Demography is all about studying populations; consequently, demographic data are the data points that detail a population's characteristics. You want to think about the various demographic data points you'll find helpful for your business (every business is different). Data you might consider including in your database include

You may wish to capture and organize psychographic data about members of your audience. Psychographic data is qualitative data used to measure an individual's lifestyle. Examples could include

You can include psychographic information in your database to help you describe and identify customers and prospective customers in more detail and to aid in developing promotion strategies designed to appeal to specific psychographic segments of the market for a product or service.

Preference data is data volunteered by members of your audience regarding their preferences, for example, their likes and dislikes (favorite food, music, and so on). Other preference criteria may include the days of the week and times the consumers prefer to be messaged or called, how many times the consumers are willing to let you contact them within a particular time frame (for example, ten times a month, but no more than three times per week).

Behavioral data includes information about past behavior or expected behavior based on past interactions or predictions based on other data. Including behavioral data in your database can tell you whether someone is likely or unlikely to respond to a specific campaign. For example, a person with a behavioral profile that indicates procrastination may not respond to a limited time offer.

Location is a dynamic data point that can be used to adjust your interaction with members of your audience so that those interactions are contextually relevant to their location. For example, if they're browsing mobile Internet sites and your database knows their location, you can display location-relevant advertising or guide them to the nearest location. You can also track location in real time and use that information to deliver location-based messages when your customers give you permission to use their location data.

Syndicated data is consumer purchasing data compiled from individually scanned consumer transactions from thousands of purchase locations. The data is collected by market research firms, cleansed, and put into aggregate to protect the privacy of individuals. It's then used by marketers to better understand the purchasing behavior of their target audience. Marketers use syndicated to data to

Syndicated data can be very useful; in fact, it can often be better than data you collect yourself because it amasses information not just about your own client interactions but those of your competitors as well.

With SMS, you can collect some data automatically as well as request that participants of your campaigns provide the data. When a consumer opts into your campaign via SMS, the mobile marketing application captures the participant's mobile phone number. From this mobile phone number, your application provider can identify the following:

You can use Internet and mobile Internet browser forms or forms in an installed application to collect information from your prospects and customers by requesting that the visitor to the site complete the form. Upon submission, you capture the requested data.

For example, a leading marketer to youth retail markets, Access 360 Media, uses Web forms that can capture different consumer preference attributes, as shown in Figure 14-2.

Figure 14-2. A consumer retail-focused preference opt-in form via the Internet.

There may come a time when you want to merge your mobile campaign data with that data stored in your company's customer relationship management (CRM) system. This is easy to do and typically can be handled in one of three ways:

Figure 14-3. The real-time data transfer configuration screen in the iLoop Mobile mfinity platform.

You have your choice of a number of mobile analytics providers to track consumer interactions on your mobile Web sites and applications. For example, if you want to track interactions on your mobile Web sites, you can consider using Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics). Google Analytics allows users get rich Web site information, and the account creation process is simple:

Bango has a similar process. See Figure 14-4 for a sample Bango mobile Web report.

Figure 14-4. A Bango mobile behavior multichannel meeting report.

You can choose between a number of application provider reporting tools, including Flurry (www.flurry.com), Medialets (www.medialets.com), Motally (www.motally.com), Bango (www.bango.com), Omniture's SiteCatalyst (www.omniture.com/en/products/online_analytics/sitecatalyst), Mobile Behavior (www.mobilebehavior.com), and others. See Figure 14-5 for an example of Mobile Behavior's reporting tool.

You should be able to obtain from your mobile application service provider a wealth of operational and business metrics from your campaigns. In general, obtaining metrics is a straightforward process, and as a marketer, you have to assess what mobile metrics are appropriate for you to measure.

Here is a list of the common metrics, tools, and questions you should be asking your provider about so that you can develop your mobile analytics strategy:

An analytics report is a collection of mobile metrics presented to you in a single report so that you can see all your data as a whole and begin to gather insights from it. You can then use these insights to make decisions on how to best move forward with your business (see Figure 14-5). In other words, reporting and analyzing the data generated from your programs are absolutely critical components of your mobile marketing efforts. What good is the best mobile marketing campaign if you do not have strong insights into exactly how it performed or is performing?

