By Dave Lewis

Mobile marketing is at an inflection point.

Growth in mobile subscriber numbers shows no sign of letting up. At the same time, mobile applications continue to proliferate, messaging formats continue to evolve and consumer preferences continue to shift.

Marketers are keen on tapping into this rapidly emerging opportunity, but there is one systemic obstacle that must be overcome first ? namely, the management of multiple communication channels on different platforms.

To complicate matters, consumers are increasingly more exacting in terms of their expectations for receiving messages. They want to receive messages how, when and where they want them.

Billions and billions served
The challenge for marketers is keeping pace with consumers? ever-evolving communication preferences. Because whether it is email, SMS, MMS or instant messenger today, you can bet it will change tomorrow. And the reality is that this is not a single channel issue. 

Consumers fluidly move between channels, so communication that begins in one channel ? email ? may morph into one or more others ? SMS or instant messenger ? before the marketer is rewarded with a transaction.

For marketers, these challenges are complex and their scale is enormous.

According to the International Telecommunications Union, there will be 5 billion mobile cellular subscriptions worldwide this year.

In 2008, more than 75 billion text messages alone were sent nationwide, and global SMS message volume is projected to grow to 5.5 trillion messages by 2013, according to Portio Research.

To be or not B2B
While SMS may have once been the domain of the younger set, the mobile channel is growing in popularity with all age groups, including those over 55. What is more, SMS is rapidly moving into business-to-business communication as well.

Recognizing the consumer adoption of SMS, many marketers are exploring its use 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 do not have the technical capability to act on their knowledge or customer preferences in a multichannel environment.

Simply having deployment capabilities for email, SMS and instant messenger is not the answer for marketers. 

In fact, disjointed point solutions may actually worsen their fragmented customer view and make holistic communications more difficult to achieve. And they are expensive in terms of managing multiple operating systems and sending costlier but ineffectual SMS messages. 

But more important, they are expensive in terms of what misdirected, uncoordinated messages produce relative to customer expectations, perceptions of the brand and, ultimately, lost revenue opportunities.

Tips for taps
So how can marketers act on customer preferences to achieve more holistic communications? 

No, the answer is not to just send messages and hope that customers will sort them out on their device. That cannot be the point of convergence if you expect their business and loyalty.

The answer for marketers is in next-generation message management platforms that can:

? Accommodate your multichannel communications, including SMS, in a single stream
? Leverage your intelligence on preferences and behavior in delivering your messages to the customer?s channel of choice
? React in real-time to customer response and new behavioral data based on your unique rules
? Dynamically transform your messages between channels ? email to SMS ? to keep the dialogue alive
? Provide integrated, cross-channel reporting to enhance your customer insight and improve the quality of future interactions

Of course, technology can only provide the means for achieving customer-centric communications.

Marketers must believe in the value of such communications in building durable and profitable customer relationships. They must follow through on that belief in delivering relevant content in ways that are respectful of the customer?s preferences and sensibilities, regardless of the channel. 

In other words, there is no technology substitute for marketing best practice.
  
But for those marketers who believe in the vision and the business benefit of true holistic, cross-channel messaging, the technology solutions are emerging. They will be the ones best able to capitalize on the opportunities of SMS, accrue the benefits of customer loyalty and gain a significant advantage in the marketplace.

Dave Lewis is chief marketing officer of Message Systems, Columbia, MD. Reach him at .