FlyTxt - A conversational Mobile marketing technology

The VAS market is growing into a huge market in India, and there are new startups which are venturing into these services with keeping high userbase that is there in India, it is said that 8 million new connections of Mobile phones is happening every month, and that really is a big number and businesses are evolving around this area more these days.

As traditional voice products are getting commoditised, VAS is gaining ground as a key service differentiator for operators. It is also a new revenue source actively pursued by operators through partners. Lots of players emerging in the VAS ecosystem looking at the significant potential of this segment. Operators need to choose right partners, both service and technology if they want to gain an early advantage in this growing market

One of the key challenges for operators is in promoting these 100’s of VAS products, most of which have very short lifecycles. Promoting and selling them to right customer segment quickly holds the key to an operator’s success in MVAS.

And one such company which is venturing into this space is Flytxt which says it will help in simplifying the complexities of mobile advertising.

And their take is, today most of the majority of marketing impressions over the mobile channel are operators selling something to their subscribers. Mobile advertising as in third party brands using mobile as a channel for their advertising is at a very nascent stage.

Here they focus on providing marketers with a fully integrated, automated and usable technology platform, which can connect them directly to subscribers without any IT intermediaries, their aim is insulate marketers from technical complexities and challenges in launching marketing campaigns through mobile channel and free their time for more creative thinking and designing innovative campaigns. They also said that they help marketers do iterative marketing, test their ideas with instant campaigns, analyse its results, choose the best idea and execute it.

With hundreds of marketers trying to reach subscribers with hundreds of products, customers are receiving too many messages, and controlling spam is becoming difficult.  Neon helps in this by providing Operators with centralised control over distributed marketing.

Till now the first generation of mobile marketing tools is list based bulk messaging tools. These tools are typically designed for use by Engineers and do not support targeting nor any subscriber feedback. These tools do not use any of the extensive subscriber data available with the operator and over time does considerable harm to the mobile marketing channel.

Then the second generation of tools improves upon the first generation through targeting, done mostly offline. These traditional multi‐channel campaign management systems, mostly extensions on BI and CRM tools, are designed for use by IT/ business analysts. They are intrinsically not transactional and lack real‐time conversational marketing characteristics. Lack of real‐time tracking and poor usability severely limits their value to mobile marketers.

And their Flytxt Neon product is a third generation mobile marketing platform designed for conversational marketing and to be used by marketers. It connects the marketers directly with subscribers without any intermediaries. Neon is characterised by real‐time transaction processing, native communication interfaces and seamlessly integration with live subscriber data. Marketers can run hundreds of highly targeted campaigns, track and quantify the customer reactions and respond to them in real-time, enabling conversational marketing.

What do you think people, with all the recent advancements happening in telecom arena, and 3G on the brink of entering Indian shores, I guess this type of technology will be helpful for both marketers as well as consumers.