Best Practices For Mobile Marketing: How to Acquire, Engage and Retain Users

Mobile marketing is a multi-channel online marketing technique that focuses on reaching specific audiences on their smartphones, tablets or any other related devices through SMS, MMS, email, or mobile applications. Mobile marketing technique provides customers with time and location sensitive, personalized information that promotes your goods, brand and services. According to academic Andreas Kaplan “Mobile marketing is a marketing activity which is conducted through a ubiquitous network to which customers are connected using their mobile devices.”

Mobile Marketers get ahead on the edge of emergent mobile technology but never fall through the cracks. They apply best marketing practices to mobile platforms and are always ready to take on what’s coming next. Smartphones, tablets, cyborgs, implants – in their world, if there’s a message, there’s a digital platform to deliver it on. SMS, yes. They’ve always got an app for where it’s at.

The above video by TrafficTouchPro describes mobile marketing and how it generates more profits than any other advertising methods. Mobile is disrupting the way people are engaging with your brands. Today’s smartphone can do everything. You don’t have to open up your PC or laptop. There are 5 billion mobile phones on the planet and 91% of people keep their mobile phones with them all day along. 80% of the internet users have smartphones. 97% of all text messages sent get read, and 85% of those messages get read within an hour.

Mobile marketing is the only medium that offers instant access to your audiences. Many mobile platforms such as smartphones and tablets, host up to 60% of digital media time for users in the US. Google anticipates search queries on the mobile devices to surpass the desktop searches by the end of 2015. An effective mobile marketing focuses on understanding your mobile audiences, designing contents that are mobile friendly and making tricky use of SMS/MMS marketing and mobile applications. The whole mobile marketing process can be defined in the following steps:

Deliver mobile experience as per user’s expectations.
Reach users across the mobile customer lifecycle.
Find and acquire the right customers for your products and services.
Driving mobile engagement and Retention.

Deliver Mobile Experience As Per User’s Expectations

Today there are more smartphone users than any other medium. As a mobile marketer, you need to deliver the cohesive experience that your audience expects. Four out of five users check their smartphones within 15 minutes of waking up and 44% sleep by keeping their phones beside their bed. But total time is not spent equitably across all apps. So how will you drive your attention with so many apps competing for customer’s attention? The answer would be engaging individuals continuously, in a meaningful and personalized way across channels and devices. Engagement is the critical part of the overall customer’s journey. Engagement marketing is all about creating useful interactions with users based on who they are and what they do, continuously over time, and directed towards a goal, anywhere they are.

Reach Users Across The Mobile Customer’s Lifecycle

Embrace A Unified Cross-Channel View

A good mobile marketing strategy addresses the continuum of mobile app usage, from acquiring, engaging, retaining, to reactivating. But consider mobile app activities as your bigger part of your engaging journey. Understanding where a user is into mobile app lifecycle provides an opportunity to trigger activities and automate to encourage engagement. Mobile offers a unique ability to access billions of users on their most personal device. This includes their specific location based on their permission. So it’s very important to include mobile marketing in your marketing strategy. Effective mobile app marketers can reach to their audiences through push notifications, SMS/MMS, personalized web communications, in-app messages, social media advertising, website and online mention ads, social media channels, news feeds, reviews, in-store experience, articles and emails.

Tap Into Mobile Signals And Insights

Enable a continuous cross-channel conversion. You must track the way each user has changed with your brand across each channel to discover your true ROI. Mobile signals in mobile app marketing include:

Timing Delivering messages particularly when the user is currently interacting with your brand.

Behavior Present your messaging and content dynamically based on user’s actions that are either engaged or completed.

Proximity and Location With user’s data and technologies like GPS, iBeacon and geofencing, you can gain insights about the user’s real-world location and deliver relevant offers in response.

Stage-Sequence Depending on the user’s actions you can directly deliver messages to the device to accelerate conversion.

Measure, Engagement And Optimize Track metrics that measures where the users are spending time in your app that may include:

Time in app
Monthly active users
Average revenue per user
Open appsv
Bounce rate
Time spent per screen
Cost per loyal user
Session interval
Session length

Mobile marketing measurement determines the effectiveness of your marketing across all mobile touch points that include the following:

SMS/MMS
In-app push notifications
Mobile landing pages
Email on mobile
Cross-channel communications (mobile touch points when combined with other mobile marketing elements )

How To Find And Acquire The Right Users?

Mistargeted mobile marketing results in low engagement levels, low retention rates and high app uninstall rates. New users are up more than 84% over the last year. So how to find and acquire the right users? The best plan is the deep understanding of your best audience and making right decisions as you work to find and acquire new customers. Understand the points that make your user loyal and point out their demographic attributes and interests. These strategies will help you in gaining new customers. By targeting the right people that stay loyal over time and engage for a long time with your app, you are reaching higher levels of engagement, lower cost per install, stronger referrals and reviews and new user growth. Activities to find and acquire right users can include:

Email Drive awareness of your mobile app among your contacts that haven’t downloaded yet. Offer information and offers for motivation to download your app.

