Avesair Inc., one of the first companies to get involved in wireless and mobile marketing, is making available an early release of its new suite of products that turns mobile phones and devices into what it calls "a revenue-generating and awareness-building marketing channel."
Avesair said it put together the suite because of a demand from both marketers and for an integrated set of software products that fully leverages two-way SMS dialog messages for marketing, advertising and customer service. With the new product suite, interactive mobile marketing programs are automated and can be integrated into traditional marketing campaigns. This in turn makes it easier for advertisers to incorporate mobile marketing into their media mix, the company said.
The new suite is made up of a core offering for campaign management, ad creation, targeting and delivery, as well as reporting. Additionally, a set of sophisticated ancillary products, including SMS dialog management, advanced SMS and SMSC control, list management and HTML e-mail, will let Avesair customers "completely utilize the capabilities of mobile devices to connect with consumers," officials said.
The new dialog management product manages the entire dialog process, tracking results and status for millions of potential subscribers on behalf of a carrier or marketing agency. It includes standard templates that allow for the creation of interactive dialog campaigns for trivia games, sweepstakes, contests, and customer service surveys.
Lists can easily be built and managed with the suite's subscriber list management capabilities lists, allowing advertisers to run granularly targeted mobile programs with a consumer-controlled dynamic opt-in function, optimizing the success of each campaign. It also automatically manages the entire opt-out process ensuring consumer privacy is not jeopardized.
Avesair gave a hypothetical example of how its new mobile marketing suite can be used:
A major movie studio (or the advertising agency acting on their behalf) can easily incorporate an SMS trivia program into a larger integrated media campaign by adding a `short code' onto a billboard advertisement or packaged good wrapper. In this example, a consumer may see a billboard for the upcoming movie enticing interested parties to send a text message using a short code -- for example 445566 -- from their mobile phones to enter a sweepstakes. By sending a text message to the short code, the consumer is immediately presented with an SMS confirming their desire to enter. If the consumer replies "yes" and answers a few short movie-related trivia questions, he or she is immediately entered into a sweepstakes to attend an advance screening
"We've seen the powerful impact interactive SMS and mobile programs have on marketing campaigns, but to date, the process has been rudimentary with simple one-way messages or significant manual intervention when deployed on a large scale," said Sean Harrison, EVP of business development and marketing, Avesair. "We've built this new product suite to address emerging needs and to give our customers additional functionality to further increase their success with our solutions."
On the carrier side, Avesair said its wireless company customers will use the suite to deliver programs designed to drive subscriber awareness about new plans or services, educate subscribers on how to use new wireless services, or to convince subscribers to switch to a different rate plan. For instance, Avesair enables carriers to set a threshold for customers approaching the maximum minutes on their pre-paid calling plan. Using Avesair, the carrier can send an SMS message to a subscriber that enables them to renew their pre-paid calling program with a few simple steps. This saves the customer from having to go to a retail location to renew their minutes, which can help the carrier avoid subscriber churn, Avesair said.
The suite will be widely available later this year. Research Triangle Park, N.C.-based Avesair is a developer of mobile marketing products, programs, and services for carriers, publishers, advertisers, and media companies. Avesair's customers include 12snap, AT&T Wireless, Boston.com, Enpocket, Mercedes-Benz, MSN Mobile, Nokia and Volvo.
Bob Woods is the managing editor of InstantMessagingPlanet.
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