Im at the brilliantly-named How Do Mobile Marketing conference in Manchester well as a Northerner, it gave me a laugh anyway – where both the delegates and myself have got the worst of it out of the way. Yes, I was asked to give an Introduction to Mobile Marketing presentation to kick things off. Having done so, I gave up the podium to the professionals, one of whom, Sienne Veit from Marks & Spencer, has just given a brilliant explanation of how M&S has really got mobile, running through some of the things the company is doing with it, including an opt-in SMS database, a .mobi site, and even a data matrix code campaign for a range of fruit juices.
M&S currently has 250,000 people on its SMS database, and sends out half a million messages a month. Veit cited response rates from SMS campaigns of between 2% and 9.5%, and she played a video clip, where a 78-year old lady from Birmingham taking part in ongoing M&S research suddenly started talking, unprompted, about the text messages she gets from the firm, and how useful she finds them.
She also talked about mobile coupons, in response to a question I asked her, saying that with 700 stores, M&S was not about to put in new POS kit incorporating mobile barcode scanners until standards have been agreed. On a more positive note, she added: Our people who work with coupons are working with the people who provide that kit to make things happen. And she described the idea of having an opt-in database and sending them a targeted mobile coupon to their phone as absolute magic.
In the course of the presentation, Veit invited delegates to see her after the event if they wanted to use any of her ideas or tactics in their own campaigns, and to steal the M&S Ts & Cs, rather than reinventing the wheel. As I listened to her speaking, it struck me that she is exactly what the mobile marketing industry needs, a true enthusiast, or evangelist if you prefer that term, who really fired up the audience and explained the process for taking a brand into mobile and getting other people in the organisation on board.
Every brand should have one.
David Murphy
Editor 
