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Almost every brand has some form of an existing mobile marketing strategy in place. It comes as no surprise as 68% of consumers used their mobile phones to make online purchases last year. But how well are your campaigns performing? Are they meeting your expectations or do they need some work? And when was the last time you actually upgraded your mobile marketing? If it’s been a while, don’t worry! You’re in the right place to learn some key tips to transform your mobile marketing campaigns.
In this blog, we’ll take you through 11 game-changing mobile marketing techniques that businesses swear by. These unmissable tips will enable you to deliver mobile campaigns with exceptional customer experiences that drive engagement, strengthen loyalty, and secure sales.
The Complexities of Mobile Marketing
As consumers are glued to those tiny screens, mobile has become fundamental in our daily lives. But for marketers working behind the scenes, mobile marketing comes with common complexities that many struggle to overcome.
Short Attention Spans
Mobile users now have shorter attention spans as they are constantly multitasking and are often pulled in by a variety of distractions. You’ll find them switching between consuming content on YouTube and Netflix, online shopping on websites and apps, socializing on Whatsapp or Instagram, or simply managing their life with banking apps. Not only are you competing for attention with your competitors, but you’re competing with almost any person and business. It’s why you need to learn about your customers on a deeper level to create concise, personalized, and attention-grabbing messages.
Channel Evolution
Mobile marketing requires a deep understanding of the user journey from how often mobile devices are used, where in the customer journey they’re being used, and what mobile channels they’re bouncing between. To recap, some of the main mobile marketing channels include:
Short Message Service (SMS): SMS is a mobile-only channel that allows you to text compact messages to shoppers’ mobiles.
Email: Most emails are now opened on a mobile device, making email marketing a valuable part of any mobile marketing strategy.
Location-Based Marketing: This involves messaging customers when they’re in a location that’s relevant to your brand, for example, when they’re in close proximity to one of your brick-and-mortar stores.
Push Notifications: Sending customers messages to your home screen.
In-App Marketing: Communicating with shoppers while they browse your app.
Social Media: Ads, in-app profiles/stores, and live streams.
But as more channels emerge in the eCommerce space, brands are trying to keep up with the pace by expanding onto these multiple channels to try to maximize their marketing reach. This can stretch your marketing team thin, particularly with limited budgets, time, and resources. Ask yourself, how can you keep on top of these multiple channels and learn the value they are bringing to your business? How complex has the customer journey become because of these large numbers of channels? Can you really afford to chase customers on these channels that they may or may not be using?
Complex MarTech Stack
Finally, mobile marketing involves a wide range of technologies and platforms, which can be overwhelming for marketers to try to manage daily. Every business has a MarTech infrastructure that’s tailored to its needs. But when there are too many tools, it means your data and tools are often siloed, causing fragmented customer insights, poor cross-channel communications, and inaccurate analytics.
Consolidating your MarTech stack can help simplify it. This also helps your tools to work better together to run even higher-performing marketing campaigns smoothly.
Mobiles Are Highly Personal Objects
Mobile marketing done right can help achieve optimal marketing reach and capture shopper attention as they go about their busy lives. But it’s important to remember that your customer’s mobile device is a highly personal object.
When sending any communications to their device, you need to consider the relevancy of the content, the day/times of message delivery, and the frequency of sending messages from your various campaigns. Get this wrong, and you could be accidentally over-messaging and overlapping messages on multiple mobile channels with a general promotional message that gives no value to the consumer. This poor customer experience can be enough to push your customers away.
Overcoming these combined complexities means your mobile marketing needs to be data-driven. By rooting your marketing into customer insights with the right tools, you’ll be able to enrich your customer relationships and orchestrate an effective mobile marketing strategy that can boost sales.
11 Tactics For Your Mobile Marketing Strategy
1. Unify Your Customer Data
To learn about your customers and understand how your channels are being used, your business needs to work on the same sets of data. Many marketers are trying to work with siloed data that are stored in separate technologies, limiting themselves to a fragmented view and fragmented marketing. Without a unified view, you could be making easy-to-avoid mistakes, such as sending shoppers a promotion about an item they just bought!
