Unlocking the Potential in Your Multichannel Mobile Strategy
Shoppers are spending more and more time on their mobile devices — almost 4.5 hours per day. For marketers, this is a huge opportunity to reach shoppers right under their thumbs. And that means a strong mobile marketing strategy.
Mobile marketing strategies aren’t new for retail marketers. As mobile has grown, more and more retailers have shifted to SMS campaigns, and focused on mobile optimization to keep pace with the shopper.
Unfortunately, while shoppers are spending twice as much time on mobile devices than they did four years ago, mobile conversion rates are still low compared to desktop. Why? Most mobile experiences were simply ported over from desktop and don’t cater to the mobile device or mobile device user. When compared to desktop, mobile engagements require more concise, timely communications to a millennial-first audience. Marketers simply haven’t caught up.
There is a huge opportunity for mobile
The headlines are staggering — CTRs are 10X what we see in email with claims of as high as 20% contribution to total ecommerce revenue. But, SMS is at least 10 times more expensive than other retention channels like email and brands are wondering how much of the revenue they’re driving in SMS is truly incremental to what they were doing before. Which is why you need to make sure your investment is living up to its full potential and driving revenue.
Key factors in building your multichannel mobile strategy
Understand your audience
Gaining a thorough grasp of how your target audience uses their mobile devices will help you design campaigns that will better appeal to them and enhance conversion rates. This includes researching their preferences for mobile devices, the apps they use, their online surfing habits while using a mobile device, and how they interact with mobile advertising.
You should also segment your audience based on how they use mobile devices and develop customized marketing for each group using customer data and analytics. Your multichannel mobile strategy is built on the understanding of your target audience’s mobile usage behaviors, which will guide your decision-making.
With the right technology partner, you should also be able to understand where each of your shoppers are most likely to engage across channels — some shoppers are more likely to open on email, while some are more likely to open their texts. Having that 1:1 functionality baked into your mobile marketing strategy will help you save the bottom line and drive conversion.
Consistency is key
An effective multichannel mobile strategy requires consistent branding and messaging across platforms. This makes it easier for your audience to recognize and interact with your brand, increasing recognition and driving loyalty. It also helps you establish trust with your audience.
Consistency fosters a credible brand image for your company, which makes it easy for customers to love what your brand has to offer even more.
Create a seamless user experience
A good multichannel shopping mobile strategy in retail delivers a consistent user experience across all channels with seamless transitions. This includes testing across platforms and devices, incorporating mobile-specific features like push notifications, and optimizing mobile websites and apps for conversions.
Using a responsive design and simplified layout will help keep consumers involved and engaged for longer. Remember to test your mobile campaigns and make adjustments and enhancements based on user feedback.
One location for all your data management
To make the most of your multichannel mobile strategy, all of your channels’ data should be in one place. Your company should use this retail data to monitor performance, refine strategy, have a comprehensive understanding of how your customers engage with you, make decisions, and spot future problems.
Your retail data also enables you to quickly segment your audiences depending on how they behave across channels. With that data, you can tailor each shopper’s experience, and present them with better moments with your brand. Having a consolidated view of your data makes it simpler to manage engagement, conversion rates, and ROI across all channels, and evaluate the effectiveness of your mobile strategy.
Overall, having all of your channels’ data in context is the key to making data-driven decisions and enhancing the efficacy of your mobile strategy.
5 Challenges holding your multichannel mobile strategy back
Don’t limit the success of your SMS program. To drive incremental revenue, there are a few considerations you need to make to be sure that your SMS program is helping you — not hurting you.
1. Limited personalization
Marketing has come way too far to let the digital personalization ball drop now. Even if your experiences across site, email, and display are personalized, you’re still not delivering on the promise of keeping the customer at the center if you’re not personalizing your cross-channel marketing and SMS program. At such a higher cost than other channels, it becomes that much more important to deliver on that promise to protect your bottom line and make sure that you’re driving incremental revenue. It just takes one moment for a shopper to convert or not convert — so don’t waste that opportunity to match your shoppers with the product they’ll love with static messaging. You have all of this data on your shoppers and your products, so you don’t want to let it go to waste.
What this should look like: Your SMS program should match shoppers to the products they love, in the environment they prefer based on the predictions generated by all of that shopper and product data. So any trigger like an abandoned cart trigger, a price drop trigger or predictive audience-driven campaign should be able to be orchestrated via your SMS platform for mobile-friendly shoppers to increase conversions.
2. Cross-channel coordination
No man is an island, and SMS is no exception. The implications of not having coordination with another channel like email are huge. A lot of times with SMS, marketers are operating out of siloed customer profiles. All of that valuable data is wasted if that identifier isn’t connected to a larger customer profile so you get the full picture of who they are (and so you can market to them with scientific precision). The other implication is that you might be wasting your investment in SMS if you’re sending texts to shoppers who aren’t likely to convert there. Not knowing which shoppers are likely to convert on which channels at different moments in their shopper lifecycle won’t just cost you a conversion — it will erode your bottom line.
What this should look like: Customer profiles are connected and robust. With cross-channel marketing coordination, you can identify and grow customer profiles with the information you get across channels. You can launch multichannel campaigns, build channel touches into those campaigns and determine the best channel option for any individual.
3. Slow workflows
Your SMS program needs to move just as fast as you do. Slow workflows mean more manual work for you and your team with an SMS program that is siloed from your other channels and your other customer data. Without the speed to add audiences quickly and easily to your SMS campaigns, you won’t be keeping up with the speed of your shoppers.
What this should look like: You can segment, build and personalize campaigns at scale. You can understand performance across channels with commerce campaigns built to convert and drive repeat purchases.
4. Channel overload
It might be tough to effectively contact and engage with the target audience when you don’t know which channels to use. Using the wrong channel for a given message or audience can lead to low engagement or even backlash (or the dreaded unsubscribe)n as different channels have different strengths and limits. Utilizing too many channels can also cause channel fatigue in clients, which lowers engagement.
What this should look like: In order to effectively reach and engage with your target audience, businesses must have a thorough awareness of which channels best fit their demographic. A multichannel strategy doesn’t need to use every channel but instead should focus on the most effective ones.
5. Building a relationship takes time
Building a relationship with your audience can prove to be a daunting task. It takes a long time for a consumer to feel like they can trust the product and service you are offering. Be patient.
What it should look like: Utilizing multiple channels will help your consumer be aware you exist. When it comes to mobile marketing, understanding your customer journey will help inform your team on how to move forward.
Use multichannel mobile strategies to enhance a shopper’s lifecycle, not interrupt it
Your mobile marketing program should enhance your shopper’s lifecycle — not interrupt it with stale messaging and untimely communications. You only get so many chances to get it right before you get blocked (or left on read).
Think about how this all comes together. With SMS, you can increase the identification of new shoppers with true cross-channel coordination. With all of that new data, you can grow your unified customer profile to make your outreach better and better. With all of that new shopper, behavioral and product data you can make recommendations about which products your shoppers will want to buy to boost conversion on the channel they’re most likely to convert.
Armed with that information and your new identifier, you can continue to drive purchases with predictive analytics from those shoppers at scale the way they want to be reached (know who is mobile-friendly, who prefers email and who loves social media) — keeping the shopper at the center and the channels all working together in harmony.
Choose the right SMS technology partner for your business
Making the right investments in your mobile strategy is critical in building and scaling your mobile program to drive profitability. By starting with the right foundations or implementing them now, you can be sure that you’re intelligently driving incremental revenue at scale and bringing your SMS program into your multichannel mix in the right way.
