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If your idea of mobile marketing is driving around town with a loud speaker yelling “kids frames half off”, then please read on. Mobile marketing describes marketing on or with a mobile device, such as a cell phone using SMS Marketing. The Mobile Marketing Association defines mobile marketing as follows:

Mobile Marketing is a set of practices that enables organizations to communicate and engage with their audience in an interactive and relevant manner through any mobile device or network.

From a business and marketing standpoint, the current trends in mobile are worthy of our attention. Mobile cell phones have become the epicenter of all digital convergence – fixed telecoms, the internet, banking, social networks, and even advertising are all migrating to mobile. While rival technologies such as internet and PC roughly doubled in size over the past decade, mobile phone subscriptions grew 10-fold. Mobile phones are now the most widely owned and used technology in the world. Over half the population of the planet has a mobile phone, and most users carry their phones with them at all times. Christian Lindholm, the ex Nokia mobile design guru and author, likes to say: “Anything that can be mobile, will be mobile.”

These trends have not gone unnoticed by marketers. Despite a sluggish economy the past few years that led many companies to slash advertising budgets, mobile advertising displayed a growth rate last year that exceeded 80%. Noah Elkin, principle analyst for mobile at emarketer, predicts a staggering $4.40 billion dollars in mobile advertising spend by 2015. Mobile is poised to become a permanent fixture in the marketers’ digital strategies.

So how can we leverage these trends in our optometric practices? A simple way to introduce a mobile marketing channel into our practice would be through our annual recall. Convert to an electronic recall system and give patients the option of receiving an email or a text reminder when they are due for their next eye exam. As you build your patient database, coupons or discounts can be attached to the reminder to bolster customer loyalty and retention.

Due to its simple yet highly effective approach, SMS (simple message service) texts have been the darling of the mobile ad industry. The vast majority of mobile ads consist of SMS text messages. By adding customer value to patient recall, this should prove to be a more effective call-to-action than a one-sided postcard. Since commercial text messaging is permission-based, consumers get to choose who they want to receive messages from. Since they’ve agreed to the text reminder and they trust your office, this form of marketing will not be perceived as marketing at all, but rather a message they actually want to receive from you. Combined with mobile coupons, this can be a very powerful call-to-action for patient recall and retention.

Email is a great marketing and communication channel for many businesses, but for the purpose of patient recall there are a few distinctions that may lead us to focus more attention on channels that have greater reach. 1) Over 95% of text messages are opened, while email open rate is around 20%. 2) There are twice as many users of text messaging than email. 3) Text messages are sent directly to people’s mobile phone, which is typically near them at all times and can be acted on immediately.

In the past few years the world’s biggest internet company, Google, said the future of the internet is mobile. We’ve heard the world’s biggest software maker, Microsoft, say their future is dependent on the success of the smartphone. Remember all trends point to mobile, and consider this in your marketing and patient retention strategies. I would love to hear your thoughts on this.