Americans are increasingly glued to their smartphones. The average person receives at least 50 push notifications each day from apps, email, and social media. Mobile marketing is the clear way forward for most businesses, with the average mobile marketing budget increasing by 320 percent since 2015.
To stay competitive, you need a solid mobile marketing platform with cross-channel support, scalability, and segmentation features. You also need to build and visualize the customer journey across multiple channels automatically. And you need the ability to engage with customers in real time, to seize moments of opportunity when a sale can be made if the customer is engaged immediately.
Mobile Marketing Platform Features
The right mobile marketing platform for your company will have these five features.
1) Cross Channel Support
Most people won’t go anywhere, even to the bathroom, without their phone. Plenty of people also wake up and grab their phone first thing. A strong mobile marketing platform will help you reach those people with emails, texts, or push notifications.
But it’s not enough to assume that customers will be content to research, shop, and buy without turning to another channel. They might use another channel for more information, customer support, or to make the final purchase. You need to be reaching customers across multiple channels — mobile, print, TV, social media marketing, SMS, and email.
2) Channel Scalability
Your company might be small now, but will it always be? Not if your mobile marketing campaigns are successful! Your mobile marketing platform should allow you to scale up or down as needed. This will let you use the same platform to manage marketing campaigns as the contact lists grow. Always ask about a vendor’s scalability before signing a contract. Also, make sure to get information on current clients and their messaging volume.
3) Segmentation
Few businesses cater to such a narrow demographic that marketing messaging doesn’t need to be tailored to the needs of different customer cohorts. Your customer base can be segmented into different groups or cohorts by age, shopping and purchase patterns, interests, profile completion, app usage, or more. To maximize the effectiveness of your mobile marketing campaigns, tailor your messaging to the specific needs of each customer cohort. Double check that your mobile marketing platform that lets you do this.
4) Journey Visualization
With large campaigns, you need a sophisticated, automated journey builder that helps you visualize the customer journey easily. Automated, multichannel journey visualization is a must-have feature that makes your mobile marketing platform ultimately scalable. A sophisticated journey builder lets you build massive, multichannel, automated campaigns with a small team of one or two employees.
5) Real Time Support and Engagement
A mobile marketing benefit is that you can use it to engage customers in real time. For example, you can send a mobile marketing message to a customer that left items in their cart. Or, you can offer customers a limited-time-only offer redeemable via text, email, app, or digital coupon.
Real-time support and engagement means that customers aren’t allowed to simply lose interest and drift away to another app or site. Well, at least they can’t do this without a text, push notification or email reminding them to come back and finish checking out, or offering them a discount on their first purchase. It’s one of the most powerful tools you have as a marketer, so tuck it firmly in your tool belt.
A strong mobile marketing platform can help you grow your business by engaging with customers on their phones. Reach out to customers in real time to offer special discounts, promotions, support, and information. They’ll reciprocate with new enthusiasm for your brand.
