Author Archive

Los Angeles, CA—January 26,2009 mobileStorm, the premiere email and mobile marketing and solutions company, announced that company revenues grew by 63% during 2008. Fourth quarter showed strong performance with the addition of over 200 new clients.

mobileStorm has been focused on the digital marketing space since its inception in 1999, and is a known veteran in text-messaging, or SMS, and email marketing solutions for businesses both small and large.  Growth in both retail and event marketing clients were a highlight of fourth-quarter wins.

” I’m excited to be running a company that provides digital marketing services. It is a really good market to be in during these challenging economic times. We have a great outlook on 2009, as we can help clients who are stressed right now to generate sales, stay healthy, and even grow,” said Jared Reitzin, CEO and founder of mobileStorm.  “It’s always important to spend marketing dollars wisely and never more than today. We’ve built on our experience developing programs using email and SMS to generate and track real sales.”

The company introduced several important upgrades in 2008, designed to focus on ROI, including digital and mobile coupons, RSS, RSS to email and text-to-screen.  Text-to-screen is an engaging technology that supports the administration of polls and quizzes at events.

mobileStorm views 2009 as a year in which high ROI from email and SMS programs will be a centerpiece for clients in industries such as retail, entertainment, and hospitality.  Accordingly, the company plans to release numerous special packages tailored to these industry’s digital marketing needs.
mobileStorm also has a continuing series of online webinars, launched during the fourth quarter, which feature “how-tos”  and preset marketing solutions for industry professionals.  The company also hosts an weekly open orientation, “Exploring mobileStorm 4.0.”  Please contact sales@mobilestorm.com or call 866-492-7886 x1 to register for this event.

If you’re interested in learning more about us, give us a call 866-492-7886.

About mobileStorm

For a decade mobileStorm has pioneered the concept of digital marketing. Having successfully delivered more than two billion messages on behalf of thousands of premier customers such as American Idol, Qantas Airways, K2 Sports, Palms Casino, Carl’s Jr., and Squaw Valley Ski Resort, mobileStorm is at the forefront of the digital marketing revolution. The company provides a turnkey, hosted email and mobile messaging platform backed by world-class support and expert digital marketing services. mobileStorm has created the most complete digital marketing solution available, enabling you to reach your customers via email marketing, SMS/text messaging, voice messaging, video broadcast, RSS marketing, or fax broadcast from a single provider.

For more information, contact:
eydie@mobilestorm.com
press@mobilestorm.com
866-492-7886
323-785-6333
323-785-6310

It was pretty much the worst case scenario realized for retailers last month. Retail sales declined 2.7 percent in the all-important month of December, drawing to a close the worst holiday season since 1969. With consumer confidence still at record lows, how can a typical retailer hope to survive such dire circumstances? While there are no easy answers to address this multitude of problems, it’s time for retailers, especially those in the SMB space, to embrace digital marketing to help survive and possibly even thrive in the current economic conditions.

As I noted in my previous article, digital marketing should be top of mind for anyone in the SMB sector, and this is especially true for retailers, both online and “brick and mortar.” Here are a few reasons why:

It’s Affordable-Unlike other more traditional marketing channels, digital vehicles like email and SMS should be within the budget of even the smallest of retailers.

It’s Trackable-Lower revenues and disappointing sales mean it’s time to re-focus on maximizing ROI, and digital marketing in its very nature is designed to be trackable. Whether you just want to see how many people respond to a specific offer, or you need more sophisticated conversion tracking, you can monitor, in real time, the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts.

It’s Attainable-Gone are the days where only larger companies could effective deploy and manage digital marketing strategies. This is especially true for mobile marketing, in which SMB retailers can use applications like our mobileStorm SMS platform to quickly and easily launch highly effective campaigns, such as mobile coupons.

It’s Adaptable–Being stuck with an ineffective marketing campaign can be a serious blow to a retailer, both in terms of lost revenue or even your reputation. Changing course in the traditional media outlets can be cost both time and money. In the digital realm, however, such corrections can be done with minimal effort and expense.

It’s Personable–Most forms of mass communication are geared towards the mass market, meaning that the same message is applied across a wide section of potential consumers. Digital marketing allows you to take an inverse approach, giving you the flexibility to customize your offer to a much smaller (and arguably more effective) niche audience.

It’s Inevitable–Whether or you are currently engaged in digital marketing, the fact is that eventually you’ll have no choice but to use it. Your competitors will be, or already are, doing so.

What has your experience been like using digital marketing as a retailer? If you haven’t started, what is holding you back from doing so? We’d love to hear your thoughts either way.

