Too many marketers ignore the potential for meshing mobile and email strategies. However, this integration creates more personal and effective campaigns.

Mobile and email marketing campaigns have both become highly valued tactics leveraged by marketers worldwide. However, these campaigns have not been adequately integrated into full-scale multichannel strategies, something that needs to change, according to Dave Lewis, chief marketing officer of Message Systems, Columbia, MD.

?I think we?re going to have to change as online marketers and direct marketers, taking relevance into a much broader sense than it is now,? Mr. Lewis said. ?It?s not just about content any more ? it?s about how it?s presented ? the time and, now more than ever, the place and channel it?s received on.

?If you look at consumer behavior, we?re moving in and out of channels constantly, so marketing has to be adjustable to behavioral change,? he said. ?That?s going to be a big challenge.?

In this Q&A with Mobile Marketer?s Peter Finocchiaro, Mr. Lewis explains how Message Systems is working to integrate mobile marketing tactics into a broader, multichannel strategy. The interview with Mr. Lewis:

Both email and mobile are targeted, highly personal channels of communication and marketing, and permission-based: are mobile and email a natural fit?
Absolutely, there is an emerging majority of customers who use multiple messaging channels, including both email and SMS, and fluidly move between them, allowing for two-way communication that begins in one channel and may morph into the other.

What is Message Systems group doing in the mobile space?
On July 20, Message Systems introduced Mobile Momentum, an industry-first, single-platform solution for enabling multichannel communication by sending and receiving SMS messages and dynamically transforming them to and from email-based customer preferences and company rules.

Integrated reporting capabilities in Mobile Momentum ensure higher quality, more relevant and customer-centric communications.

Is Message Systems? emphasis on SMS, or beyond
While SMS messaging is popular today, customer communication is evolving beyond SMS to include a mix of channels, including email, SMS, IM and social.

Marketer strategies and tactics ? along with the technology solutions that support them ? must evolve, too, as the growing customer segment that prefers multi-channel messaging should not be ignored.

What are some examples of Message Systems Group work in the mobile space?
We already have a major carrier utilizing our technology to issue SMS alerts for subscribers and we are in negotiation with a number of enterprises and service providers as well on deploying Mobile Momentum.

The multichannel, single platform capability has great appeal, and we are actively working to complement our SMS capability with MMS and extend it into other channels.

Which client categories are ideal for the email/mobile integration?
Email/mobile integration is ideal for marketers at enterprises and the service providers that support them.

Both are looking for a way to enable messaging in an era where customers expect to get messages how, where and when they want them.

Email/mobile integration is also a critical capability for carriers and Internet service providers as it enables them to provide a value-add, point of differentiation in how they satisfy subscriber preferences in sending and receiving messages. The net benefits for carriers are less account churn due to improved subscriber satisfaction, higher average revenue per user, and a lower total cost of ownership.

How will you sell your mobile services to clients? What advantage do you have over purely mobile service providers?
Message Systems will sell Mobile Momentum to enterprises and the email service providers and mobile service providers that serve them, as well as carriers and Internet service providers, that need a single platform solution for enabling effective, customer-centric communication across multiple channels.

In a world where our view of the customer is already badly fragmented and siloed by a data source, business process or organizational division, point solutions for deploying messages to different channels do not help in achieving that objective.

In fact, our view is that point solutions are non-solutions.

What about mobile email ? are you working to resolve image rendition issues plaguing emails on phones such as the BlackBerry and Nokia models?
Message Systems is focused on providing the technology to ensure that the right message gets to the right place at the right time through multiple channels.

We partner with application and other providers who are addressing the image rendering challenge across different devices.

Why is there not more of an emphasis on mobile email?
In our view, the issue isn?t about mobile email, per se.

The bigger issue is around recognition that customer communication behaviors are changing and providing the technology solutions that enable companies to respond to that change.

Viewing email on a mobile versus more stationary device is one indicator of that change. But so is customer behavior relative to the use of multiple channels.

Digital marketers must be prepared for a future where the communication they initiate in one channel may move into another, such as SMS or IM, before they?re rewarded with a transaction.

This future will be challenging for many, but ripe with opportunity for those who can respond. In essence, the future will be about managing the communication flow in whatever channel it takes, not email or SMS specifically.

Think about what that means to traditional marketing and sales cycles.

There are some holdouts among email companies embracing mobile ? why?
Many marketers are exploring the use of mobile in a variety of creative ways, including triggered travel and event promotions and geo-based offers for retail outlets.

But, their ability to fully integrate SMS into a holistic, multichannel customer communications strategy remains an elusive goal.

It is not that marketers do not know the importance of delivering the right message at the right time and place or that they lack data on the customer?s channel preferences, explicitly stated or implied by behavior.

The fundamental problem is that marketers don?t have the technical capability to act on their knowledge or customer preferences in a multichannel environment.

What do email companies have to offer that brands and agencies cannot get from other mobile-only service providers?

The only company with a single technology platform for enabling multi-channel messaging, Message Systems is best positioned to help companies capitalize on the changes in customer communication behavior.

Where will email/mobile marketing integration be headed in the next few years?
Conceptually, what I see occurring is, rather than managing in terms of siloes, as in the past, we are going to have to start managing the communications flow where you start something in one channel and it morphs into another.

The fallacy in some of the things I heard, close to Silicon Valley, is talk of convergence occurring on mobile devices. Well, yes and no ? I think, yes, you have got all your stuff now piled on one device.

But, as a marketer trying to sell products, I cannot be relying on the consumer to make sense of all that stuff.

If I am, I will not get business ? they?re inundated and they have a big challenge of sorting through it all.

Convergence cannot just occur on the device, it has to happen all the way up through the marketing we provide.

This company looks to provide the technology platform for all these different channels to be deployed on the same platform, so you can mobe seamlessly between them and understand results more comprehensively.

We have to be capturing the intelligence on the back-end to know what your customer really wants, so we can be responding and making best use of the technology.

Final Take
Peter Finocchiaro, editorial assistant at Mobile Marketer, New York

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