As you look for ways to build and sustain relationships with your customers, mobile marketing strategies should always be on the table. Consider this your guide on how to use mobile marketing, design an effective strategy, and extract the most value from it.
What Is a Mobile Marketing Strategy?
A mobile marketing strategy helps brands like yours reach people wherever they are on their mobile device, using different channels — including SMS, MMS, email, social media, mobile apps, and push notifications — to do it.
Whether they’re at home, in the car, waiting in line, at work, on vacation, or at the grocery store, you can connect with consumers on their handy, on-the-go devices. To take engagement even further, your mobile marketing strategy can incorporate personalization to tailor campaigns based on customer preferences, locations, and other demographic and behavior-based data.
Why Mobile Marketing Strategies Are Critical Today
Most people now consume their content primarily on their mobile devices. In fact, mobile use surpassed desktop use nearly a decade ago, and it’s been on a steep incline since then. On average, people spend more than four hours on their mobile devices each day.
If you want to stay connected with your customers, then your mobile marketing tactics need to be optimized based on what these consumers want right now.
In addition to reaching people wherever they are, mobile marketing campaigns offer plenty of other benefits, too.
It’s a Cost-Efficient Approach to Marketing
Mobile marketing campaigns can be more cost-effective than traditional marketing methods, such as print advertising, direct mail, or billboards. This allows you to reach a bigger audience more cost-effectively.
It Can Take Location into Account
Because consumers have their mobile devices with them no matter where they go, certain mobile marketing tactics — like digital wallets — can take advantage of geotargeting and proximity marketing to convey time-sensitive information based on their location.
It Builds Strong Relationships
Your mobile marketing strategy can offer a direct connection to your customers, helping your brand stay in touch and build relationships with them. They receive messages from you alongside informal and personal conversations about work and social activities, making you feel more like a friend or someone they know. The information they’re looking for arrives right on their device, saving time and effort. Through the right channels, consumers can also easily provide feedback, ask questions, or request assistance.
It Makes Transactions Easy
Mobile marketing campaigns can help streamline the buying process. Marketing to your customers via mobile with links that drive directly to what you want them to purchase makes the buying journey as convenient as can be — sometimes just a tap or two is all a consumer needs to complete a purchase.
How to Create a Successful Mobile Marketing Strategy
There are specific actions you can take to develop a mobile marketing strategy. Use the steps below as your framework.
1. Define your mobile customers.
The foundation of a good mobile marketing strategy is reaching the right audience at the right time with the right message. Determine who you’ll be reaching and what you know about them.
There are a variety of factors to consider, including:
- Demographics
- Interests
- Behaviors
- Preferences
2. Set realistic goals.
What’s the purpose of your mobile marketing strategy? What do you hope to gain from it? Answering questions like these and defining achievable objectives for your mobile marketing efforts will help you best evaluate their effectiveness. These objectives could include:
- Increased brand awareness
- Better audience engagement
- Higher conversion
- Increased traffic
- Expanded market share
- Better customer retention
- New customer acquisition
3. Choose your mobile channels.
With the wide range of mobile-first channels available today, there’s practically an unlimited combination of approaches you can use to reach your mobile audience. These channels include:
- SMS: Reach your customers instantly with text messages — the channel with a 98% open rate and an average response rate of 3 minutes. These messages arrive in the user’s native messaging inbox right alongside messages from friends, family, and coworkers.
- MMS: Take your mobile messages to the next level by transforming them into GIFs, videos, images, and more — offering a more dazzling visual experience that’s proven to generate clicks and drive online & in-store traffic.
- Mobile app: Display a contextual message or prompt to a customer while they’re interacting with your mobile app.
- Social media: From Instagram to YouTube, you can use social media channels to reach mobile users.
- Email: Send email messages straight to users’ mobile inboxes, whether it’s about upcoming sales or connecting them to blogs and other content you created.
- App push notification: Deliver messages directly to a user’s lock screen on their mobile device that can link directly to your mobile app’s inbox, drive to specific product pages and shopping carts, and more that deliver a rich customer experience.
- Digital wallet: Send digital coupons, loyalty cards, event tickets, gift cards, and more can be housed and organized as passes in a mobile devices’ native mobile wallet app — no additional app download required.
4. Identify your message.
After you’ve defined your goals, mobile audience and the channels you want to reach them in, you need to determine what you want to communicate with them about. What do you want to tell your customers? What do they need to know?
For instance, your mobile marketing campaign could have information about:
- Upcoming events and sales
- Exclusive discount or offer codes
- New product arrivals
- Recognition of a special event (birthday, anniversary, etc.)
