The Hindu : Front Page : An easy campaign through mobile marketing

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Oct 25, 2009
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An easy campaign through mobile marketing

Shanthi Kannan

CHENNAI: Technology plays an important role in promoting a brand or product these days. A new mobile marketing solution, from Impiger Technologies’s “EasyCampaign,” enables businesses to send offers and promotions over voice directly to customers and reach them wherever they are, and at any time they want.

Marketing managers are beginning to realise that mobile marketing must be part of their media mix — that an audio campaign can be leveraged to promote a brand. Voice increases brand recall and also offers a medium to engage users, says K.S. Rajasekar, Director (Social Media Marketing), Impiger Technologies.

The Texas-based company, with offices in Chennai and Coimbatore, is a major in the telecom voice space and has seen an 80 per cent listening rate for voice promotions.

Highly targeted

Mr. Rajasekar says mobile marketing becomes highly targeted. The solution offers plenty of possibilities for enterprises, retail, consumer electronics, hospitality and other businesses to engage customers with promotional messages. Voice promotion can also link to an Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS) to get customers showing interest in the promotion to respond, and send a discount coupon code to them, to be shown at the time of billing.

Companies can target their own customer databases or Impiger’s database of a specific city or State. The 30 or 60 second voice promo will be played the moment a person picks up the call. The advantage for businesses is that they are billed only for the calls listened to by users.

This is also a scalable marketing solution with the ability to target millions in a few days. Businesses can monitor the campaign statistics every 15 minutes over a web interface. Investment in the solution and infrastructure is nil and businesses pay only for the number of promotional calls. However, if it intrudes into the privacy of mobile users, customers will have a choice of registering for a “do not disturb” service with mobile operators.

Besides, mobile marketing suits the mass market campaigns of governments, especially in health care. It could similarly prove effective in times of a calamity such as tsunami, flood threats, or disease outbreaks. Festival seasons like Diwali, Christmas and New Year also lend themselves to mass marketing over mobiles.

Mr. Rajasekar says EasyCampaign is based on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl) architecture — a solution stack of free, open source software. It also uses a custom-built Model View Controller (MVC) framework written in PHP and makes extensive use of Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX, jQuery, Scriptaculous and Web Services. The back end is heavily customised software IP PBX (Internet Protocol-Private branch exchange) which connects to telephone services like the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), GSM, CDMA and 3G networks.

Companies like Netcore Solutions, mKhoj, Affle India, Webaroo Technology India, Maxconnect (voice), Flytxt, Nextcell (voice) and Vakow are some of the players in mobile marketing. Most of them, however, use only SMS for promotions and not voice. Impiger’s EasyCampaign solution combines voice with SMS to make it more effective. EasyCampaign also has a management portal that allows customers to see reports in real time.

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