These days, it seems like everyone has a smartphone — and we’re all using them to conduct our entire lives. Everything from email to banking to shopping and even socializing is done on our phones. And if your company isn’t using mobile marketing platforms to engage with customers in real time, you could be missing out on a lot of revenue from sales.
The average mobile phone user gets about 50 push notifications each day, and more than half of emails get opened for the first time on a mobile phone. While most mobile users may disregard most marketing emails, though, there are other channels that mobile users are still very willing to engage with, like texting and mobile apps, and the right mobile marketing platform can help you reach your customers on those channels. Personalization and segmentation capabilities, real-time automation for customer engagement, marketing analytics and more should all be part and parcel of any good mobile marketing platform.
Tailor Campaigns with Segmentation and Personalization
To really appeal to customers with the strength of your mobile marketing campaign, you need to be able to create messages tailored to reach them on an individual level. You’ll need two separate suites of features to pull this off.
Segmentation allows you to divide your customer base into groups that share common demographic characteristics, like location, age, employment, or even family status. That way you can bring another layer of personalization to your marketing campaigns, by creating one set of messages tailored specifically to appeal to, say, the college students in your customer base, and other set tailored to appeal to their parents or professors, or even their older siblings who have finished school, buckled down into careers, and begun to start families.
However, it’s not enough to lump customers into demographic groups — these days customers want to be catered to on an individual level. They want you to remember their names and send them offers based on their specific, individual purchasing habits, interests, and circumstances. Personalization features allow you to do this by incorporating customers’ individual info, including online profile info, rewards points balances, or purchasing history, into your marketing messages.
Engage Customers with Real-Time Automation
You need to be able to connect with customers in real time, and not just to offer them customer support through a chatbot. What makes mobile marketing platforms so much more effective than traditional forms of advertising is the immediacy of the medium. You can reach out to customers in real time to offer the support they need as they research products, track them across channels, and even nudge them towards a purchase. For example, in the fast-paced restaurant industry, it’s not at all uncommon for restauranteurs to send out marketing texts around mealtimes to promote special menu items, coupons, and discounts to hungry customers who might make a spur of the moment decision to eat out when they receive the text. By connecting with customers in real time, you can make more sales and create more satisfied, loyal customers.
Understand the Impact of Your Marketing Campaigns with Analytics
You need to collect real data regarding the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, or you’ll always be in the dark about what’s working and what isn’t — and that’s no way to boost sales. Data analytics tools let you see which aspects of your marketing campaigns are working and which aren’t, and how to make improvements. It’s an essential tool and it needs to be robust, or you could find yourself struggling to obtain data, much less interpret it.
Follow Customers Across Channels
Customers don’t spend the entire purchasing journey in one channel anymore — they move from desktop sites to mobile apps to in-store shopping. They engage with text message marketing and with marketing emails. They might gain awareness of brands and products from more traditional channels, too, like print and TV. You need to keep customers’ attention as they move from one channel to the next, so they don’t get distracted from your brand. Cross-channel support is essential to pull this off.
Mobile marketing platforms are the future of advertising, especially as more and more people use their phones as a primary means of engaging with brands. Whatever mobile marketing tool you choose, make sure it has all the essential features you need to reach more of your customers and sway more of their purchasing decisions.
