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Grow Your Business using Multi-Channel Mobile Marketing

Guest post by: Michael Farrell

Article Overview: Many economists say that traditional economic tools can not even measure the benefits that mobile phone technology have generated, suggests Mike Farrell with aspenIbiz. Read this short post to learn how over half of the world’s population are using mobile phones as part of the global economy and how to use multi-channel mobile marketing systems for your main street business in the New Economy.

Grow Your Business using Multi-Channel Mobile Marketing

It is easy to take the convenience of mobile technology for granted. Many economists say that traditional economic tools can not even measure the benefits they have delivered. Consumer price indices, for example, have become meaningless. Schedules can be constantly updated, waits shortened, and stresses reduced. Economic opportunities can be acted on far more rapidly.

However, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Internet access is coming to most people of the world first through their smart phones. Mobile broadband, and smart phones, are the sources of the fastest growth in the communications industry. According to the industry group Wireless Intelligence, the 4 billionth mobile phone was activated a few months ago. In 2010, for the first time, half of the world's 6.7 billion human beings had mobile phones. The industry estimates that over 6 billion people will have mobile connections by 2013.

The benefits to the world economy are staggering. Mobile phones not only deliver access to news and information, they bring users into the global economy. Mobile banking is delivering the means to save, spend, and transfer money safely.

Because of these capabilities and benefits, multi-channel mobile marketing systems are a must for your main street business.

The use of email-based marketing systems with direct broadcast and auto-responder capabilities was discussed in a previous article. These are great tools to capture leads, send out email messages, and build a relationship with leads and customers on your list.

However, today's email systems totally depend on your leads and customers opening their emails ... and in our busy world we are finding that many of us are not opening our emails as frequently as we used to open them.

At the same time, have you noticed that many of us have our cell phones with us all the time? It has been reported that many actually sleep with their cell phones in order to not miss a message ... and most of us will look at a text message as soon as it has been received.

This behavior leads us to ask, "could we use our email marketing system to also automatically send a text message, as part of the autoresponder series of messages to a lead or customer that has opted into our list, and encourage them to go read the email we have sent them?" We believe that if we can get our leads and customers to read our messages, we will be able to grow our business!

Another recently noticed behavior is that many of us do not answer calls from phone numbers we do not recognize however we will listen to our voice mail messages.

Knowing this behavior leads us to again ask, "could we use our email marketing system to also automatically send a voice message, as part of our autoresponder series of messages, directly to the voice mail number of our lead or customer, and encourage them to go read the email we have sent them?" Again, we know that we will be able to grow our business if we can just get our leads and customers to hear our messages!

The capability to send mobile text, and direct to voice mail, messages as part of the email autoresponder series of messages, is available today and these capabilities are just the tip of the iceberg for the next generation of autoresponding followup email systems ... and I am sure you are learning that these systems are more than just email systems. They are comprehensive, multichannel, marketing and selling agents that use email, and much more, in an integrated way.

What if these capabilities, plus some new marketing tools and automated sales agents, could be found in one place and provide the versatility and effectiveness of a Swiss Army Knife? With these capabilities, it is clear we will be able to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of our efforts to get our marketing message out ... and grow our business!

Today, it is becoming clear that the same "ol sales pitch" does not work anymore. The days of mass email and voice mail are over. It takes more than just delivering your message in order to close a sale.

Our prospects are searching for a trusted advisor ... someone that can meet their needs and solve their problems. The message to our target market must address the specific needs or problems that a prospect in our target market is experiencing. So we must have a way to connect with, learn about, and offer a solution to our leads that converts them to customers.

For our marketing and sales activities to be successful, we need to build trust, develop powerful relationships, provide education about our solutions, and deliver a compeling call to action so that the potential customer takes the next step in solving their problem (which is to buy your product or service and satisfy their need).

So, let's discuss a few more marketing tools of our Swiss Army Knife that can help us: followup with leads and customers; build trust; and provide education about what we offer. These tools enable us to create a more comprehensive and effective marketing process and empowers us to become a trusted advisor with a solution to the needs and problems of our leads and customers.