- Feedback survey requests
- Time-sensitive information that needs to be acted upon
5. Apply best practices.
As your mobile marketing campaign moves forward, review your messaging to check for things like:
- Clear calls to action. Will your audience understand what they should do next if they’re interested in what you’re saying?
- Clarity. Are you delivering concise, eye-catching messages that will grab attention quickly?
- Easy opt-in/opt-out. Is it simple for consumers to sign up if they want to start hearing from you? Can they easily determine how to decline if they want to take a break from messages?
6. Test, track and optimize your program.
As your mobile marketing strategy gets underway, be sure every campaign is set up to track the necessary data in order to make smarter decisions on your subsequent campaigns. For example, you can use methodologies like A/B testing to understand incremental value mobile drives for your business.
Experiment with different elements (subject lines, visuals, and calls to action) to pinpoint what resonates with your audience.
For instance:
- Do response rates improve when you send MMS messages instead of SMS?
- Are your customers more likely to act when they receive a time-sensitive message with an expiration date?
- Are certain customers more engaged with your brand on their mobile phones at certain times of day?
Having this valuable performance information at your fingertips can help you prove the value of your investment when it comes to your mobile marketing initiatives.
Taking Mobile Marketing to the Next Level
To really stand out, there are a couple advanced tactics you should weave into your mobile marketing strategy to grab your audience’s attention.
1. Use multiple mobile marketing channels.
Engaging with your customers across multiple mobile marketing channels is a critical way to improve customer communication, boost sales, and cultivate loyalty.
Here’s an example of how it might work:
- Use MMS marketing to send your audience information (along with photos or videos!) about a relevant, limited-time offer that entices them to take action, e.g. visit one of your brick-and-mortar locations, get food delivery, etc.
- Give customers the option to save a digital wallet offer or loyalty card to their mobile wallet on their phones, giving them real-time access to their loyalty rewards, along with the information about the limited-time deal you’re running.
- When customers are close to one of your physical locations, the mobile wallet pass that’s saved to their phone can automatically send a wallet notification to their lock screen reminding them about stopping by — whether it’s to redeem an offer still available, or to use their outstanding loyalty rewards in conjunction with an offer.
- For those that open your mobile app to take a closer look, send an in-app reminder about the time-sensitive offer.
2. Target as often as you can.
Advanced targeting options can help you reach the members of your audience who will be most interested in your message.
To do this, you need information about what customers want, need, and expect. The more data you have, the more targeted an audience you can reach.
Depending on your brand, audience data collection could include things like:
- Demographics (birthday, location, name, income, occupation, etc.)
- Preferences (frequently purchased items, coupons used most often, communication platforms used most often, types of content interacted with most, etc.)
- Behaviors (what’s being purchased and when, which links are clicked on most, etc.)
To individualize every interaction as you execute your mobile marketing strategy, your customer information can be pooled, unified, and analyzed in a mobile audience management platform. From there, you can use it to create unique list segments based on the data you have (new vs. returning customers, previous purchases, preferences, etc.).
You can use the information you gather about customer behaviors and preferences to personalize the messages you send as part of your mobile marketing campaign. This increases engagement and effectiveness for your brand while connecting consumers to the information they want most. Whether it’s customized product recommendations or discounts on what they purchase frequently, tailored messages make customers feel valued, understood, and appreciated.
Start Your Mobile Marketing Campaigns With Vibes
As mobile marketing continues to stand out as a way to effectively reach your customers, interacting with them in meaningful ways is critical — and we at Vibes know that one size does not fit all.
Our customers don’t have generic, cookie-cutter mobile programs. That's because we pride ourselves on having an unparalleled strategic focus on helping our customers achieve long-term success — an approach that’s unmatched in mobile marketing, and it has set us apart from our competitors for over 25 years.
Each of our customers has a team of dedicated mobile strategy experts to help build SMS, MMS, and Mobile Wallet marketing programs that exceed their goals and boost revenue.
It’s why major mobile-first brands like Chipotle, The Children’s Place, Polo Ralph Lauren, and others see 25% lower SMS subscriber churn than those brands using competitive platforms.
Let's talk about how Vibes can help you activate a mobile marketing engagement strategy that will attract and retain the most impactful, profit-driving customers for your business.
The Bottom Line
As mobile marketing continues to stand out as a way to reach your audience, build relationships, and boost sales, it’s critical to develop the right strategy — and then revisit and refine it over time.
If you start by defining your message and your audience, and then you optimize your mobile marketing campaigns accordingly, you’ll be able to connect with consumers who are waiting to hear what you have to say.
Whether you’re new to mobile or aren’t seeing the results you expect, get in touch with us today to learn more about how we can make your mobile program a smashing success.
