Welcome to the first lesson in the nuts and bolts of mobile marketing mini-course. Over the next few days, I plan to go over several key points that will include easy techniques to help you up the ante of your mobile marketing campaigns.

Let’s start with a simple definition: Mobile marketing is marketing on or with a mobile device, such as your iphone, ipad, galaxy, Note, or any smart device you rely on. Mobile marketing can provide your customers with time sensitive, location sensitive, personalized information that promotes your business’ products, services and ideas.

In this first lesson, we are going to talk about some of the things you need to know in order to run an effective mobile marketing campaign – And how to take advantage of these popular devices (that virtually everyone has) to reach more customers and ultimately make more sales.

Before you dive in and start using mobile marketing for your business, let’s just make sure that it will work for you, shall we? Generally, mobile marketing will work for any business as long as you have something to offer your customers via text that will entice them to take action, such as come into your store, click on a link, watch a video or make a purchase.

While many mobile users have access to fast download speeds and reliable data plans, there are still many who have very slow connections. Which means that it may take some of your customers a long time for them to access images and video – resulting in a frustrated customer instead of an interested one. Downloading large amounts of data can be costly for some mobile users as well and even though the medium is becoming more image and video friendly, text-based ads are most definitely still more effective on mobile platforms.

Here are some initial key points to keep in mind as you build your first mobile campaign:

Customer retention

Text messaging can be a great way to retain customers. Especially customers who have already purchase from you, as they would be more willing to receive direct messaging from you than new customers. Use this to your advantage by offering special deals to current customers. They will feel special from receiving the extra attention, rather than an automated newsletter.

Easy, opt out

Always make sure your mobile marketing has a clear link for opting-out. There are actually legal implications to not having a clear opt-out on every single piece of mobile marketing message, same as email campaigns, so be absolutely sure to develop your opt-out system at the same time that you are developing your subscription system. Each system handles this differently, but opt-outs can be done by clicking a hyperlink or by texting a word like ‘unsubscribe’ to a mobile short code. It’s easy and necessary… so do it!

Holiday sales

Align your mobile marketing campaign with holidays, big events and local events as well. Use holidays to make your marketing campaign sparkle. Use a major sporting event to theme a promo. Make a special code for everyone to text for a chance to win a small prize related to a celebration or holiday. Using these types of commonly celebrated occasions will help to make your mobile campaigns much more effective. Just be careful to focus any holiday-related campaign around the special day rather than on it… you don’t want to end up losing subscribers who don’t appreciate being contacted on special occasions – Which would be totally understandable.

Set a budget

You will want to plan your mobile marketing campaign to a T so don’t forget to set a budget and stick to it. Over-working your budget early on in a campaign can easily cause your efforts to fall apart. So plan out how to spend your resources before-hand so that you can remain focused on the effectiveness of the campaign all the way through rather then focusing on a too-tight budget half-way through. Working attentively to stay within your budget will truly help your mobile marketing efforts achieve success.

We have a lot to go over in the next few days if you want to learn how to boost the effectiveness of your mobile campaigns, so make sure you look for your next lesson soon. We will be going to go over a few tips for creating your mobile marketing plan.