More than half of all emails are read on mobile devices, and the average mobile user receives more than 50 push notifications each day. Mobile marketing budgets have skyrocketed at most firms over the past five to six years, so if you’re not taking advantage of mobile marketing opportunities, your business could be missing out.
In order to make the most of a new mobile marketing platform, though, you need to make sure it has the right features and capabilities. You need to be able to reach your customers in real time, and engage them with a sense of urgency regarding the deals offered on your mobile platform. You need to be able to scale the platform to meet your needs, including adjusting which channels you want to focus on. And you need to be able to personalize your marketing message to target specific groups within your customer base, or even specific individuals.
Real-Time Engagement
Sometimes, you need your customers to receive your mobile marketing messages immediately. Maybe you have a restaurant and want to offer a special, one-day only promotion to members of your customer loyalty program who have opted into text message marketing. Maybe you want your customers to receive a mobile marketing message as soon as they perform some action, like visiting your website, abandoning items in the virtual shopping cart instead of completing the checkout process, or even failing to successfully login to their account.
Sales opportunities can be fleeting, and you need a mobile marketing platform that allows for real-time engagement with your customers so you can seize those fleeting opportunities and turn those abandoned carts into completed sales or turn your limited-time promotional offer into successful conversions. Make sure your mobile marketing platform provider can accommodate the number of event hits you need to make per month and that overage charges aren’t too onerous.
Scalability
It’s not worth investing in a mobile marketing platform that can’t handle your needs over the long term. You might not have as many customers to reach right now, but if all goes well, that will change, and you’ll need a solution that’s capable of scaling up to handle a growing message volume.
Mobile marketing isn’t one-size-fits-all, either — you can’t just send the same marketing message to all of your contacts and expect to be successful. You need to segment your messaging, dividing your customer base into cohorts with common attributes (such as the demographic group they belong to, whether they have completed a profile in your app, or have recently completed a purchase, for example) and tailor your messaging to appeal to customers by cohort.
Personalization
Today’s customers want a personalized experience when they engage with a brand. You need the ability to engage with individual customers through personalized messaging that does more than merely include their (probably poorly spelled) first name. You need to be able to incorporate other details of an individual’s life and shopping habits into your messaging, including primary interests, purchasing history, membership information, or customer loyalty points balances.
Cross-channel Capabilities
These days, you need to be able to reach your customers where they are, and that might not necessarily be on their mobile device. Sure, most people are practically glued to their phones, but that doesn’t mean that mobile messaging is always the best way to reach them. Some people use their mobile phones to search for products and services, but want to buy them in the real world — or vice versa. Some want to engage with your desktop site or even reach out via phone. Cross-channel support keeps you from losing these customers to your competitors.
Mobile marketing can help you reach your customers quickly and efficiently via email, mobile push notifications, and text. But while mobile marketing messaging is a powerful tool for promoting brand awareness, building customer loyalty, and more, you need to make sure you’re getting the right features and capabilities from a mobile marketing platform. Choose a platform that will grow with your business and let you reach out to customers across channels and in real time. When you choose the right platform, you’ll be covering your bases not only today, but far into the future.
