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Can our mobile marketing strategy be scalable? Can we have complete control of the ROI? Are we addressing our whole target market or just a small segment?

Mobile Marketing doesn’t come in a box; its an enabler that comes in many shapes and sizes. Presence based solutions, such as an app or mobile website, may attract a one off investment, however without customer awareness presence will go largely unnoticed without advertisement or a strategy to drive traffic.

Presence solutions will provide your brand with a more accessible route with which to engage your market. But they don’t necessarily acquire new customers, because they rely on people finding and accessing your content. You should also give consideration to the potential cannibalization of other channels, such as the website, when marketing another channel to the same typical set of customers.

Messaging channels such as SMS for example lacks that content rich material but done well it can drive significant footfall into your brick and mortar store or your virtual one equally. It can also drive consumer behaviours and awareness of your content.

Messaging works best on a pay as you go commercial model and will generally deliver a good return on investment. You have to be prepared for a large take up of an offer via the mobile channel though… do you have enough call centre staff on to manage a high volume of calls? Do you have enough vans for delivering a lot of stock on time? etc..etc… 

Have you considered the regulatory implications, mCRM management, best practice campaign execution and how to knit together with social media and email to enhance response levels?

The last 5 years have seen a dramatic shift in terms of how mobile and retail go hand in hand.. in the past companies where quick to add an app to their marketing channels as they wanted to compete with their competitors but they werent actually sure what to do with it once they had it… it was more like “well they have one so we should – tick that box”.

The problem was that everyone had an app, mobile as a channel was diluted by the sheer amount of apps a consumer could download so quite quickly consumers started to delete or simply not use an app after the first week or so, as new ones were available everywhere.

For the price savvy consumer, they would sign up to an app to get a discount and then never use it again, deleting it after 4 weeks for another sign up offer instead. Brand loyalty didn’t seem to penetrate the app market either and a big part of this was the consumer attitude to mobile as a channel.

As mobile has evolved and matured, we have seen the app craze slow down and loyalty and retention become the by words for a succesful business and more importantly a successful mobile strategy.

5 years ago 40% of smartphone users would use their phone to research a product in store and gain competitive pricing info etc.. thats now over 70%

5 years ago 1% of smartphone users had bought something using their mobile phone in store, this is now over 13% as retailers buy into making it easier for consumers to engage with the one device they always have with them.

Useful stats;

• 53% of smartphone users check their phones within 5 minutes of waking
• Over 32 million phones are purchased yearly in the UK, and 6 million are handed down
• The proportion of 4G users jumped from 8% to 25% in the last year
• 25% of smartphone users make no traditional voice calls in a given week
• 13% of UK adults have now made a mobile payment in-store, up from 3% last year

Statistics – Deloitte 2015

When deciding on what your strategy is you must keep in mind that you have a wide and varied audience, who are for the majority at least, very mobile savvy. They expect to be engaged and involved via the mobile channel. When it comes to defining the ROI of a mobile strategy, decide what your objectives are before you decide what your return will be. Is it to acquire more customers? Retain existing ones? etc..

If you need help with any of the things we discuss here then please give me a call or email me at scott.threlfall@eagleeye.com

Thanks

themobileexpert