Mobile + Marketing Automation Demystified

Mobile Marketing

There are plenty of people talking about mobile and how it interacts with marketing automation. But depending on who you talk to, you might hear a lot of different answers about what exactly this synergy entails. Let’s take a quick look at some of the common considerations in mobile marketing and marketing automation, and provide some clarity around terminology and key practices.

Generally, marketing automation refers to software designed for businesses that market on multiple channels (such as email, social media, websites, etc.) and automate activities ranging from segmentation, nurturing, scoring activities, a/b testing, metrics, analytics, and more. When creating your mobile marketing strategy, do not think about mobile in isolation. Instead, you must consider how your mobile marketing fits with your other marketing initiatives.

A Continuous Cross-Channel Conversation

You’re having an ongoing conversation with a person, regardless of channel. You need to be able to listen to their actions on one channel and then respond on another channel to continue driving that dialog. But how can you deliver coordinated, relevant, customer experiences across channels? A good marketing automation platform combined with mobile insights will help you:

Listen: Your marketing automation platform should help you listen to how people engage on one channel and use that knowledge on your other channels. For example, with web personalization, you can detect mobile web visitors and direct them to download your mobile app. Another example might be listening to an action taken in a mobile app and sending a corresponding email.
Leverage: Then you can leverage those cross-channel behaviors to engage audiences. Your marketing automation platform can help you monitor key metrics that listen for indicators inside the mobile app, allowing you to deliver messages on other channels.

The Benefits of Mobile Listening

When applying the concept of marketing automation to mobile the tactics can vary significantly. Due to the personal nature of mobile devices, marketers are able to leverage a range of signals and insights that aren’t typically available in other channels. Taking the idea of listening, leveraging, then and responding—let’s take a look at the types of signals you can utilize in mobile marketing automation:

1. Timing: The ability to deliver messages at moments when your customer is currently interacting with your product, whether that’s in a mobile browser or native app.

2. Behavior: Present content and messaging dynamically, based on actions that your customer has completed or is actively engaged in from their device.

3. Proximity and Location: Because of the personal nature of mobile devices, combined technologies like GPS, iBeacon, and geo-fencing, marketers can provide targeted experiences and insights into a consumer’s real-world location; seamlessly across the mobile web and within a native mobile app.

4. Stage/Sequence: Depending on specific actions your customer has taken, you can deliver messages directly to the device to accelerate conversion or drive a specific behavior.

Using a marketing automation platform that gives you the ability to look across all channels—mobile or otherwise—will help you determine which channels people prefer and allow you to build your campaign strategy based on those preferences. For example, you can target people who aren’t opening your emails with push notifications. Or, for those who come to your website and your mobile app, you can “listen” to the type of information they consume in your mobile app and “leverage” it to present similar, relevant information on your website.

Context is crucial to making marketing work at any level, and as consumers increasingly turning to their mobile devices as their primary computing device, it’s easier than ever for marketers to leverage the insights that can be collected from mobile and integrate them into their holistic marketing efforts. For more information, check out our ebook: Creating Your Mobile Marketing Strategy which walks you through how to integrate mobile into your comprehensive marketing strategy.

ORIGINAL Blog