Until next time,

Steve Chipman
“Analog thoughts in a digital world”

Los Angeles, CA— January 12, 2009 mobileStorm Inc., a leading provider of email and mobile marketing, today announced the appointment of Doug Schiller as its new Chief Financial Officer.  Mr. Schiller, who was most recently the founder of AlternativeEnergy.com, has a long-standing history with mobileStorm, providing financial strategy and guidance since its inception.  In his new role at mobileStorm, he will oversee all financial leadership and planning, reporting directly to CEO Jared Reitzin.

Mr. Schiller has over 20 years of experience as a CFO and senior-level positions in venture-backed companies.  He earned a Master of Business Administration degree from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University.  Previously, he held leadership positions at NewYears.com, ClubPlanet.com, Xingtone and PrimeID.

“The hiring of Doug Schiller as our new CFO is a reflection of the explosive growth we’ve been experiencing at mobileStorm,” said Jared Reitzin, chief executive officer of mobileStorm.  “I am extremely excited to have such a well-respected financial leader in our organization and look forward to continuing our already solid partnership in this new official capacity.”

About mobileStorm

For nearly a decade mobileStorm has pioneered the concept of digital marketing. Having successfully delivered more than 2 billion messages on behalf of thousands of premier customers such as American Idol, K2, Qantas Airways, MGM Grand, Palms Casino, Carl’s Jr., Squaw Valley Ski Resort, and Horoscope.com, mobileStorm is at the forefront of the digital marketing revolution. The company provides a turnkey, hosted email, and mobile messaging platform backed by world-class support and expert digital marketing services. mobileStorm has created the most complete digital marketing solution available, enabling clients to reach their customers via email marketing, SMS messaging, voice messaging, RSS marketing, video broadcast, or fax broadcast from a single provider.

So you know you want to add or continue email campaigns for your 2009 marketing efforts. But you need to consider email relevance as a factor from the start. Not only will this increase your campaign success rates; it also will serve as a preventive measure against your messages being marked as spam.

Where do you begin? The answer is to start with your subscribers, those people to whom you plan to send email messages. Remember, there is a person on the end of each address (at least in most cases).

Some of you may already have a database with existing email addresses, while others may be employing various forms of email capture–via a website, brick-and-mortar locations, etc. Regarding those contacts in your existing database, it’s important to ensure they still want to receive your emails. If you’re just starting to send out marketing emails, make sure you send an opt-in message to these addresses. This way you reduce the risk of sending an irrelevant email to a recipient who will very likely hit the spam button.

Next, consider where you are getting your email addresses, and why your subscriber signed up in the first place. Was it for a newsletter to keep updated on information in your industry? For a specific product offering? Or maybe to get updates on new events? Each of these people have completely different motivations for interacting with your company, and will be more responsive to messages that take this into consideration. Each grouping should either have its own list, or else be properly segmented within your database.

Remember, email can be the extra punch in your marketing strategy, but not just in terms of the volumes of leads. Quality email programs allow timely deployment of targeted messaging, which triggers an increase in the quality of leads (and the qualification) and ultimately equals higher revenue for your business.

Tune in next week for more on email relevance…

Shaneli Ramratan, Director of Marketing, mobileStorm

According to a recent study by eMarketer, the majority of college students pay little or no attention to marketing emails. However, email still remains their second- most preferred way to communicate, after text messaging. While this study mainly applies to college students, it got me thinking of the importance of relevance in messaging.

The deluge of marketing emails hitting inboxes ,paired with unrelenting spam, makes it hard for messages to get through to the brand audience—as we can see from the survey above. Taking the reins of your email marketing today can mean increased attention to your brand for generations to come. Not doing so means losing the very generation that email should be able to reach. Action has to be taken by all email marketers out there, to ensure that good marketing gets through.

The solution to effective email marketing , according to many companies and consultants in the field: Relevance. This word is often spoken, but the confusion lies in it being defined in too many ways. For some, relevance is equated to proper segmentation; for others it may involve dynamic content; and still others may focus on data collection and metrics as a key factor in achieving relevance. Before even considering email relevance, the first thing you should do is take inventory on attitudes in your organization about your email marketing itself.

Email marketing is well-known for its ROI, and as a relatively inexpensive channel, is often and easily abused. Looking at email as a channel where you can unload a mass of messages for quick impact to your bottom line would be cheating yourself. Email is not just randomized contact on a mass scale- it directly touches an individual on the other end, and can have a major impact on how your brand is recalled. Think of the brands whose emails you receive everyday: Google, Apple, Amazon… which ones do you read?

