O2 saw a 30 percent response rate from its integrated mobile customer relationship management campaign with the help of 2ergo's integration product, 2ergo Unite.

The mobile marketing product used by O2 allowed the wireless carrier to send out text messages, MMS and email all from the same platform. After trying to engage customers through SMS, MMS and email separately, O2 came to 2ergo for a fully integrated product that would allow its CRM teams to effectively engage with consumers.

"We were approached by O2 to run all of their pieces from one platform," said Colin McCaffery, director of products at 2ergo, Manchester, England. "We wanted to pull it all into one centralized campaign where they can send SMS, MMS, WAP push and email campaigns, all interconnected into one campaign engine.

"The idea was that they could have one platform and use the strength of the media for interacting with customers," he said.

O2 is a subsidiary of Spain-based carrier Telefonica and serves more than 20 million British residents, claiming to be Britain's leading provider of wireless communications and broadband.

O2 hoped to minimize its suppliers and acquire more flexibility and diversity in its switch to the 2ergo Unite product.

Another demand from O2 during this initiative was a reliable delivery of comprehensive reporting methods in order to track its return on investment.

Additionally, metrics for the campaign tracking customer behavior were important to O2 .

"O2 is a prepaid-based carrier - half of its customers are prepaid," Mr. McCaffery said. "Part of the nature of these prepaid consumers is that we don't know a lot about them, other than their phone number.

"O2 is keen on understanding the metrics for this segment especially," he said.

The fully integrated SMS, MMS, WAP and email campaign reached out to all of O2's 20 million customers through one application and one supplier.

During the eight months of the campaign, O2 sent out more than 12 million multimedia messages.

The response rate was an astounding 30 percent, according to 2ergo.

O2 claims that its implementation of 2ergo Unite not only gave it a truly one-on-one relationship with consumers, but also gave the carrier the ability to streamline the many processes involved in interactive mobile campaigns into one application.

"From our perspective, mobile marketing is very effective and has great response rates," Mr. McCaffery said. "That will become more animated in the future.

"We've seen that iPhone apps have become very powerful," he said. "Everyone wants an app but what happens is that within a couple weeks or a month, their app is no longer discoverable, so now people are starting to use other mobile marketing platforms to promote apps."

"There is huge potential for that in the future."