By Eric Nykamp CEO of Raange, Inc., Guest Columnist

Setup a call. Email Me @: Contact_Me@raange.com; Text Me @: (514) 613-3324 with Keyword ‘Database’

Are you taking marching orders from senior executives who are stuck in 2005? You know!? That top-down focus on the wrong strategic marketing goal for tomorrow. I keep speaking with companies still focused on email acquisition, and resistant to mobile acquisition. It’s 2017!

It’s clear: you are not the only one. Today, I want to arm you with information to help win over your boss.

What’s the problem with email only?

Let’s be honest, when given the chance, people provide fake contact information. A recent study by Verve found that out of a group of 2400 consumers, 60% admitted to intentionally providing some sort of incorrect information when submitting their personal details online.

Focusing on email acquisition alone can create murky data, as everyone has multiple email addresses - university or college email address, hotmail, yahoo, gmail etc. - or people can simply make up a false email address.

Oftentimes when people do provide their real email addresses, spam filters and message categorization, used by free services such as gmail, can hurt the success of your campaign. As a result, email communication alone may not always be timely or may not even be reaching the end users eyeballs amidst the clutter of all the other email newsletters that customers subscribe to.

Therefore, it’s important to create redundancies in your customer database growth strategy by collecting mobile information as well as focusing on email acquisition. Mobile marketing still has the ability to draw a user’s undivided attention, improve your data quality and increase sales conversions.

SMS increases open rates!

Over 95% of text messages are opened and the majority are read within the first few minutes of receipt. There are no filters to doom your message to marketing purgatory: the spam folder.

SMS is Ubiquitous and Universal! It doesn’t matter what phone, browser or software your customers are using. It Gets Delivered and Opened.

Now the hard part is what you are communicating… That’s another topic for later!!

Mobile can improve data quality.

There is mobile technology that can validate registration information via the phone in the customer’s hand. No opportunity to place a fake mobile number.

But more importantly collecting good data is just good business..

SMS increases sales conversions.

Raange recently ran a comparative campaign, wherein we collected 3,000 email and mobile registrations at one brick-and-mortar location for a well-known retailer. We executed a side-by-side campaign with the same offer and unique redemption codes to test and compare attributed sales to email and SMS.

In less than 24 hours, mobile killed it:

● Email: 12 email coupon redemptions at the cash.

● SMS: 192 sms coupon redemptions at the cash.

Campaign Sales Results

● Email: Sales uplift of $480

● SMS: Sales uplift of $7,700

Don’t forget mobile...

Now I trust that you will take this information and push back! You can be focused on email acquisition, but don’t risk missing opportunities to collect valuable mobile information as well.

Do yourself a favour and be prepared. It’s a lot more difficult to play catch up down the road once senior executives shift priorities to mobile; it will happen.

Eric Nykamp is CEO of Raange, Inc., Founder at Mamoth-Group, TAARGA, RAANGE and Mamoth-Labs! Internet Strategist, Entrepreneur, Inventor, Investor, Husband, Father, Insomniac.

My goal is to elevate traditional brick & mortar retailers to quickly and easily transition to the latest marketing concepts and communication channels, so as to rebuild trusted dialogue with past, present, and future customers.

More ideas & rants found here: Retail Innovation News.

Canadian Retail News From Around The Web: August 1, 2017