Mobile Marketing as a strategy in CRM

Mobile marketing is a young and still developing strategy in marketing. It thanks its creation and rapid evolution to the growth of mobile devices, such as mobile phones and tablets. This paper's research question, "can mobile marketing be used as a strategy in CRM?" investigates the strength of mobile marketing, its application and use by marketers as their sole or part of their marketing campaign and as strategy in customer relationship management (CRM). The two main components of the research question are mobile marketing and CRM. Mobile marketing is part of the marketing mix, namely promotion. CRM on the other hand is a business strategy which is designed to reduce costs and increase profitability by solidifying customer loyalty. According to Pousstchi and Wiedemann (2006), there are 6 objectives of mobile marketing, and a Mobile campaign is based on 12 critical success factors (CSF) (Scornavacca E., McKenzie J.). These CSFs range from related content, permission, personalisation to time and response time. If mobile marketers take these CSFs into account when creating their mobile marketing, then they raise the success rate of their mobile campaign significantly. Mobile devices are very personal items, people even take them with them when they visit the bathroom. This and the fact that most people have a cellphone and/or other mobile devices, make mobile marketing very appealing to be used as a marketing medium. Mobile marketers have several options, using mobile devices, to reach consumers. Internet plays a critical part, but new technologies such as 3G and Wifi have also eased the way of reaching consumers. SMS and MMS are two other commonly used messaging services in mobile marketing. With all the research of this paper, but with regard to its limitations, this research paper concludes that, if used properly, mobile marketing can be used as a CRM strategy.