Mobile marketing provider Cellit released a benchmark study this week and its most telling insights speak to a company’s customer engagement infrastructure.  Through the good range of data points, we zeroed in on one point: that SMS’s potential as a powerful customer engagement tool depends on two things:

1. Respecting its limitations and ‘best practices’ for communicating with prospects and customers
2. Not operating mobile programs in a silo

The latter point is particularly important, because it balances out a company’s expectations from its mobile marketing programs and allows them to be used appropriately to their ability to engage customers.

Avoiding the ‘silo’ approach means:
- using a multi channel approach to interacting with customers
- connecting your mobile marketing systems to your overall CRM infrastructure
- leveraging each channel to it’s maximum potential but no more

The study shows that mobile marketing is akin to an oil well: there is an optimal limit to the production of both — exceeding it will ‘water it out’ — thereby destroying its long term value potential