Mobile as a marketing channel no doubt has unlimited potential for operators. At the same time, there are hurdles too. From conducting large scale campaigns, measuring their net monetary impact, to maximising returns on investment, challenges are many. In this article, I would like to highlight a few of them.

1. Current Marketing Technology is too slow
   Today most of the products and services promoted by mobile operators have extremely short lifecycles. The success of such products depends purely on instant selling. Conventional marketing processes and generic multipurpose campaign tools are designed for long-cycle marketing campaigns, and hence not effective in the new scenario. A marketer can be successful only if he can test offers and product variants, and come up with the most profitable recipe within hours. This requires a specialised, real-time mobile marketing technology platform with an end-to-end workflow and easy to use tools.
2. Subscriber Value Maximization not possible with Push and Forget Tactics
   “We have to make the transition from playing the customer acquisition game to the value game ... The industry has to now move towards managing customers,” comments Sunil Mittal, the CEO of Airtel (as quoted in the Forbes magazine). The key to creating value is engaging subscribers in a direct conversation and fostering a lasting relationship based on it. This necessarily means a shift from the open loop “push and forget” tactics to a real-time customer lifecycle management. It involves sending the right messages at the right time, listening to customers’ feedback and using them to make future communications more relevant.
3. True ROI Measurement is impractical and too slow
   Most marketers measure the effectiveness of campaigns based on response rate. Though response rate is a reasonably good metric, what matters to mobile operators is the return on the investment, i.e., the actual money generated. A part of the total revenue from a product could be a direct result of marketing campaigns. However, another part of it is also generated without any trigger from the marketers. In other words, some customers buy products on their own. Therefore the net impact of a campaign can be calculated only if we distinguish between the above two. Currently this is impractical and too slows with tens of campaigns per day and manual ‘Excel’ techniques. Only a marketing technology that allows for automated, real-time monetary impact analysis based on control groups will help marketers formulate swift and educated decisions.
4. Unscalable Marketing approach for VAS Revenues
   With stagnating Voice and Data revenues, the percentage of Value Added Services products is increasing steadily. As a result, number of partners also increases and the question arises “Who should do the marketing for those joint revenues?” Partners don’t have access to the entire subscriber profile, and mobile operators cannot directly support the marketing of partners’ products. To leverage these new revenue opportunities, mobile operators need a marketing technology that allows their partners to accomplish effective marketing, while they exercise control over subscriber data and marketing policies.
5. Lack of Real-Time data for Personalisation and dynamic Offers
   Marketers understand the value of real-time data for maximising the relevance of campaigns and offers to the subscribers. But currently marketers do not have access to real-time data sources. Operator’s BI and CRM systems have a latency of minimum 24-48 hours and by the time the data is transferred and analysed it would have lost its real-time value. Relevant offers for the mobile channel require an operational real-time mobile marketing database that provides fresh subscriber data to marketers all the time.
6. Marketers are consumed with Manual Data Processing
   Currently, mobile marketers depend on manual processes to execute campaigns. Data files are transferred manually, analysed, exported, transferred again and uploaded for sending and the story continues. This process is error-prone, slow, hardly scalable and above all hinders marketers from being innovative and creative. To get the brightest and the most creative thinkers to exercise their potential, it requires a mobile marketing technology that automates all steps of the campaign workflow, including real-time campaign analytic reporting.
7. Personalised Offers cannot be tracked and rewarded
   Offers like “Top-up with a minimum of Rs.100 and get Rs.50 extra talk time” pre-defined, for example, by subscribers’ ARPU are proven to have high ROI. But the challenge is to identify conversions for an offer based on the eligibility criteria and fulfilling the reward to the customer. With tens of campaigns per day, it is impossible to keep track of it manually. It requires a flexible integrated marketing technology to enable sending dynamic personalised offers and fully automating their fulfilment.
8. Limited Reach to Rural Populations
   Rural areas have a rapidly growing subscriber base and mobile is the only channel to reach them. However barriers like multiple languages and low literacy rate make it difficult for marketers to address the rural population. To maximise the returns from the rural population, it requires a marketing technology that allows for automatic language personalisation and the use of the voice channel for those who cannot read.
9. Enforcing Subscriber Privacy and Spam Control
   Increased competition, subscriber fatigue and government regulations make subscriber Privacy, Do Not Contact (DNC) list and frequency management an important part of mobile marketing. Most of the operators have some policies in place, but they do not have adequate tools to enforce them, and hence run a high risk of violation of regulations. An automated privacy mechanism is required to control the frequency of messages and prevent spam blasting. This is extremely important as the Operators could be subjected to heavy fines in case of non-compliance.
10. Marketing Inventory cannot be fully exploited
    Mobile operators have been fairly successful in exploiting the push channels using generic multi-purpose tools. However, the interactive and real-time potentials of mobile are yet to be unlocked. Though Operators realise the opportunity, they are hesitant, as real-time marketing involves a lot of practical difficulties. To monetise valuable subscriber touch-points, it requires an integrated technology that will help in rolling out real-time offers based on subscriber actions.