Social Media Advertise your brand on several social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. Target specific audiences with the goal of getting them to download your app.

Paid-ads Run paid-ads to drive your app downloads and track attribution.

Web Monitor site visitors deliver personalized messaging to encourage them to download your app. Don’t forget to offer users browsing mobile web with downloading app opportunities before directing them to a mobile web page.

Retargeting Run ads for the users who have visited your site repeatedly because they have already shown interest in your brand. So it allows you to reach wider and improve your results.

How To Drive Mobile Engagement And Retention?

Find out the reasons why users prefer to hear from you. 70% of users allow push notifications. They prefer to receive helpful notifications and specific call-to-action. SMS/MMS messaging provides higher engagement with 15% average click-through-rate, boost campaign opts by 20%, and increase social share.

Make It Personal

Making a personal relationship with the users is an important part. Users navigate between channels and devices seamlessly. Interact with your users by using a 360-degree view of each user based on their mobile app activity, behavior, and location. Use personalized messages that are relevant and meaningful to encourage your user’s trust and loyalty to your app. You can send push notifications with special offers to gain loyalty. But you should do it with their permissions by offering goal-based incentives

Test, Improve and Repeat

Test the copy of your push notification or SMS/MMS message.
Analyze your calls-to-action across in-app messages and push communications.
Measure the result of sending times and frequency of messages.
Find out which images on your landing page drive the most reactions and affect engagement.
Measure the impact of including SMS/MMS in cross-channel marketing campaigns.
Tract by segment – Start by segmenting your base and message accordingly. Use each user’s life cycle behavior and demographics to segment them into categories that you can target with highly relevant messages and offers.

Reactivate Lapsed Users

Try to check your historical transactions. Based on its behavioral data, you can help yourself to re-engage your inactive customers. Support all channels. All communications at this stage are very relevant, interactive and easy for the user to act upon. Once you win the race by gaining user’s back, treat them as your new customer again. Test your timing, offers, personalization, creative channel and much more to find out what brings users back into the loop and what will drive them away.

Get back your customers coming back twice as often by offering them sensitive special offers and discounts through Mobile Marketing. Send special offers to your customers when you need your business the most. Mobile is no longer an exception now. It’s the ultra and ultimate rule for marketing strategies. Mobile has changed the way people interact with brands. So include mobile marketing technology in our marketing strategy to unlock the potential of always-on conversion leads.

Mobile Marketing Manager: Roles, Responsibilities, Companies and Salaries

Roles & Responsibilities

Conduct formal market analysis (mobile, digital,social and local) to identify key market and customer trends
Create, target, segment and initiate mobile marketing plans and communications
Develop the mobile marketing strategy for company XYZ
Conduct a competitive and customer analysis and report findings to key stakeholders
Provide best practice research to channel owners (display, email, paid search, etc.) and provide cross-functional sharing
Stay updated on latest technology changes and identify evolving marketing opportunities
Analyze user generated data to discover behavior patterns. Fine tune the campaigns based on the findings
Identify the right marketing metrics to track and put the right tools in action to measure ROI of mobile marketing
Share information with the VP and suggest improvements that can be made to increase value of initiatives
Focus on driving downloads from organic channels including but not limited to social media and blogs
Collaborate and work with cross-functional teams to plan, deliver and execute successful mobile marketing campaigns (QR, SMS, Coupons, Ads, etc.)
Ensure accurate and complete information is captured in customer relationship management(CRM) system
Establish best practices for marketing and advertising in the mobile space
Create a mobile marketing dashboard and maintain ownership
Attend industry conferences to network and develop industry expertise
Drive to actionable insights and recommendations; communicate them to senior management
Ensure alignment between mobile marketing strategies and the overall business marketing strategy

Companies Hiring for Mobile Marketing Manager

Accenture, Praxis i-Technologies, Capgemini, SumTotal Systems, IBM India, Ernst & Young, Amazon Development Center, Tata Communications, Cactus Communications, JPMorgan, Dell International, Techbooks Intl, ACT Television, Wipro, KPMG, Karvy Stock Broking, Akamai Technologies, Hewlett-Packard, FIITJEE, Sofomation, G-Cube Webwide, Indegene LifeSystems, Packt Publishing, Extramarks.com, Synopsys.

Mobile Marketing Manager Salary in India (Entry Level)

Pay scale varies according to companies

For MNCs: 24 to 30k INR CMM Level 2+: 20 to 24k INR Startup & Small Companies: 18 to 20k INR Companies source: Naukri Salary Source: Payscale