Pre-scoring most effective weapon for mobile marketing deliverability

October 9, 2008

JF Sullivan is vice president of marketing at Cloudmark

By JF Sullivan

Traditional email marketers should approach the problem of effective programs by using third-party technology to scrub the addresses of their marketing lists.

Email marketers should also use third-party technology to develop and template out the creative.

Additionally, they should merge the data against their Sugar/SalesForce CRM system, perform a test run and check the readability and deliverability of the creative.

Email marketers should also engage a third-party accreditation system to pre-stamp their email. They should also engage a third-party remediation system as insurance for when things go wrong.

However, in examining the efficacy of mobile marketing, content rendering tools and scoring system technologies are needed.

That's all -- and here is why.

The mobile medium still presents a problem with regard to the restricted real estate available to the end consumer target.

Even with improved handsets, like iPhone, Nokia N95 and Samsung Instinct, mobile devices suffer from the expectation of an efficient user experience and interaction.

Hence, the amount of content being delivered to the device will continue to be a subset of what traditional HTML marketers would use.

Less content means fewer tricks to hide the usual offending content tags. It also means that you should know what your content will look like on the intended device and what the spam score will be before you send it.

With email marketing, you have a wealth of tools for remediation and accreditation available.

These tools, by and large, are there to off-set the edginess of your email content and behavior.

With mobile marketing those tools have virtually no effect.

The infrastructure of the SS7 layer (mobile equivalent of the Internet) that you are communicating with has no certification stamp and no TCP/IP-based protocols to investigate or dispute.

All of the traditional tools exist before the content will be delivered and rendered on the mobile device.

Therefore, the principle technologies that will prevent your mobile marketing creative from reaching its goals will be the rendering engine that translates it and the anti-spam technology that scrubs it.

Many vendors supply tools which will present a spam score assessment of your intended marketing creative.

These tools can be quite helpful, as in the example of the SpamAssassin scoring test that will tell you quickly which specific content is contributing the most to your overall spam score.

Since your content will be limited in the first, this tool can help you dramatically improve your mobile deliverability.

Other spam assessment tools are available of course.

My recommendation is that you use several different ones to get an aggregate view.

Similarly, other companies allow you to view the creative on dozens of possible devices, many of which are mobile.

Naturally, if your content is not being rendered in a coherent fashion, the fight for its deliverability was fruitless.

Security will continue to evolve as the mobile medium accelerates adoption and use.

Eventually much of the creative tricks and tactics will be brought to bear on the mobile advertising marketplace. In the meantime, rendering and pre-scoring will be your most effective weapons for deliverability.

JF Sullivan is vice president of marketing at Cloudmark, a San Francisco-based company whose products protect consumers from spyware, viruses, worms, identity theft and phishing. Reach him at .