Top Tips for Mastering Your Mobile Marketing
Take Your Marketing on the Move With These Mobile Marketing Tips
Optimize your mobile marketing strategy with these 10 tips:
Determine goals and priorities: Are you focused on optimizing your site for mobile? Are you looking for a way to great location based in the moment mobile campaigns? Do you want to create a mobile app? A StrongMail study found that forty five percent of US businesses have integrated mobile marketing into their efforts in the following breakdown: mobile websites at 70 percent, mobile applications at 55 percent, and QR codes at 49 percent.
Remember, mobile marketing is NOT about individual tactics. Instead, it is a marketing tool that should be integrated into your overall marketing plan. Determine how mobile can support business goals. How it will be integrated into the overall marketing plans. Decide what business goals you want mobile marketing to achieve and what KPI you will use to measure success. According to a Salesforce study, seventy one percent of marketers now consider mobile marketing campaigns central to their business growth. Furthermore, 68 percent of companies have implemented mobile marketing strategies.
Some mobile marketing benchmarks to consider:
- Smartphone conversion rates are 64 percent higher compared to desktop conversion rates. (CMS Report, 2015)
- Eighty one percent of US mobile users performed pre-purchase research from their devices prior to going to a retail outlet. Nineteen percent of US mobile owners used their devices to perform their research from while they were at the retail store. (Ninth Decimal 2014)
- Forty four percent of consumers report that they prefer brands that deliver coupons and deal offers to their mobile devices. (Millward Brown)
- Show-rooming, when a customer makes a purchase using their mobile device after viewing it in a retail outlet, figures were at 28 percent in 2014. While, web-rooming, making an in store purchase following researching it on a mobile device, numbers were at 41 percent for the same period. (GfK’s 2014 FutureBuy Global Study)
- Seventy one percent of in-store shoppers who use mobile devices for online research, report that their mobile devices enhances their in-store experience. (IpsosMedia/Sterling, 2014)
Identify your mobile audiences: Take a close look at your analytics reports from early 2016 until today; pay close attention to the number of visitors who are accessing your websites via mobile devices. You should answer the following questions: what are the predominant devices and how can I optimize their visit?
Carefully practice a direct approach: With mobile marketing, you have the power to reach prospects and customers wherever they may be, but you should also stop to think about getting permissions and avoid sending too many text messages or mobile alerts.
Don’t forget about the basics: Effective mobile advertising and promotion campaigns may feature innovation, but they should also adhere to established principles of marketing. One such principle is to always include a call to action with every message delivered. Remember —when you select keyword for your promotion, the minimum length is for characters, i.e. SALE or JOIN. If you want your customers to call you, make it easy for them. Make sure your phone number is a “click-to-call” so website visitors can click the number and have it show up in their mobile phone dialer.
Make your email marketing mobile friendly: The ongoing shift towards mobile has revitalized email thanks to smartphones. A recent study shows that more people use their smartphones to open emails than those who use them to make calls. To take advantage of modern email communications, marketers must craft their messages in responsive formats that can adapt to various devices; they should also keep their messages brief and devoid of surprises, which means explaining on the body of the email what they should expect if they tap or click on an image.
Key email marketing statistics to consider:
- Eighty percent of Internet users own a smartphone (Smart Insights, 2015).
- Email access from mobile devises has risen by 180 percent over the past 3 years. (Email Monday, 2015).
- More than 36 percent of mobile subscribers use either an iPhone or an iPad to read their email. Thirty four percent of mobile subscribers use their mobile device solely to read emails (Informz, 2014).
- The number of companies creating emails formatted for mobile devices grew by 22 percent in 2014 (Adestra, 2014).
Make your forms friendly: Although onscreen keyboards have vastly improved in recent years, typing for mobile users continues to be a limited and fastidious affair. With this in mind, forms should be kept short and sweet, preferably with pull-down menus, radio buttons and other elements to help users in submitting their information. A McKinsey & Company study found that sixty one percent of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site if they experienced problems accessing it. Forty percent of online purchasers experiencing technical issues will move on to a competitor’s site.
Consider social networks: Facebook and Twitter may still be the kings of social media, but newer networks are taking market share by virtue of their affinity towards mobile users. To this end, Snapchat and WhatsApp are two networks that mobile marketers should not ignore.
Take advantage of text messaging: SMS marketing provides the lowest cost and highest ROI that is crucial in today’s shrinking economy and budgets. To get the best results, segment and target your audience with relevant messages. If you don’t have the budget for building an app or using beacons, Krissy DeAngelis shared this idea, “At Waterfall, we recommend our clients to collect zip codes and use an operator to filter subscribers based on certain location e.g. “in the radius of 5 miles of X location. Another method is to create a unique keyword for each call-to-action, then associate that call-to-action with the zip code where the customer signed up.”
Use short codes and OCR: Mobile marketing entails making everything easy for customers. Offering OCR codes on print materials and desktop websites is very convenient, and the same goes for the old “text 12345 to 323 to get a free offer.”
Optimize for mobile search: eMarketer anticipates that mobile paid search will rise from $8.72 billion to $12.85 billion, overtaking the $12.82 billion targeted at desktops. This increase will result from the 156.4 million mobile phone users performing online searches in the US, a figure that represents roughly 49 percent of the total US population.
Bing and Google make it easy for local businesses to get discovered by mobile users, but only when owners take the time to optimize their websites with required tags, scripts and algorithm signals.
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