Mobile Device-Agnostic Marketing

Like thousands of others, we are racing down the iPhone app freeway trying to figure out if Iphone apps make sense for us. We have several pilots underway. And the iPhone is just one device; there is the issue of the other PDAs. Will we eventually make apps for all of the other PDAs too?

I like my iPhone. I have been bothered, however, about making apps for a device that has a relatively small market share compared to all the other PDAs that have Internet access; never mind the total cell phone population. Jennifer Deshler, Senior Director of Marketing for our fiction books, may have come up with an interesting solution.

On September 1st Thomas Nelson will launch Green by Ted Dekker. Jennifer will be launching a mobile site that will work on all Internet-capable devices, such as the iPhone, Blackberry, iPod Touch, tablets, computers, etc. Fiction will be driving traffic to the site through radio/advertising efforts. The week of September 7th, our Fiction division will be offering a full free download of Black (all epub formats or a pdf) to anyone who enters the mobile site and provides their email address.
Jennifer appears to have done a lot of things right:

1. Clearly defined customer need – Dekker Tribe wants to be first in the know
2. Why the customer would visit our site – Learn about Green; get a free copy of Black
3. How to drive site traffic – radio and other advertising

In addition, Jennifer has put in place a series of metrics to monitor the results of this effort, including Google Analytics.

We should know if the next month or so just how well this works. My hats off to Jennifer and the Fiction business unit for their creativity.