Driving Incremental Impact in Mobile Marketing
A mobile marketing strategy for your retail brand can feel like a catch-22.
More and more brands are adopting mobile strategies in 2022. Creating digital experiences that meet shoppers wherever they are spending time online is critical in the digital world. And that means meeting them right on their phone. But mobile marketing strategies need a high level of scrutiny.
On one hand, conversion and click-through rates are really high for SMS and mobile channels. Shoppers want to get texts and updates about their favorite brands on SMS. On the other hand, it’s one of the more expensive owned marketing channels and mobile conversion rates are still much lower than what we see on desktop.
And it doesn’t stop there. You also need to consider attribution & spend optimization. If you’re converting a shopper with SMS but you would have converted them by email anyway, why are you spending the money just to cannibalize revenue from your other channels? Also, if you are using separate providers for email and SMS and each provider takes credit for revenue and conversions that were influenced by their programs, your SMS provider may be taking credit for a purchase that your email provider is also taking credit for — this gives you an inaccurate view of what’s driving revenue and for which shoppers so you won’t be able to optimize and personalize properly — resulting in a big data and analytics snowball effect that builds all the way to bad experiences for your customer.
There’s a lot to unpack to make sure you’re driving true growth and leveraging mobile strategies for success, customer optimization and incremental revenue. We can really boil this all down to four main considerations.
4 Ways to Measure the Value of Your Text Message Marketing
1. Spend and Send Optimization
The time spent launching text message campaigns can’t exceed the total cost, so easy workflows and an agile provider are key. Agile workflows with easy-to-use design elements and unified data access helps brands save critical time. Brands also need to consider how to optimize every single message for the customer through personalization — by understanding shopper product affinities, lifetime value and even channel affinities, you can save money and protect your bottom line by only showing products to shoppers that are more likely to convert and only sending texts to shoppers who are more likely to convert on that channel.
2. Reducing Total Cost of Ownership
To make sure that you’re driving incremental revenue, you need to start with the total cost of ownership. Total cost of ownership (TCO) refers to the ongoing platform costs and expenses to buy, maintain, service and utilize multiple platforms. It also includes the time spent by your team to create and launch text message campaigns. To reduce total cost of ownership, you’ll need to eliminate any redundancies, consolidate efforts and make the most of your team’s time to protect your bottom line revenue. Having an agile tech stack or platform that streamlines and activates data with easy-to-use processes and campaign setup is critical in reducing TCO.
3. Return on Investment
Return on investment (ROI) refers to the top line revenue driving impact of having a more streamlined platform delivering the same or better results at a more efficient cost. That means taking a look at your tech stack and ensuring that the CAC to acquire a new customer and convert them to a first and repeat purchase is low. You can keep costs down just like you do with other channels — personalizing recommendations.
When you’re evaluating ROI, here are three key measurements you should consider:
1. Trigger revenue
2. List growth & acquisition
3. Incremental revenue
4. Clarity on Channel Attribution
Understanding engagement metrics that have a direct impact on your company’s profitability is key to driving incremental revenue with your text messaging program. Measuring things like list growth and interaction rate can help you at a high level, but clearly and confidently understanding how each channel is contributing to a shopper’s journey with your brand is key. Understanding that journey of interaction that led to shopper conversion will not just help you define overall strategy, but will also help your technology understand and learn over time how to best nurture shoppers across channels. With a more organic approach to shopper engagement of meeting the shopper where they are in real-time with touches across channels, you can engage them throughout their discovery and consideration cycle.
By measuring these interactions clearly and understanding attribution, you can get a clear picture of that journey without double-attribution coming from different tech platforms.
Whether you’re just starting out with your mobile program or looking to optimize this year, there are three focus areas to ensure your program is optimized to drive incremental revenue for your business.
Three focus areas to drive incremental revenue
1. Customer-centricity
The sentiment of being customer-centric is notoriously ambiguous — that said, it’s critical that your technology provider cares more about the customer than the channel. There are a few ways to make sure that the provider you’re using to manage your mobile program is truly supporting your goal of keeping the customer at the center of your brand’s experience for their lifetime — that means going beyond just capturing a new identifier and growing a list, but truly putting every effort toward nurturing your shoppers with each channel, deciding which channel is best for every shopper and determining when to communicate.. While it might be easy to get SMS program growth tunnel vision, it’s important to leverage mobile strategies to their full potential across a shopper’s lifecycle and individual preferences
2. Retail data
Your mobile technology provider needs to know your product catalog in and out to best drive the best outreach for shoppers and incremental revenue for your mobile program. This means understanding not only your shoppers, but the details of your products so you can truly provide 1:1 product recommendations and continue to learn more about your shoppers’ product preferences over time. Personalized recommendations boost conversion and help you make the most of your SMS strategy, the same as any other channel. Going beyond product and category preferences that your shoppers’ have, you should also know where each shopper wants to be reached. This is critical in driving incremental revenue. With a provider that can track shopper engagement over time and gather data on shopper channel preference, you can make sure you’re sending SMS messages to the shoppers that need them to convert. This way you’re protecting your bottom line and communicating with shoppers where they want to be communicated with.
3. Multichannel attribution
To best understand your program’s growth, you need a provider that understands revenue attribution across channels and sees the whole picture for the customer, beyond blindly attributing conversion to their channel. Your team should be able to measure last-click revenue for conversion attribution across channels. With separate providers, you may have attribution being claimed twice. While it’s important to consider the contribution of each channel to a customer’s entire lifecycle, knowing that last-click conversion is critical in understanding growth and measuring the ROI of your SMS program. Creating a system to be sure that you aren’t seeing double is foundational in measuring the success of your program.
By making sure you have a grasp of these three fundamentals, you’ll drive incremental revenue that continues over a shopper’s lifetime by increasing identification with cross-channel coordination, increasing conversion rate with personalization in SMS and driving repeat purchases at scale by understanding performance and preferences across channels for each of your shoppers. Don’t let things get confusing with your mobile marketing strategy. Treat your mobile program like every other channel — personalize the experience from end to end and integrate the experience into the entire lifecycle of your shopper.
If you prioritize the customer over the channel and work with providers that have a clear model of attribution, you can measure incremental revenue for your mobile program and continue to optimize it for success.
