The Cross-Channel Digest to Mobile Best-Practices

How to Start a Solid Mobile Strategy

Cross-channel tactics are the name of the game, and mobile is the main player. Customers are spending an increasing amount of time on their mobile devices annually, and marketers that want to stay at the forefront of customers’ minds need to lean on this channel as much as possible. 

While most marketers understand the demand for this channel, having the budget, bandwidth, and practical know-how to activate a mobile strategy is another barrier altogether. That’s why MessageGears and Movable Ink are partnering to create this quick, tactical guide to help you hit the ground running with your mobile strategies.

Step 1: Power Mobile With Personalization

Customers crave personalized experiences, no matter the devices. In fact, over 70% of customers will disconnect from brands that don’t offer tailored experiences, while 68% not only engage, but feel loyal to brands that do. This is a behavior that doesn’t change as customers switch between devices; customers always want tailored relevance, and their expectations are just as high in the mobile channel. 

The heart of personalization lies in good data. That means marketers need to collect, translate, and activate accurate information—such as zero- and first-party data–quickly across devices. Only then can markets look to incorporating AI powered personalization, the true game-changer. However, this is easier said than done, and an insurmountable task to execute manually.

To solve that issue, marketers need tools that integrate seamlessly within their tech stack. For example, if brands want truly personalized, data-driven marketing, they need a tool to organize data into one accessible warehouse and another to automatically generate visual content for every device.  

For sophisticated personalization across devices, a tech stack with the right tools and integrations is your best bet.

Step 2: Leverage Mobile-Specific Features

Mobile is a permission-based channel, meaning that customers who have already opted into these marketing communications have agreed to the channel’s more flexible data and privacy restrictions. In short, marketers can activate some of their most sophisticated campaigns from the get-go, without having to jump through all of the privacy hoops that surround email. 

The best mobile campaigns marketers can start with are contextual campaigns using location and real-time features:

Location-Based Campaigns

By looping the customer’s environment into a campaign and adjusting messaging to match, brands can see up to a 300% higher rate in influenced opens.

Here, Inkredible Hotels uses geolocation to drive incremental revenue with personalized recommendations for “staycations” in rich push notifications. By using the customer’s current location to suggest hotels 0-3 hours away, the brand gives spontaneous customers the information they need to book quickly.

Weather Personalization Campaigns

Personalization directly correlates with increased average order values (AOVs). This is especially clear with weather personalization; after all, there’s nothing more irresistible than an ice-cold drink during a scorcher or a warm meal on a cold winter day. 

Inkredible Food Delivery knows that and uses it to their advantage with an IP-powered weather personalized push notification. Customers need it, love it, and remember the brand for it.

Time-Targeted Campaigns

When marketers think of time-targeting, countdown clocks may be the first thing that comes to mind. But that’s only a small slice of the true potential of time-targeting via mobile.

From live pricing, inventory, or even displaying seats available in an airplane, keeping customers in the know in real-time is a no-brainer advantage with mobile.

Here, Inkredible Retail serves customers morning, noon, and night via time-targeted personalization. Through geotargeting that determines the customer’s location and time of day, the brand displays personalized deals that engage customers exactly when they want it. 

While some of these tactics are available in other channels, an unbeatable advantage of mobile is its immediacy. In mobile, marketers can activate these sophisticated campaigns from the very beginning, wowing customers and ultimately driving long-time loyalty.

Step 3: Adapt to Every Stage of the Customer Journey

From first touch to fanning the flame of loyalty, adapting your mobile campaigns to suit where customers are at is key to maximizing the potential of the channel. 

When you have a new mobile customer, SMS should be your go-to. Before the customer has made any further commitments—such as purchasing or downloading the branded app—SMS is a personal avenue to gaining customer attention in a way that helps them. As an added bonus, SMS has the highest CTR of any channel; it’s as close to a guarantee of engagement as you’ll ever get.

Inkredible Media uses SMS to drive conversions up and ensure that the word is out whenever there’s a new release. Using web cropping, the brand delivers a personalized recommendation in their SMS messages through a compelling visual tailored just for the recipient. Providing this level of personal attention from the start will get the customer/brand relationship off on the right foot.

Once customers have committed further with your brand, optimizing the mobile app experience is the next step to solidifying loyalty and increasing customer lifetime value. Using data visualization, Inkredible Financial delivers a monthly membership statement to keep customers in the loop. Not only are customers updated with need-to-know information, they are also motivated to keep using the brand when they visually see how close they are to their next member tier or points threshold.

Mobile Is the Pillar of Cross-Channel Marketing

Mobile is a non-negotiable for marketers, and leveraging the right partners and tactics will set you up for success. To hit the ground running with mobile and activate cross-channel campaigns, watch the  Movable Ink and MessageGears partnership in action at Think Summit 2023.