Scott Mirabello urges us to look beyond app marketing, and assume every aspect of marketing will hinge on a mobile interaction. Here’s his tips for optimising your mobile marketing mix.

Mobile is now the centre of a consumer’s world. While ‘mobile marketing’ still means mostly app marketing, your operational view of mobile should be that every aspect of marketing will, at some point, hinge on a mobile interaction.

This interaction will not be in insolation, but part of an orchestrated experience to your mobile customer. If that’s not your organisation’s reality yet, it will be soon.

Here are three strategies to help you on your road to mobile marketing success:

 

1. How to evaluate mobile marketing tools

For marketing leaders evaluating investments in the still burgeoning world of mobile marketing tools, there are a few crucial considerations that can make your move to mobile pay dividends, or if overlooked, can set the stage for unwanted time, resource, and budget challenges.

The magic happens backstage. You need to access and leverage real-time data in myriad ways now, and those needs aren’t going to reduce as your marketing organisation grows. Whether you’re evaluating a full-stack partner or one of their integrated partners, the key evaluation criteria is how their data structure enables fast, reliable, scalable data exchanges.

The ideal solution is to find the all-in-one platform that can meaningfully integrate the data you need into other platforms as needed.

 

2. Understand how changes in the app marketplace affect mobile marketing strategies and teams

Google and Apple’s app ecosystems have evolved over the years and, as mobile consumers become more savvy and scrupulous, app marketing has had to adapt. It’s more competitive than ever, especially for new apps. It’s never been more important to have an effective cross-promotional strategy.

With a crowded marketplace, acquisition spend shifting dramatically, and consumer market fatigue, it’s no surprise that your owned channels are your strongest app user acquisition channels for maximising customer lifetime value. Mix in high-performing anonymous channels, like Facebook mobile ads, based on high-performance segments from owned channels.

 

3. Tips to optimise the SMS, push, email and in-app messaging mix

Customers who interact with brands on more than one channel have a 30% higher CLTV than those that don’t. By incorporating multivariate tests into your promotional and transactional communications, you can learn which segments respond best to which kinds of messages on which channels – and boost cross-channel engagement accordingly.

It’s important to note how best to approach these tests; they’re not just about finding the highest performing CTA on the campaign or the best color for that ‘buy now’ button. It’s about looking at the impact of multiple campaigns on different user segments to understand, more than anything else, how to identify segments by their channel and frequency preferences.

 

Quick tips to optimise your mix:

Try running experiments around these three areas of mobile marketing:

• Test calls to action across mobile channels (email, app, SMS, mobile ads across formats) against hyper-granular segments,
• test whether retargeting a customer on the same channel as their most recent interaction, or different channel, is more effective for a given segment, and
• cycle tests in 45-60 day iterations; try tests again that weren’t clear-cut winners – and revisit every test you possibly can every 18 months at the most.

 

High-potential tests for push and rich push:

Test pushing content – not a promotion – that’s relevant to an app user based on their desktop and mobile web browsing behaviour within 24 hours.

Look for ways to leverage transactional messages to drive loyalty. Examples could include order shipment status updates, appointment reminders, taxi arrivals, or flight updates.

Try running a flash sale that offers a unique, mobile-only incentive to current app users. This tends to work well when paired with an app user acquisition campaign through Facebook offering mobile-only discounts after download.

Create unique in-app experiences for in-the-moment engagement: Try celebrating your active users with birthday, anniversary, and holiday-themed messages. Target offers for positive shopping behaviours. For instance, drive conversions by offering users free shipping when their cart reaches a certain value. This tends to work well when paired with a cart abandon email follow-up reminding them of their free shipping offer.

It is important to remember, that success in mobile marketing orchestration lies in connecting a customer’s data and behaviour across all channels both online and offline; and in doing so delivers a consistent and optimised experience.

By knowing what to look for in mobile marketing technologies, understanding how the app marketplace is evolving, and trying new, high-potential ways to deliver value to mobile customers, you can build mobile momentum that matters to both you and your customers.

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Scott Mirabello is principal mobile marketing evangelist at Oracle Marketing Cloud.