Figure 14-5. Analytics reports quantify the interactions with your mobile campaigns.

Many of the companies in the mobile marketing space today can provide a high level of reporting sophistication. Campaign dashboards are often configurable so that you can see the metrics that matter to you and see them in a variety of formats.

Reports typically are summary views of a mobile campaign on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, but they can also be unprocessed and unformatted data files, which require additional work to arrange and present the data.

Every mobile application provider has a different user interface for pulling its reports. Ask about the reporting feature in the application as well as the mobile Web site reports available when you're selecting a mobile service provider.

Often mobile marketing reports can contain both graphs and data for the metrics and be made available in a variety of formats (such as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, Adobe Acrobat PDFs, or other). A current trend is to provide visual representation, typically in graph form, so a user can quickly see how his campaign is doing.

Figure 14-6 shows a sample trend graph on the effectiveness of mobile advertising.

Figure 14-6. Mobile advertising and application download reports can call out important details on effectiveness of advertising.

Calculating your ROMMI for revenue generating mobile marketing programs is a simple math exercise. The ROMMI for revenue generating programs compares the sales you generated, or expect to generate, in revenue terms against your mobile marketing spending, or expected spending, that helped generate those revenues.

Here's the formula:

Here's an explanation for each variable:

Here is an example: Say you're selling T-shirts. The shirt sells for $10 and it costs you $1.50 to make it.

The contribution per unit (in dollars) is $10.00 - $1.50, which equals $8.50. The contribution margin is $8.50/$10.00, which equals 85%.

For example, say you own a chain of retail outlets and you want to use mobile marketing to drive traffic to your store to generate T-shirt sales. You're already spending money on a direct mail campaign and you want to mobile enhance the program by adding a mobile coupon call to action. The total cost of the mobile marketing element to enhance your existing marketing campaign is $5,000. You expect the mobile marketing element of the campaign to increase revenues from $22,000-$30,000. You previously calculated that the contribution margin of the T-shirts sales averages out at 85%.

In this case, your ROMMI would be

ROMMI = [incremental revenue attributed to mobile marketing (in dollars) * contribution margin percentage - marketing spending (in dollars)]/marketing spending (in dollars)

The ROMMI for this example = [$8,000 * 85% - $5,000]/$5,000 = 36%

In this case, your mobile marketing program is estimated to generate $0.36 per every dollar of spending. Not bad!

Calculating your ROMMI for indirect revenue programs can be a bit harder than doing so from direct programs, but it is not impossible. The same premise applies as for direct revenue programs: You want to estimate the overall value of the mobile market program to your achievement of the company's objectives.

Your goal for indirect revenue objectives is not sales, but rather some other trackable measure (opt-ins, impressions, clicks, traffic, redemptions, and so on). For example, maybe you want to measure the number of new leads in the opt-in database (opt-ins), total mobile advertising impressions generated (impressions), increased traffic in the store or on Internet or mobile Internet sites (traffic), the number of loyalty points redeemed by customers (redemptions), or whatever. In order to calculate your ROMMI, you need to know what each of these measures means to you. Look at your historical data and calculate how much additional revenue an opt-in, impression, redemption, or traffic means to you in terms of real revenue. You can then compare the value of an indirect measure, like an impression, against the estimated/actual costs of running the marketing program to estimate your indirect ROMMI and see if the program is worth doing.

Here's the formula:

Here's an explanation for each variable:

As an example, say that a travel agency wants to sponsor a live event. The sponsorship costs $35,000 (including the mobile marketing program costs). The agency assumes the sponsorships will generate 250,000 impressions, which results in a cost of $0.14/impression ($35,000/250,000). The agency knows that historically an impression is worth, on average, $0.20 in future revenues.

The ROMMI for these indirect programs = [$0.20-$0.14] / $0.14 = 43%

Based on these estimates, the sponsorship is worth the expense.