It’s that time of year for nostalgic reviews of the year that was and bold predictions about the year to come.  This is not one of those posts.

I’ve already issued the call to make next year your “Year of Mobile.”  There are plenty of stats there to support the idea that consumers have rabidly embraced mobility and it’s time for marketers to play catch-up. This post aims to provide a lens for you to view your mobile efforts and for determining successes, failures and learning.

My proposed model involves the 4 ROIs of Mobile. Return on Investment is a common cross-discipline yardstick for success. Return on Insight has been generating more awareness as a way to quantify campaign propositions. To these, I’m adding Return on Involvement and Return on Innovation.

Return on Investment

Accuse me of over-simplifying things if you want. But for me, return on investment is a straightforward calculation of “I spent X and earned Y”. The science is in being able to draw a solid line from spend to revenue.  The good news is that mobile is highly trackable when properly executed.

Mobile commerce, the most obvious path, is gaining significant momentum and will eventually become a considerable revenue-driver, but it’s very much in its infancy in Canada (here’s where the US stands).

A better bet is to use direct and CRM marketing tactics to drive clicks to bricks. One of the best examples I have seen involves BMW’s efforts to target recent customers in an effort to drive snow tire sales. The campaign used customized messaging to drive interest, saw a 30% conversion rate and netted $45 million dollars in sales out a $120,000 investment.

Using mobile coupons tailored to customer interests, delivered at key decision points or including promo codes to drive to retail and/or e-commerce are all readily executable and highly measurable.

Mobile is with the customer at points of inspiration and decision.  Capture attention there and conversion to action won’t be far behind.

Return on Insight

The key to Return on Insight is the understanding you can gain about your customers’ habits and preferences.  Insight should drive everything from program planning delivering ongoing optimization benefits. Plan carefully and you’ll be able to draw from data points all along the customer experience.

Information on consumer devices and their capabilities plus data on how consumers use them and where they interact with you equals pure gold for developing programs that provide genuine and repeatable utility to customers.

Mobile applications offer perhaps the richest canvas for this type of data. But you should be well into your Insight research before even considering an app build. Ask yourself “do a significant + valuable + engaged slice of my customers or target customers have and use deeply an iPhone/Blackberry/Android device?”

Both the mobile web and advertising will provide you with the same kind of actionable data that you’ve come to love from their wired cousins. Plus, you can target demo- and psycho-graphically against handset types, geography, and more.

You can gain valuable customer insight even via the lowly text message. Getting customer opt-in and then allowing them to manage preference around what content they’d like and when they’d like to get it is immensely valuable.

A view through the Insight lens will help you develop and modify program features, provide optimized experiences and allocate budget according to where and how you can best reach your target audience. Sound data and insights lead to sound programming.

In the next post, I’ll review Return on Involvement and Return on Innovation.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Easing Into B2B Mobile Marketing
• Mobile’s 4 ROIs – Part 2
• Avoiding A Mobile House of Cards
• The 5% Mobile Challenge
• Brother, Can you spare a text?