In a previous blog post, two methods were presented as a way to get the contact information of our prospects into our mailing list. One way was to manually key the contact information, we obtain, into a list. Another way is to have an optin form, on a webpage, where we can entice prospects to provide their name, email address, and mobile phone number so it can be captured and transferred into our leads list.

A third method to get contact information into our mailing list is with a business card scanning app that you can download from an online app store ... and you can use it with your smart phone.

Here is how it works based on a business development scenario experienced by many of us.

When you go to a sales meeting, an industry event, a convention or trade-show, you collect business cards from many prospects and potential partners. When you return to your hotel room, or office, you have a stack of business cards staring at you ... and you think, one more chore you must do to grow your business.

You know you need to capture the contact information from the business cards and do some research to learn more about these contacts. You need to determine if the new contact is a potential partner or if they are a potential customer. You need to followup with them and develop a more powerful relationship.

You are already overworked and have many other business tasks to do but you know the followup must be done. This is why the stack of business cards staring at you, requiring followup, is frequently called the followup monster. It is one more chore chomping away and eating up what little time you have.

What if you could tame that followup monster by automatically capturing the contact information (using the business card scanner app on your smart phone) and then automatically begin to deliver a series of previously prepared multichannel (email, text, and direct to voice mail) messages?

What if you could capture valueable information about your leads and learn about them by having automated agents visit their website, social media sites, and the online profiles on their sites?

What if you could even send them a brief survey with a few simple questions and automatically collect their responses to the survey questions?

All of this data could provide more targeting information that you can use to build trust, develop powerful relationships, further qualify your new leads, and turn them into customers.

Plus ... what if you had a way to tell your story, deliver your message, and market and sell to your leads as you build your relationship with them using a series of online and automated teleseminars and webinars?

It would be the equivalent of providing collateral, and product or service education, to your leads and customers. It will position you as a trusted advisor while marketing and selling to your leads ... all in an online and automated way. It will help you increase the conversion of prospects and leads into highly satisfied, well paying customers of the solution, and value, you provide.

In summary, next generation email systems are here now and they are more than just email.

They are a collection of capabilities with automation agents that change the way you deliver your message, grow your business, and promote your cause.

They are a revolutionary new way to communicate and followup with your business connections, leads, customers, family and friends.

You are able to create marketing campaigns that utilize all the traditional channels of lead generation such as phone, email, and optin forms on websites plus the game changing new methods of mobile text marketing, business card scanning, and automatically delivering product or service information and education using teleseminars and webinars.

The capabilities enable you to set up your marketing campaigns and then put your followup efforts, on autopilot. They also give you the added versatility to analyze, and modify, your campaigns on the fly.

Capturing leads, building relationships, creating trust, and following up, could not get much easier than this. It does not matter if you are a small brick-and-mortar business, or a services business, or a Fortune 500 company; your business can now truly have MonsterFollowUp ... that is effective and low cost.

It is now up to you to improve your productivity, increase your effectiveness, and grow your business by taming the followup monster and turn it into your greatest asset Learn how to use automation agents to capture leads, learn about them, automate the followup, and market to your leads and customers with teleseminars and webinars. With these capabilities, you an spend your limited one-on-one time with the most qualified leads thereby increasing your conversion rates.

At this time, the existing email solution providers are all scrambling to add the capabilities, described in this article, to their systems. New providers are emerging that focus on mobile marketing solutions, and the existing webinar providers are scrambling to add automated tele-seminar capabilities.

Your Main Street business must do multi-channel mobile marketing to capture, connect, communicate with leads among the world's 6.7 billion mobile phone users and convert them to customers that will deliver profits to your business in the New Economy.

I Hope You Enjoy the Articles and I Trust You Will Find Them Insightful! Let me Know What You Think.

Please be sure to share this post with anyone that you think would benefit from this message... thanks!

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Article Tags: Internet Marketing, Main Street Business, Make Money Online, Mike Farrell aspenIbiz, MultiChannel Mobile Marketing, Small Business



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