Unifying your data helps to create a complete 360-degree view of each individual customer, align your marketing operations, and provide a single customer view to gain a deeper understanding of your customers. This helps you to activate insight-led marketing by drawing actionable insights to optimize your campaigns.
To do this effectively, you need to map out all the data sources and tools you currently have. Next, use a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to break your data siloes, consolidate your data, and build unified customer profiles to draw actionable insights.
There are three types of CDPs you can invest in (standalone, + automation, and +analytics) – but you can find out more about them here >
2. Maximize Data Collection
With your unified data centralized in your CDP, you’ll want to explore opportunities to gather more information about your customers. Enriching your existing customer profiles with first-party data collection in a compliant way (such as onsite web behavior) and capturing zero-party data (using surveys, quizzes, gamification, and more) are some of the most widely used data collection methods. These help you to achieve an even more accurate and real-time customer analysis to adapt and act on your campaigns effectively. Additionally, you can trigger pop-ups to offer a 15% discount in exchange for their mobile number.
For any unidentified customers, you can use your insights to identify key moments in the customer journey to trigger data-capturing tactics for key opportunities. For example, this can be triggering a pop-up offering a 15% discount for customers that submit their email addresses. Your CDP can then take this data and match it against a unique customer ID to build a profile and enrich it with real-time data as time goes on.
3. Target Customers Using Segmentation
It’s all too easy to put customers off with a one-size-fits-all approach, as it demonstrates a lack of attention to your customers’ preferences. Customers prefer to engage with your brand when you take the time to tailor your marketing messages specifically to them. In fact, they’re 14% more likely to open email marketing campaigns that are based on segmentation than generic campaigns.
Segmentation has been around for a long time, but with machine learning, you can automate the hair-pulling manual process of developing and targeting segments. AI tools also help you to understand these micro-markets and send targeted communications that strengthen your relationship with them over the long-term.
For instance, when using your CDP, you can advance your mobile marketing strategy with hyper-segmentation that takes into account many different factors. From there, you can group shoppers using many different characteristics, such as where they live, behavioral data, devices/channels they use, and even metrics such as customer lifetime value (CLV). A strategic example can be sending a higher discount to all shoppers who are high-value but churning and a lower discount for your average customers.
4. Find Your Best Channels
It can be overwhelming to think about managing, monitoring, and optimizing your marketing for every mobile channel. Many marketing teams simply don’t have the time, money, or resources to manage each channel, but with customer insights and analytics by your side, you can focus on the key channels that will bring the most significant results and revenue.
For example, when exploring the different age groups that utilize certain channels you find that 18-25-year-olds spend more than double the amount of time on apps compared to people aged over 65. By segmenting the 18-25-year-olds into a target group, you can focus on in-app marketing and push notifications to communicate personalized messages for urgency that bring them back to the channel and drive conversions, e.g. back-in-stock products, cart abandonment, price drop for saved items, etc.
5. Time Messages for a Higher Open Rate
Imagine being woken up in the middle of the night with a message about a run-of-the-mill 10% off sale? It’s probably not how you want your customers to think about you. Timing messages strategically are vital to avoid poor experiences and prevent customers from opting out.
Use your customer insights and analytics to learn when customers are most active and likely to engage with your messages. You can even become more strategic in your approach by responding in real time to events your customers are interested in. For example, if you sell sportswear and send celebratory discount messages shortly after a goal in a national football match or an Olympic gold medal, you can create excitement, increase engagement, and remain relevant.
6. Reduce Frequency
When it comes to mobile marketing, it’s quality, not quantity, that counts. Increasing the number of times you send push notifications from once a week to three to six times a week nearly triples the chances of shoppers deleting your app. In fact, many channels, such as SMS and push notifications, offer opt-out options. That means that the only way to keep customers subscribed is by respecting them.
Mobile is a personal channel, and it’s important to not abuse the privilege of having direct access to customers. Instead, use your customer insights to learn whether you’ve overstepped the line. Growth hacking and A/B testing are great ways to learn how frequently you send communications to learn how your customers react. Do they respond better to fewer messages? How often are they engaging with your messages? Are they clicking through to your app or website? Answering these questions will keep you on your customers’ good side!
