Sep 12, 2016 Mobile Marketing 0 comment

Build Your Mobile Marketing Momentum

For those of you who have treated your mobile marketing strategy as an afterthought, it’s time to rethink your strategy.

Mobile now lies at the center of the consumer universe.

And while “mobile marketing” still mostly means app marketing, your operational view of mobile should understand that every aspect of marketing will, at some point, hinge on a mobile interaction. If that’s not your organization’s reality yet, it will be soon.

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Here’s three tips to start you on your road to mobile marketing success.

1. Evaluate Mobile Marketing Tools

For marketing leaders evaluating investments in the still burgeoning world of mobile marketing tools, a few crucial considerations can mean the difference between your move to paying dividends, or set the stage for unwanted time, resource and budget challenges.

The magic happens backstage. You need to access and leverage real-time data in myriad ways now, and those needs aren’t going to reduce as your marketing organization grows.

Whether you’re evaluating a full-stack partner or an integrated partner, the key evaluation criteria is if the data structure enables fast, reliable, scalable data exchanges.

See if you can find an all-in-one platform that meaningfully integrates the data you need into other platforms as needed.

2. Changes in the App Marketplace Affect Mobile Marketing Strategies and Teams

The evolution of Google and Apple’s app ecosystems over the years, combined with the growing savviness and scrupulousness of mobile consumers, has pushed app marketing to adapt. It’s more competitive than ever, especially for new apps, which means an effective cross-promotional strategy is more important than ever before.

With a crowded marketplace, acquisition spend shifting dramatically and consumer market fatigue, it’s no surprise that your owned channels are your strongest app user acquisition channels for maximizing customer lifetime value. Mix in high-performing anonymous channels, like Facebook mobile ads, based on high-performance segments from owned channels.

3. Optimize the SMS, Push, Email and In-App Messaging Mix

Customers who interact with brands on more than one channel have a 30 percent higher customer lifetime value than those that don’t.

By incorporating multivariate tests into your promotional and transactional communications, you can learn which segments respond best to which kinds of messages on which channels — and boost cross-channel engagement accordingly.

But when testing, know the best approach — they’re not just about finding the highest performing call to action on the campaign or the best color for that Buy Now button. It’s about looking at the impact of multiple campaigns on different user segments to understand, more than anything else, how to identify segments by their channel and frequency preferences.

Quick Tips to Optimize your Mix:

Try running experiments around these three areas of mobile marketing:

  1. Test calls to action across mobile channels (email, app, SMS, mobile ads across formats) against hyper-granular segments.
  2. Test whether retargeting a customer on the same channel as their most recent interaction, or a different channel, is more effective for a given segment.
  3. Cycle tests in 45-60 day iterations. Try tests again that weren’t clear-cut winners — and revisit every test you possibly can every one and a half years at the most.

High-Potential Tests for Push and Rich Push:

Test pushing content — not a promotion — that’s relevant to an app user based on their desktop and mobile web browsing behavior within 24 hours.

Look for ways to leverage transactional messages to drive loyalty. Examples could include order shipment status updates, appointment reminders, taxi arrivals or flight updates.

Try running a flash sale that offers a unique, mobile-only incentive to current app users — this tends to work well when paired with an app user acquisition campaign through Facebook offering mobile-only discounts after download.

Create Unique In-App Experiences for In-the-Moment Engagement:

Celebrate your active users with birthday, anniversary and holiday-themed messages.

Target offers for positive shopping behaviors. For instance, drive conversions by offering users free shipping when their cart reaches a certain value — this tends to work well when paired with a cart abandon email follow-up reminding them of their free shipping offer.

By knowing what to look for in mobile marketing technologies, understanding how the app marketplace is evolving and trying new, high-potential ways to deliver value to mobile customers, you can build mobile momentum that matters to both you and your customers.