Learn more about email relevance…stay tuned next week!

Wishing everyone a happy and prosperous 2009!

Shaneli Ramratan, Director of Marketing, mobileStorm

We’ve all heard the dire predictions of what 2009 will mean to marketers and make no mistake about it, the news isn’t great. I won’t bother with a rehash of what others have reported because, quite frankly, it’s too depressing to do so. What I offer instead is the proverbial silver lining in this dark, gloomy cloud we’re facing: Digital marketing.

While traditional marketing budgets have shrunk over the past few months, digital marketing has proven to be a much more resilient form of communication in this same time period. In fact, most analysts are predicting at least a slight uptick in overall spending in digital marketing, notably email and mobile marketing, but nothing close to what had been initially projected before the economy was finally deemed to be in a recession.

Still, there are many reasons why companies should not only maintain but increase their digital marketing budgets in 2009, especially within the SMB (small-to-midsized business) space, to take advantage of its unique properties. These include:

Price
Digital is still by far the cheapest of the mass forms of communication. TV and radio rates have not fallen nearly as far as expected, despite the weakened economy; print is in a death spiral and increasingly not a safe play for a decent ROI; and outdoor/out of home is still a niche play at best.

ROI
Digital marketing wins this in a landslide as well. Other forms of mass communication simply do not or are not equipped to give the level of insight that digital can when it comes to ROI. Digital by its very nature is trackable, with more and more sophisticated analytics becoming available on almost a daily basis to even the smallest of companies.

Reach
Digital penetration rates are now as high as more mature forms of mass communication, especially mobile phones, which should reach 100% penetration over the next few years according to most studies. Mobile marketers have only begun to scratch the surface of what is possible and although email marketing is much more established, it too still has potential growth opportunities. This is especially true in the SMB market, where there are many affordable digital marketing platforms from which to choose.

Segmentation
Not only can digital provide companies with a way to reach a mass audience, it also works extremely well in terms of market segmentation. Digital marketing is a natural for “narrowcasting” and customization of the message, which isn’t economically viable in the other forms of mass communication. With a solid digital marketing platform, the message can be tailored to a specific audience or even an individual consumer in a matter of moments.

Control
As any seasoned marketer knows, keeping and maintaining control of a marketing campaign is vital to its success. For a small company, this is even more critical because of tight budgets and lack of internal resources. With a digital marketing platform, such programs can be created and managed by even a single individual, while still maintaining the polish and feel of a much larger, more sophisticated marketing firm or company.

The bottom line is that 2009 is going to be rough on pretty much every business, with marketing budgets shrinking in kind. However, savvy companies, big and small, will recognize and embrace digital marketing as a key objective for the coming year. After all, just because the economy stinks doesn’t mean marketing will cease all together. Companies will simply have to be much more selective and expect real results, which is exactly what digital marketing can bring them.

What other unique benefits does digital marketing offer companies? Feel free to list your own and/or discuss the ones noted above. Your feedback is always welcomed.

Steve Chipman, Chief Operating Officer, mobileStorm
Analog thoughts in a digital world

Happy Holidays!

It’s that time of year again, and mobileStorm and the writers at the Digital Marketing Blog would like to take a moment to wish everyone Happy Holidays! We hope you have enjoyed reading this year, and have gained lots of good insight on digital marketing–especially email and SMS/texting.

It’s been quite a year, and our writers want to wish you all a well deserved break! For those of you celebrating today: Merry Christmas and best wishes to you and your families. At least, everyone can look forward to some time off today.

Thank you for visiting the Digital Marketing Blog!

In a faltering economy, most marketing departments are heavily focused on direct response—and online media publishers promote the seemingly perfect marriage between traditional branding and trackable response as the solution. With today’s financial situation, it’s unrealistic for businesses to pull all their dollars out of advertising and marketing. So on the minds of most marketers is this: “How can we  improve success rates with no budget increases, and possibly a decrease in spending?”

Traditional marketers who overspend in print, radio, and other traditional media formats excitedly believe the online arena is the answer to this question. The online space is heralded in the agency world as ”interactive,” and a place to apply old-school media commissions to the likes of display, paid search, video, and more. But those looking for a stringent ROI know the likelihood of getting it with online media is not encouraging. That’s why you should use your own intuition and—despite lack of endorsement by marketing agencies—consider email campaigns.

