Mobile marketing is a multi-channel, digital marketing strategy aimed at reaching a target audience on their smart phones, tablets and other mobile devices, via websites, email, SMS and MMS, social media, and apps.

In recent years, customers have started to shift their attention to mobile. Because of this, marketers are doing the same in order to create true omnichannel engagement. As technology becomes more fragmented, so does marketing. And in order to earn and maintain the attention of potential buyers, content must be strategic and highly personalized.

What is mobile marketing channel?

More than a third of all traffic reaching the average retail website is via a mobile device and so it's easy to see why many companies are now attempting to create an even more accessible platform for customers on the go.

With an average of 35,000 new apps introduced on Android devices alone each month, however, marketing your latest app to reach the optimal amount of people and the right target audience can easily become a challenging and often daunting task. Taking advantage of more than one marketing channel can increase the probability of the successful promotion of your new mobile application.



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Benefits of multi-channel marketing automation for your businesses

It isn't unusual for developers to spend lot of money to create an app, but dreams can quickly come to an end if you don't consider a marketing strategy when launching your app into the Google Play or iTunes app stores.

The marketing arm of a business is essential to attain its goals -- be it brand awareness, sales growth or even talent recruitment. Through the power of digital transformation, marketing has evolved over time, with marketing automation tools available to help marketers capture leads and essentially accelerate their marketing efforts.

In fact, 68% of businesses count on marketing automation to reach their objectives, according to Forbes Magazine. Companies of all scales have a lot to gain from marketing automation tools, but for B2C companies, which essentially markets products and services to customers directly, they are a definite must-have.

To ensures consistency among your marketing efforts

Marketing automation allows for businesses to stay active in the digital realm, and post content on various platforms according to schedule. Through this platform, companies can program routine or repetitive tasks, and focus on more important matters.

The utilization of B2C marketing strategies narrows down the margin for human error given its smart features, and provides some structure for fluid campaigns. Take social media channels, for example. Posting content regularly on various social media platforms can be repetitive. Through multichannel marketing automation, this task can be done through a single platform. All supporting media would scale to the respective social media channels' requirements as well.

A personal touch with customer relationships

It is nearly impossible for marketers to reach out to each customer individually according to their personal preferences and available information. Marketing automation tools categorizes your audience for you according to available data. This will help marketers promote their products or services to the right people in the right channel at the right time.

For example, through marketing automation, companies have the capability in order to text message or e-mail their customer on their birthday. Reaching out to your target market individually paves the way for special marketing approaches, such as a birthday promo code or a special treat. Plus, your customer would feel special that your company allotted resources for them individually.

Maximizing your resources

Multi-channel marketing automation allows you to optimize all your existing marketing tools in order to drive sales. Be it social media, online ads or content creation, marketing automation tools help companies make smart decisions grounded on facts or data.

Among good B2C marketing examples is email marketing. It can be very laborious to have to email thousands of your customers from your database by name, and the software can speed up this process for you. It also allows for marketers to come up with different messaging styles depending on their respective profiles.

Main mobile marketing channels for your business

• SMS promotion
• E-mail promotion
• Push notification promotion

Promotional SMS: practices for e-commerce businesses

If your brand doesn't have a mobile app you may be thinking that reaching customers on their most personal device is out of reach. However, SMS constitutes a concise, personal and effective way for marketers to engage with customers on their phones -- no app required.

A word of caution: with the great power of SMS also comes great responsibility. Given that each SMS is bound by a 160 character limit, making sure each message is concise and doesn't run over into multiple messages is key to making sure users do not get annoyed.

Finally, like with email marketing, you must get explicit permission to contact users on this channel and always provide a way for users to opt out of receiving these messages. While SMS provides a mobile option for companies without an app, it does require nuanced messaging and frequency to avoid overstepping boundaries.

Secure customer permission

It's not the best etiquette to send SMS messages to people without their permissions, it's essential to running a successful promotional SMS campaign. However, like cold calling, there may be a need to send SMS to people who aren't even leads at all, in which cases it would be wise to conduct proper research before sending out SMS.

Nonetheless, with this strategy you can expect to have much lower conversion rates. So securing customer permissions is important. It is just as important not to abuse those permissions, by sticking to the initial terms and conditions and notifying customers when these terms change.

Simple and memorable

These are carrier-approved 5 or 6-digit numbers for commercial use, as they are easy to remember and optimized for businesses. In the case where you use an online based marketing tool, it is best to have your brand name in its simplest form as the SMS sender. Also use memorable coupons codes and simple SMS marketing keywords that are specific to your niche.

Keep your messages punchy

The average attention span is dwindling by the minute. A study showed that the average attention span for people was less than 10 seconds. This is slightly lower than the average attention span for goldfish, 9 seconds. This makes it all too important keep it short and punchy when you send text messages, optimally 160 characters or less.

Stay on-brand and don't overload customers with texts

How do you deal with that friend or family member who you feel talks all the time? You usually tune off after a bit! It's the same with your customers; send the most important messages and try not to send too many SMS texts, or they'll tune out as well.

The slew of new businesses springing up each second, especially in ecommerce, makes branding more important, ensure the texts in your promotional SMS is on-brand with all other brand communication and can be easily identified with, by your customers.

