If, like just about everyone else these days, you have a smartphone, you already know how useful mobile apps and messaging can be when you want to do a little shopping. Retail apps let you browse through thousands of options without leaving home. And push notifications, text messages, and emails let you know about deals and discounts you might qualify for.
So you already have some idea of the opportunities your company is missing because you’re not using a mobile marketing platform. Your company could join the ranks of those sending dozens of push notifications to the average consumer each day, or enjoying 98 percent read rates on marketing texts. But first, you need the right mobile marketing platform — one with the features you need to engage customers, promote brand awareness, and drive conversions.
You Need a Complete Range of Campaign Options
A mobile marketing platform won’t do you much good if it doesn’t let you effectively design and implement the most popular and effective campaigns. If you run a restaurant, for example, you need to be able to engage with customers in real time with text message marketing deployed strategically at those times of day when customers are getting hungry and looking for a quick, cheap bite nearby. If you’re a retail outlet, you need a mobile app customers can use for browsing and research, and you need push notifications to tempt them with discounts on items your algorithms show they’ve been looking at.
Buy a mobile marketing platform that lets you engage with customers via in-app news and messaging, as well as by SMS marketing, push notifications, email, and web notifications.
You Need Cross-Channel Support
Customers don’t stay in one channel throughout the customer journey anymore — and they haven’t for a long time. But today marketing channels are much more complex than they were even 10 or 20 years ago.
Customers are moving from traditional media channels to social media media, text messaging, email, web, and back again. Some do research on their mobile phones or browse products on an app before coming into the brick-and-mortar location to examine products hands-on and make a final selection. Some do things the other way around. Some shop on various apps and websites before choosing one to finalize an online purchase. To keep from losing customers as they bounce around from one channel to another, you need the ability to stay engaged with them by staying with them as they move from channel to channel.
You Need Segmentation and Personalization Options
Personalization is the new watchword of marketing as customers increasingly feel entitled to expect marketers to engage with them on an individual level. Customers want to feel seen for who they are, and personalization features can help with that — you can go deeper than just slotting customers’ names into a marketing email. You can engage with individual customers based on their purchasing habits, loyalty points, profile information, and more.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you can ignore larger campaigns that seek to appeal to entire groups of customers, but you need some segmentation capabilities to make sure that your mass campaigns are tailored enough to appeal to the demographics of the group. That’s especially important when, like most companies, your customer base is extremely diverse in terms of age, socioeconomic status, family status, and other criteria. You need to be able to tailor one message to appeal to, for example, the young adults in your customer base and another to appeal to the retirees or even the middle-aged parents of teens and tweens.
You Need Data Analytics Tools
Data analytics is the final piece of the puzzle because it can give you insight into how well your marketing campaigns are working. You shouldn’t just be throwing things at the wall without also measuring what sticks afterward. Collecting data on marketing effectiveness, analyzing it, and interpreting it can give you a more complete picture of what isn’t working and what you can do to make your marketing more effective, and that will significantly increase your marketing ROI.
With the right mobile marketing platform, you can engage more deeply with your customers than ever before. You’ll boost sales, increase brand awareness, encourage more customer loyalty, and strengthen your company — and all for less money than you might have spent on traditional advertising.