In today’s business environment, most of us need to know if our programs were successful “the day before they start.” Otherwise there is the constant fear that you are throwing precious business dollars out the window. Marketers who have already dabbled in banners, search, and other online media should really check out email marketing—whose cost is a drop in the bucket compared to the last commission you paid your interactive agency. I’m writing this article to propel “traditional marketers” into a communications channel they should look at before taking the online plunge. Sure, you may find yourself in unfamiliar territory, but the pay-off supersedes waiting for latent conversions generated by an unsourced click. Don’t get me wrong, there are clear values in online media. But if you’re looking for high impact NOW, try an email campaign.

I look at email marketing as putting money in the bank. But before looking at one-off results, think of it this way: Email campaigns help you get to know your prospects and customers. It is a nice way to build a richly engaged contact base from which you can farm future conversions. Not everyone is ready to buy now, but by using email to segment your audiences into buckets, you can quickly separate buyers from browsers—while figuring out who needs that extra incentive.

Email is a direct response tool, yet it’s also a means of building a relationship with your buyers. The messages you can use in email are far more personal, and they hold the power to activate the emotions of your prospect. An email is like an intimate conversation— not shouting over a megaphone across miles of traffic buildup, hoping you’re placed as far forward as possible in the feature article, or deciding if RON buy can give you enough impressions for your bottom line. Email is highly dependent on how you choose to build your database. It allows selectivity and filtering depending on where you implement forms or contact information capture—and in turn gives the marketer the control to determine the success of the campaign before they even hit “send.”

Shaneli  Ramratan, Director of Marketing, mobileStorm

This week Nielsen Mobile unveiled a new report, titled “The Short Code Marketing Opportunity,” that proves what we at mobileStorm have long known: Texting is now. The report is one of the first of its kind to take inventory of this year’s successes in text message marketing. mobileStorm client Ashley Furniture HomeStores was among those featured, with the report highlighting the furniture retailer’s usage of mobile coupons to boost sagging summer sales. Nielsen notes, “Rewards programs are one way to ensure that a short code marketing campaign creates an engaging consumer experience; another logical opportunity is couponing.”

Other texting campaigns mentioned were from the likes of Coca Cola, Best Buy, Subway, and other internationally-known brands. One of the most well-known examples cited was the recent campaign for U.S. President-elect Barack Obama: Though the SMS message declaring Joe Biden as the vice presidential nominee was disparaged by critics who saw the announcement first on CNN or other news stations, the mass of people–2.9 million of them–who “texted-in” was proof in the pudding.

Nielsen’s report comes just in time for marketers who are unsure of venturing out into the mobile space and have been deterred by industry cynicism. The truth is that mobile campaigns are a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing mediums and pose the opportunity to capture large returns. The key is to use text messaging to start a personal and engaging conversation one-on-one with your customer or prospect, rather than send the kind of messages traditionally used in broad-reaching media formats like print, outdoor, and television.

Along with highlighting the uses of stand-alone mobile campaigns, Nielsen Mobile also talks about using SMS/text messaging to encourage users to participate in traditional media campaigns like television and radio. One of the most obvious examples of this (not mentioned in the report) happens to be another mobileStorm client: American Idol.

The point is that not only is texting powerful by itself, it can also be used to turn branding initiatives into direct response vehicles–an invaluable tool for marketers and media gurus alike.

Times are hard.

As a marketer, racking your brain for fresh ideas going into 2009 is probably on top of your to-do list in December. I know it is for me.

I received a CNN news alert yesterday, saying we’ve officially been declared in a recession as of November 2007. Immediately, a feeling of relief rushed over me. Kidding! With the market plummeting nearly 700 points yesterday, I felt no relief.

Today I searched for ways to make myself feel better. Quite successfully I might add, because of these two reasons:
1) This isn’t anything new. We’ve been in this “recession” for an entire year.
2) Email and SMS marketing are where it’s at. For marketers, that is.

You, too, can get some relief from the recession by implementing email and mobile efforts into your 2009 planning. There are two reasons to give this a try.

Activate your customers’ purchase interest: Personalized communication from brand favorites, or even brands that are new to me, makes me feel special as a consumer. In times of drudgery, an email message makes me feel like a company values my business; an SMS message puts a brand forefront in my mind. (Provided the message is relevant, of course.) Sadly enough, the presence of relevant email and SMS messages were lacking in my inboxes both on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Short ramp-up times: We all need some pick-me-ups, and having a little extra marketing firepower on short notice is invaluable. You hit the send button when you want. You can act on marketing gut intuition—and easily track your results. It’s also a great way to execute testing for messaging and segments.

Tell us how email and mobile is working for you! Leave a comment below.

Shaneli Ramratan, Director of Marketing, mobileStorm