Practices for e-commerce businesses: E-mail marketing strategies that generate revenue

E-mail marketing is one of the oldest and most effective type of digital marketing. It is a form of digital marketing aimed at prospects or customers through the use of e-mails as a medium. E-mails remain a viable tool to be employed for use in digital marketing strategies. The number of global e-mail users is predicted to be about half of the world population by 2023. With the use of the right e-mail marketing strategies, businesses are opened to up to so many possibilities.

Effective e-mails are far reaching; generating brand awareness, strengthening customer relationships, improving business engagement as well as increasing the number of leads and sales. Efficient e-mail marketing strategies are also strongly correlated with increased revenue and return on investments.

Segmentation of the customers

Segmentation has become an easily adopted e-mail marketing strategy because of its multifarious benefits. It simply describes a data centric practice where clients or customers are sorted based on specifics that pertain to them.

These specifics may range from; preferences or interests, action taken or behavior, pages browsed, purchase made and demographics, to mention a few. Why is it important to apply segmentation when sending e-mails?

For one, your customer or audience base is never monolithic so its rather impractical for you to decide to treat them as such. Recognizing dissimilarities and effectively dealing with them sets you on a path to understanding your target audience more and meeting their needs.

Overall, it is much more profitable for you to capitalize on client or customer data by segmenting your email lists when building targeted lists. Segmentation sets the foundation for other vital strategies such as personalization and automation.

Personalization targeting your customers

The 21st century remains noteworthy as a consumerist and materialist age. Consumers have the shortest attention spans and are always on the lookout for the next best thing. It is why top-tier digital marketers adopt strategies aimed at completely capturing customer attention.

In social media marketing as well as e-mail marketing, well crafted, personalized e-mails are a great way to snag a prospect's or customers attention. These effective e-mails also work better when you operate on a segmented list. With this, you are able to utilize preexisting data to your advantage. Statistics clearly indicate that consumers respond better to personalized messages. When guaranteed a personalized experience, about 80% of consumers become more likely to make a purchase.

Personalized emails are also strongly correlated with improved click-through and open rates. They also boast of higher transaction rates and are able to greatly increase revenue. These marketing e-mails have that peculiar effect because prospects or customers feel as if such messages cater specifically to them. Hence, they are more likely to be receptive to them.

Optimization

The 21st century remains noteworthy as a consumerist and materialist age. Consumers have the shortest attention spans and are always on the lookout for the next best thing. It is why top-tier digital marketers adopt strategies aimed at completely capturing customer attention.

In social media marketing as well as e-mail marketing, well crafted, personalized e-mails are a great way to snag a prospect's or customers attention. These effective e-mails also work better when you operate on a segmented list. With this, you are able to utilize preexisting data to your advantage. Statistics clearly indicate that consumers respond better to personalized messages. When guaranteed a personalized experience, about 80% of consumers become more likely to make a purchase.

Personalized emails are also strongly correlated with improved click-through and open rates. They also boast of higher transaction rates and are able to greatly increase revenue. These marketing e-mails have that peculiar effect because prospects or customers feel as if such messages cater specifically to them. Hence, they are more likely to be receptive to them.

Push Notifications

Push notifications are messages that come from your mobile app and appear on a user's lock screen. When swiped through, the user is directed to a specific screen in your app.

These are an excellent way to engage (and re-engage) mobile and tablet users. Similar to SMS, push has the ability to be an intimate channel. Messaging should be concise and handled with more caution to encourage engagement. Unlike with channels like email, there isn't a warm-up process that is required; users who are opted in to receive your push notifications will receive them. However, note that there is one big difference between devices running on the two major operating systems, iOS and Android.

On iOS, users must choose to opt in to push messaging, whereas, on Android, users are automatically opted in and must choose to opt out. We will discuss further considerations related to this in future posts in this blog series.

Push notifications have evolved over time to offer marketers the ability to create a more tailored experience for the end user -- both in delivery options, as well as in how they can be personalized (e.g. user actions and data fields). Standard push messages consist of text, but rich push notifications allow for images, videos, audio, and gifs. Additionally, push action buttons give the user multiple options to interact with the message.

There are numerous use cases to incorporate push notifications into your marketing campaigns. The answer will vary by vertical but some high-level examples include abandoned cart notifications, transactional updates, daily reminders, breaking news alerts, and new messages received.

Measurement

Now that you know the different ways you can reach your customers via mobile, it's important to identify where you are today in your marketing program. To do this, perform a messaging audit. Which channels are you currently using? Perhaps you're exclusively an email marketing business. Maybe you send direct mailers to customers. Maybe you started to dabble in mobile marketing and are looking to expand -- in which case, your research has led you to the right spot.

Beyond channel type, keep a detailed list of the context of these messages. With the audit complete, you can start reorganizing messaging with your new mobile marketing channels in mind. If your cart abandonment campaigns aren't performing well via email, this could be a good chance to utilize push notifications as a gentle nudge.

As with anything related to marketing, the key is experimentation. For any message, channel, or campaign type, it's important to A/B test all of the various iterations that come with the available options. Your mobile marketing, in particular, opens up the testing possibilities due to the various channels at your disposal and the different functionalities as well. Ultimately, over 50% of consumers feel more loyal to brands that show a deep understanding of their priorities and preferences. Incorporating mobile channels into your email marketing strategies brings increased opportunities to collect behavioral data from your customers.

You can then use this data to better personalize your messaging -- by type, channel and campaign -- for each customer. This is just the tip of the cross-channel iceberg, however. Stay tuned for the next installment in our mobile marketing series where we will focus on best practices with these different channels.