A digital commerce software and managed services provider with offices in San Mateo, California, is reporting today that 86 percent of industry insiders believe it should take less than a month to launch a new mobile campaign with an operator.
Based on a survey conducted at their Building Blocks 2008 conference, officials from Valista say the expectation likely is far-fetched, as 80 percent of respondents say it takes up to nine months to introduce such a campaign.
According to Valista’s chief technical officer, Fran Heeran, the data shows that the mobile industry wants more streamlined campaign on-boarding and management methods.
“It can typically take months to introduce a new mobile campaign across all the carriers,” Heeran said. “This clearly needs to change as many campaigns lose relevancy with each passing month and some campaigns are never considered because of the production time. Mobile service and content providers need to be able to react to the market quickly and provision new mobile campaigns in a more dynamic fashion.”
According to the survey, the mobile industry could take better advantage of customer loyalty programs as a way to spur purchases of downloaded content.
“Surprisingly, none of the respondents said that they use any form of loyalty scheme as an incentive to increase content purchasing or encourage repeat buyers,” Valista officials say. “Over 70 percent of those surveyed, however, use other promotions methods to entice customers to purchase more content, including discounts, free trials and product bundling.”
Bolstering marketing campaign efforts, particularly telemarketing, has been talent of Valista’s, experts say.
According to TMC’s Richard Grigonis, executive editor of its IP Communications Group, Valista’s addition of a so-called “campaign analytics” module to traditional predictive dialing has helped operators “more accurately determine individual mobile campaign effectiveness, analyze trends, project revenue and plan network capacity when approving and provisioning new campaigns.”
In its new survey, Valista, whose European headquarters are located in Wicklow, Ireland, just south of the nation’s capital city, Dublin, move beyond strict telemarketing and examine a number of marketing strategies and industries.
According to data the company collected, most respondents say that access to online entertainment, such as videos, movies and music, will be the most popular value-added service over broadband channels.
“Twenty-one percent believe that technical support will be common, followed by anti-virus protection with six percent and security products with three percent,” company officials say. “Regarding which channel will experience the highest growth for content purchases in the next two years, respondents were split almost even with 51 percent believing in the broadband/cable channel and 48 percent predicting mobile.”
Michael Dinan is a contributing editor for IoTevolutionworld, covering news in the IP communications, call center and customer relationship management industries. To read more of Michael�s articles, please visit his columnist page.
