How can marketers make the most of mobile? Today, mobile means far more than just SMS. Mobile marketing is evolving at a fast pace. Communication with consumers is now conducted through apps, push notifications, as well as the mobile Web.
Mobile Marketing Today
Mobile phones have achieved a near 100% penetration share; smartphones have reached over 50%, and tablets over 20%. Today’s consumers are mobile and connected, and there are several ways of communicating with them.
SMS allows brands to create inbound and outbound communications with a high level of customer closeness. Using mobile apps, you can make the most of two powerful levers: push notifications and in-app content personalization.
Finally, consumers are increasingly using their smartphones or tablets to go online. Websites and emails need to ensure flexible and comfortable reading on these devices through responsive design, like the process detailed in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Example of a Mobile Campaign
The SMS Channel: Mobile Marketing in the Mainstream
SMS management allows marketers to act on both inbound and outbound messages. With inbound SMS campaigns, consumers are asked to send a simple message to a short number (e.g. 10 22 22) to receive special offers and invitations to events. With more conventional outbound SMS campaigns, brands communicate with consumers using a personalized SMS that is consistent with messages delivered through other channels.
SMS derives a benefit from the closeness it creates between the marketer and the audience. You can read a SMS on any mobile phone. It’s short, straight to the point, and studies have shown that it will be read by 95% of its recipients less than 3 minutes after reception, while it takes an average of 2.5 days for emails to be opened. Also, SMS is still a preferred means of communication: the volume of short messages sent has gone up 400% over the last three years.
Push Notifications: The New One-to-One Channel
Push notifications provide marketers with two ways of capitalizing on mobile app users: the delivery of personalized messages and the customization of in-app content. When managed consistently with other channels, mobile apps are an effective, interactive and intuitive way of engaging consumers. They also represent an opportunity to nurture customer loyalty and develop incremental sales for brands. Strong mobile apps go beyond a simple informative interface and instead offer an immediate, long-term and profitable dialogue with users.
Here are a few examples of push notifications:
1. Special offers: personalized coupons and offers such as Figure 2
2. Transactional messages: order confirmations, and loyalty point statements
3. Real-time communications: special offers after a cart abandonment or after a check-in
Content can be personalized to meet users’ needs. Additionally, from push notification to clicks within the app, customer reactions can be measured and analyzed with a high level of precision.
With smartphone users currently spending 80% of their time in apps versus only 20% on the mobile web, push notifications have become a tangible opportunity. 70% of users are willing to receive notifications, and 20% of them have already made purchases via an app.
Figure 2: Example of a one-to-one push notification
Mobile for Highly Personalized Experiences
Mobile consumers look to SMS and mobile apps to offer a sense of proximity and highly relevant and contextual content. Mobile phones, particularly smartphones, are an integral part of a consumers’ life. They are always within reach, often consulted, and each message is an opportunity to interact. This is why brands must understand consumer needs and preferences and ensure that every experience be relevant and unique. Offers should align with consumers’ expectations and context. To that end, Adobe Campaign’s segmentation capabilities and offer engine make one-to-one personalization possible. Brands can leverage every interaction to deliver a meaningful experience.
Responsive Design: The Web is Becoming Mobile
Adobe Campaign helps brands create and deliver responsive design emails and landing-pages by detecting a readers’ screen format and adapting content accordingly. Turnkey templates make it easy to configure these communications, while the preview option gives you full message rendering.
With 70% of emails being sorted and 50% being read directly on smartphones, adopting a responsive design strategy has become mission critical. The stakes are significant: for some Adobe Campaign customers, click-through rates for mobile-optimized messages have bumped up by 44% compared to non-optimized messages.
According to Gartner’s “Forecast: Devices by Operating System and User Type, Worldwide, 2010-2017, 1Q13 Update,”
“In 2015, Smartphone and tablet sales will outsell PCs worldwide. They will become preferred devices to surf the Internet. This is already the case within many emerging markets. The consequence of this phenomenon is that each and every organization needs to re-think its digital strategy.”