Beware of the new threat in town… MOBILE DATA PLANS! In the new pricing structure, a consumer can choose to pay MORE for a super-sized data plan and life goes on for them as normal. If they choose a tiered option, then they pay for the amount of data they will access – like choosing minutes.
Here is the problem – when I scan a QR code I don’t KNOW if Im going to get a tiny little landing page OR a HD multi-megabye video file. That means every scan of a QR code becomes a roulette wheel, and in some case Russian roulette if that data puts people over their plan and charges stack up. To those tiered consumers, every scan now has a price tag and what they are willing to scan now becomes a careful consideration.
I think Marketers and Brands are going to have to re-think how QR is presented, and should get started on it. The simplicity of just having the code on materials will most likely need to be expanded to include what consumers will scan to, and perhaps even the guesstimated data usage for the scan. I don’t know, I see a whole bunch of people going insane with $600 phone bills and saying to big brands “you didn’t disclose this was a 20mg file”… or worse, no one scanning anything because they are afraid of that.
This, for lack of a better term, is not good news.
How Verizon’s new data pricing scheme affects mobile marketers
Starting June 28, new Verizon customers and those upgrading their phones will be introduced to Verizon Wireless’ new “Share Everything” pricing structure.
For new accounts with at least one smartphone, users can select different tiers of “Shared Data” capacities. This news has many Verizon customers, especially those who signed up for unlimited data plans, worried about how these new plans will affect their previous contract.
Sharing something
There are three main services that users pay to use when they sign up for mobile phone plans – the ability to make and receive phone calls, the ability to send and receive text messages and the ability to access the Internet, also known as the data plan.
The new pricing plans from Verizon do not affect the ability to make and receive phone calls or text messages. The new plans are centralized around accessing data. The more times you access the Web through your phone, the more data you use.
So how will the new data plans – Verizon may have been the first, but it will not be the last – affect mobile marketers?
To start, mobile marketers need to take a look at their existing mobile marketing programs and determine how many of them depend on data to thrive.
In this article, we break down the leading mobile marketing channels to determine which ones are affected by the new data rates and which ones continue to drive success even as carrier pricing plans change.
Mobile marketing commonly comprises the following channels:
• Applications
• QR/2D scanned codes
• Mobile Web (mobile Web sites, mobile landing pages)
• SMS (mobile messaging with text-only and links to streaming media)
• MMS (mobile messaging featuring fully-branded, rich media content and links)
As you can see from the above chart, every mobile marketing program will be affected somehow by the new data plan.
Continues at: How Verizon’s new data pricing scheme affects mobile marketers – Mobile Marketer – Columns.