7. Provide Value
Remember, your competing for their attention against a variety of activities consumers are switching – from commenting on an Instagram post of a fluffy puppy to watching those late-night conspiracy videos on YouTube. You’ve also worked hard to capture their mobile number for SMS marketing and now you need to showcase the value.
Ensure you’re using your real-time customer insights to send short, high-value, and personalized mobile-friendly messages on products they are interested in or have previously interacted with. A CDP can also help you to automate relevant messages to send at appropriate times, such as abandoned cart notifications. Additionally, customers want to receive coupons, incentives, and loyalty benefits more than anything else on channels like SMS.
8. Personalize Messages
Avoid using the ineffective “spray and pray” approach. Instead, by making mobile users feel like they’re in your exclusive club, they’ll repay you with higher response rates. Diving into your customer data and targeting them directly with personalized content to provide an exceptional CX can drive customer engagement and loyalty for the long-term. In fact, personalized push notifications improve reaction rates by 400%.
You can also use personalization to reactivate shoppers. For example, you can send a special high bundle deal discount on products they’ve previously purchased to reactivate shoppers who haven’t purchased in several months. This prevents your competition from replicating your offers. Lastly, if you’re looking to get even more specific, you can even use demographic information to offer an exclusive discount for when they pop into their nearby store.
Personalization is easy, you just need to ensure you go beyond the first name – you can learn more about it here >
9. Mobile-Friendly Content
Marketing via mobile channels requires messages that are easy to read when on the go. The most effective communications will be short, catchy, and eye-popping. So trim excess words from titles (or place the offer at the start), use scarcity and urgency to promote engagement, and keep paragraphs to the point. If you bore your customers with irrelevant or wordy texts, they’ll simply click away to one of the many other interesting distractions on their mobile devices. So make your messages fun to read!
For instance, sometimes images are 60,000 times easier to process than words. You can use them to convey emotion, attract short-attention span shoppers, and build a strong connection.
Perhaps try sparking engagement with emojis, HTML enhancements, and more. Emojis can increase your click-through rate by 38% on average, but it’s industry-dependent. Think carefully about your audience, and avoid hard-to-understand emojis instead of words, such as the most misunderstood emojis like the upside-down smile 🙃 – (We’re still not sure if it’s being playful or sarcastic? Either way, steer clear!)
You can also associate certain emojis with your brand, for example, a dress emoji 👗 will immediately tell shoppers that a message is from a clothing brand.
10. Take an Omnichannel Approach
These days, you need an omnichannel approach to keep up with your customers. This is because 73% of shoppers use multiple channels to complete a purchase. By integrating your tools and channels, you can remove channel siloes and seamlessly execute insight-led campaigns across your mobile channels.
CDPs also play a key role in integrating online and offline channels, enabling shoppers to easily access your e-commerce stores or locate their nearest brick-and-mortar store for a truly seamless omnichannel experience. In fact, 56% of shoppers will research products on their smartphones while shopping in-store, so it’s worth integrating these channels to help manage them from one place.
11. Respect Consent
Consent is vital and it’s worth using double opt-ins to make sure you don’t put customers off. Ask for permission before sending SMS or other mobile notifications to a mobile device. You’ll also need to make cookie consent visibly clear and have settings easily accessible on mobile devices to ensure you’re taking the right steps in being GDPR-compliant and respectful.
Upgrade your mobile marketing strategy with Mapp Cloud
Streamlining a mobile marketing strategy shouldn’t be approached as a “set-and-forget” mentality – it requires constant monitoring, analyzing, and optimizations. Technology and support play huge factors in this and it’s why you need to ensure you’re investing in the right marketing technology and team for your business.
Mapp Cloud is the #1 insight-led customer experience platform that offers a CDP, marketing automation, AI, and analytics to help you drive your omnichannel marketing strategy. Without needing to tame the technology behind your marketing, our marketer-friendly platform helps you to draw actionable insights without digging through the data. Your team can act on these insights quickly with segmentation, dynamic personalization, and marketing automation (including channels such as web, email, direct mail, and mobile-related channels such as in-app, push, SMS, and geo-targeting), Additionally, our customer intelligence and AI capabilities help you to draw insights, generate predictions, and monitor campaigns to stay on top of your mobile marketing.
This article was first published by Mapp. Permission to use has been granted by the publisher.
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