Mobile Marketing Automation – Never Miss an Opportunity to Engage Customers!
You might be familiar with the term ‘marketing automation’ if you have experience with automated campaigns. Mobile Marketing Automation (MMA) is similar to Traditional Marketing Automation; aiming to build a scenario within a goal, in which a particular event automatically triggers a personalised message. However, traditional marketing automation platforms recently became incapable of meeting the needs of mobile technology.
You might be familiar with the term ‘marketing automation’ if you have experience with automated campaigns. Mobile Marketing Automation (MMA) is similar to Traditional Marketing Automation; aiming to build a scenario within a goal, in which a particular event automatically triggers a personalised message. However, traditional marketing automation platforms recently became incapable of meeting the needs of mobile technology. They can’t communicate through push messaging and wearable devices, incorporate location or work in real-time.
Since prioritising a mobile marketing strategy is a necessity, Mobile Marketing Automation is the way to go to improve customer engagement with many amazing additional capabilities such as reaching the customers in all touch-points (web, mobile sites, mobile apps, and physical locations), real-time engagement and analysis and location based messaging to name a few.
Mobile Marketing Automation involves a large spectrum of approaches with the aim of improving customer engagement by harnessing customer data. The main steps in this process can be listed as below:
- Gaining customer insight
- Building a scoring system according to customer information
- Creating a targeted marketing strategy based on customer life cycles
- Building automated campaigns and
- Real-time analysis
The use of mobile devices enriches localisation during MMA. Since MMA enables you to gain insights into how your customers interact with your brand throughout their entire lifecycle, you can deliver the right messaging at the right time for your segmented customers. Marketers can utilise these benefits in addition to some smart rules that they can apply in Automated Campaigns:
- Customer Behaviour: Marketers can trigger related messages simultaneously based on their customers’ actions within native app, website, on social media and even in-store.
- Customer Stage: MMA messages can be mapped to any customer buying cycle (first time visitors, loyal customers, customers interested in specific products etc.) or funnel.
- Location/ Proximity: With Beacon, GPS and geofencing, technologies, marketers can reach their customers based on their physical location effortlessly within a native mobile app.
- Sequencing: MMA allows you to string different types of automated content (such as in-app messages, push notifications, web prompts, SMS and e-mail), so you can send the right message at the right time to the right device.
- Throttling: Throttling enables you to optimise message delivery over a period of time so that consumers don’t get overwhelmed with too many irrelevant messages at the wrong time.
It is important that these smart rules should be applied carefully with the right targeting strategy. Poorly targeted MMA will disturb your customers or it might cause them to ignore your brand with irrelevant product promotions. To avoid that, you should use additional data points (customer engagement with the brand, purchase history, time of day, weather, social media behaviour etc.) wisely and apply the smart rules accordingly.
Mobile Marketing Automation in Practice
Let’s take a look at the most popular uses of MMA with some examples:
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Mobile marketing scenarios and examples
Mobile Automated Campaigns increase conversion because they respond to specific user behaviours or inactivity, which enables you to personalise your communication with good timing. And for this reason it’s also a powerful resource to increase revenue.
You can use automated campaigns to increase Retention and Engagement in two scenarios;
- Catch your customers when they intend to do something (when they are active)
- Catch your customers’ inactivity before they disappear
Catch their Activity:
Automated campaigns allow you to attract your customers after they take specific actions at specific times. In this scenario, you should focus on the most important users’ activity based on your industry and business. Some examples of automated campaigns triggered by customers’ activities in e-commerce are:
- Sending them a warm welcome message and a discount coupon 2 days after they install your app.
- Asking them to give you a rating 1 day after their first purchase.
- Showing them the perfect matching necklace 5 minutes after they add a blouse to their basket
Catch their Inactivity: This is a great way to achieve engagement and retention. You can use it for engaging customers further by promoting a feature that they haven’t used for a while, or reengaging with them when they are idle for a while. Here are some examples of automated campaigns triggered by customers’ inactivity:
- Sending a persuasive win-back e-mail the moment they uninstall your app
- Presenting a special offer when they don’t purchase anything for a while.
- Sending them a free delivery option if they do not place an order for their shopping cart for two hours
- Sending them a message when they don’t open the app for one week.
2.The most common Mobile Marketing Automation examples in numbers
Increasing Engagement
The most popular scenarios for increasing engagement that Netmera customers use are:
- Sending a promotional message after 1 day, when a user installs an app and doesn’t log in. E.g. ‘Complete your Log In and get a 10% discount on your first purchase’.
The opening rate of these messages are 12.5 % with a purchase rate of 3.7%.
- Sending an attractive message when a user doesn’t open the app for a period. E.g.: ‘Hi, it has been 1o days! We missed you and you have missed these discounts while you were away. Take a peak at what’s new this week!’
The opening rate of these messages are 3.9 % with a purchase rate of 0.5%.
Increasing Conversion
The most popular automation scenario Netmera customers prefer for increasing engagement is ‘abandoned cart’. In this scenario, we integrate into our customers’ order systems in order to be able to see their web purchase data. An abandoned cart example would be: ‘Hey! You forgot an item in your shopping cart. But don’t worry we saved it for you!’
Usually the opening rate of these messages are 12 % with a purchase rate of 18%.
Since an ordinary Push Notification Campaign receives an open rate of 3,17% (depending on the sector), we can easily say that mobile marketing automation considerably increases conversion and engagement. Also according to Digital Doughnut, companies that invest in marketing automation solutions see 70% faster sales cycle times.
An effective MMA strategy needs real-time analytics where you can measure your users’ behaviours (app installs, uninstalls, user responses, usage, session periods, open rates and clickthrough rates etc.) and other valuable metrics. In addition to real-time analytics, you can also analyse your previous campaigns, and set up multiple variations.
Last but not least, you should provide a consistent user experience between all your channels (web, mobile, physical shops), systems (Order Systems, CRM, E-commerce Systems, POS and Payment Systems) and customer devices. In this way, you can interact with your customers regardless of which channel they use.
Original Article