Yesmail has launched new mobile and SMS campaign management features for marketers.

The new features were created to identify subscribers who are reading emails on mobile devices and which devices they are using, as well as establish a new communication channel with customers and establish direct customer interaction.

Mobile Marketer?s Mickey Alam Khan interviewed Yesmail?s Tanya Hyde, vice president of professional services, and Manny Ju, director of product management, about the new mobile services.

Why the need for Yesmail to go into mobile email and SMS?
Tanya Hyde: Optimizing email for mobile devices and SMS campaign management features are natural extensions of the tools marketers need to build interactive, multi-channel marketing communication strategies.

Manny Ju: Combining mobile email and SMS into a single campaign management platform enables marketers to communicate with their customers over the two most highly used mobile channels.

Who is Yesmail targeting for these services? Names of clients already signed up?
Ms. Hyde: Mobile email features including the ability to identify subscribers who are reading emails on mobile devices and embedding mobile-friendly content in HTML-formatted emails are complimentary features available to all Enterprise clients.

For our new SMS campaign management tools, we are targeting direct marketers who may already have an existing mobile opt-in database or are new to SMS and looking for the ability to efficiently manage and analyze multi-channel marketing campaigns.

We have been beta testing our SMS features with several clients, and Yesmail Marketing debuted our SMS tools at the DMA.

We are in discussions with many clients, and expect several of them to launch SMS campaigns in Q4.

What's the case for mobile email?
Ms. Hyde: Reading email is the top data usage of mobile devices and a significant portion of mobile devices have less-than optimal email viewing experience.

Yesmail Enterprise allows users to create web-hosted version of emails that auto-render perfectly for mobile and desktop web browsers.

Content designers now have higher control over their email design. They can embed mobile-only content that displays only emails are viewed as web pages within mobile browsers, or only to those who prefer mobile-only formatting.

Mr. Ju: Recent independent research indicates that mobile email adoption is increasing thanks to smartphone proliferation. 

In ExactTarget?s recent report, a study of Ball State University students revealed that 38 percent of students use a smartphone and that two-thirds say they use email on their phones. 

The increased use of mobile email is significant because computer email use by college students has declined over the past five years. 

In Yesmail?s own survey conducted in the spring of 2009, respondents said that aside from talking, the primary use of their mobile phones was for reading email.

Targeting email campaigns for the mobile audience enables marketers to craft highly relevant messages for readers who are out and about as opposed to those that are tethered to a desktop either at home or in an office somewhere. 

Embedding mobile-friendly content within HTML-formatted emails enables marketers to have the same copy, but include links to different landing pages  - a WAP site for the mobile email readers, and a standard website for desktop email readers.

What makes your service unique from others?
Ms. Hyde: Yesmail Enterprise is a single platform for cross-channel campaign management and reporting for mobile, email, and social media campaigns.

It extends the power of our marketing databases by enabling the same information to be available for targeting and reporting regardless of channel. So our clients can work with one vendor for messaging which makes campaign planning, execution, and coordination easier and more efficient.

Mr. Ju: Having a single platform for executing marketing campaigns across different communication channels provides marketers with the ability to communicate with their customers across different touchpoints. 

Being that it is the same platform for all messaging, it is now possible to target messages sent through one channel based on responses (or non-responses) from another. 

For example, it is now possible to combine SMS and web analytics, and send out an SMS message based on a shopper?s cart abandonment on an e-commerce site.  Or, it is possible to send an SMS message based upon a person?s opening, or click-through of an email.

Do direct marketers get the importance of mobile marketing?
Ms. Hyde: Yes, I think direct marketers do understand the importance of mobile marketing and are finally ready to begin developing strategies to integrate mobile with their other communication channels.
I think there is a great educational opportunity for us to work with our clients to help them understand best practices for collecting mobile opt-ins and to help them understand how mobile can complement their existing email strategies.

Anything else you'd like to add?
Mr. Ju: Observation of the mobile marketing space for the past two years seems to indicate that those engaging in the mobile space have been primarily brand marketers using this channel for lead generation and customer acquisition.

Email marketing on the other hand, has advanced over the past ten years to a more mature level of marketing with well-established playbooks for enhancing customer retention.

Yesmail is already starting to early stages of mobile marketing evolving from an acquisition channel to a retention channel. We expect to see SMS campaigns being created with the same level of sophistication as many email marketing campaigns ? both in terms of segmentation and in terms of staged triggering over the next two years.