or show off to their friends e.g. a badge or voucher

10. Social networking sites aren’t places for simply raining down your messages on teenage users. Instead you need to find a way of becoming a valued part of their online experience. This is why fan pages for products and brands are popping up all the time; the High School Musical and Hannah Montana Facebook pages are two great examples

11. Teens are content creators, whether it’s writing a blog, creating an avatar for a virtual world or uploading their mashups onto YouTube . You can harness this creativity, and build participation in your campaign, by asking them to contribute content

12. Teens have grown up with technology and can happily text, instant message and update Bebo all at the same time. They’re used to accessing content on demand, and will expect this from your campaign

13. As with all marketing, the best teen campaigns integrate TV, print and online. Aligning your campaign with a live event can also be a great way of building interest

14. If you’re not already using it, you should aim to include mobile in your teen marketing campaigns in the next year. Whilst teenagers are inseparable from their mobiles, the tone and style of content has to be pitched so it’s welcomed on such a personal device

15. Instant messenger is a popular tool amongst teenagers. But when communicating with the adult world they usually use email. So if you’re thinking of using IM in your campaign make sure you ask their permission first

16. Cyberbullying is rife, so brands have an ethical responsibility to protect members of their chat rooms and social networking groups. Monitor what’s being said and step in when necessary. Don’t leave teenagers to moderate themselves, unless you want your brand associated with an online version of Lord of the Flies

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 BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.