Consequently, attracting new customers, and keeping them, is not just a huge priority, but many marketing teams’ biggest challenge.
Stepping up to the task, brands must scale the effectiveness of their campaigns in a way that stands out from the crowd and appeals to individual shoppers and their specific needs. With many marketing teams now also working with lower budgets than before the pandemic, how is this possible?
The answer is mobile.
By 2025, 50% of people in Sub-Saharan Africa will have mobile subscriptions, with 61% expected to be smartphone connections. With mobile the de facto connected device for most consumers, its importance in any multichannel campaign cannot be underestimated. Gartner reports, for example, that SMS has a 98% open rate versus 20% for email, and a 45% response rate versus 6% for email.
In short, mobile marketing - especially now - is a brand’s best friend. Whether you’re a complete newbie, or your current campaigns aren’t delivering the desired results, it’s important to prioritize increasing the effectiveness of your mobile campaigns. From automation to creative content, clever use of data, and tools to keep ad fraud at bay, here are our 7 secrets for maximizing mobile and multichannel campaign performance:
Never miss a sale. Make sure to reach out to shoppers every time, and at every stage, they interact with your brand. By building automated event driven purchasing paths into your campaigns, triggered messaging based on a customer’s buying journey can work wonders.
Send a welcome discount, entice them back with personalized offers, or recover lost sales with a friendly SMS to check-out an abandoned shopping cart. Triggered messaging has been proven to have incredibly high engagement with 98% open rates. With automated mobile triggered messages also offering an unmatched 12x ROI, activating autopilot using an intelligent mobile marketing tool is a sure-fire way to win over shoppers time after time.
In a world of content overload, stand-out. Customers want interactivity, easy-to-understand information, colour, eye-catching design, and a clear focus on what action to take next. From quizzes and short-form video to images, clever memes and gifs, consumers need, and want, to be engaged, with 93% of marketers agreeing interactive content is especially important.
But don’t worry if you’re not a natural Picasso. There are shortcuts. These days, easy-to-use tools can help you craft stunning designs to incorporate into your campaigns in seconds, and with minimal effort.
No two customers are the same, so how they interact with your brand will also vary. From SMS to WhatsApp, rich communication services (RCS) and Viber, the more channels you have, the higher your engagement and reach will be. Importantly, focus on centrally orchestrating a mix of push and pull channels, both text-based and rich-media, to create a flexible strategy that meets your goals and delivers value for your customers.
Personalization is paramount. Two-thirds of shoppers expect companies to understand their needs and desires. Show customers you care by acting upon data that reveals what they want and who they are. Use tools that can help you segment customers by specific demographics, and experiment with what messages, offers and channels work best for them.
What a teenager responds to won’t necessarily work for a university student or parent. Take this into account and make sure your marketing reflects who your customer really is.
As new privacy laws come into force, third-party cookies are soon scheduled to come to an end. So how can marketers continue to enable targeted ads whilst staying compliant? Thesecret to success here lies mobile identification technologies that capture first-party data, namely the mobile phone number.
A unique asset for mobile networks, the MSISDN or mobile number can be used to anonymously identify users with their consent to keep personalised user experiences running.
By working with a mobile operator to access this data, brands can craft highly personalized communications that are far more likely to resonate with their customers.
One of the beauties of mobile and multichannel marketing is the massive amounts of data it generates, allowing you to refine campaigns over time. By analysing key data such as engagement rates, performance-per-creative and revenue generation, you can quickly decide to try new strategies, jump on fresh opportunities, and optimise every single campaign as it unfolds to boost performance and future planning.
Last, but not least, ensure all your leads are genuine. Deploy software that automatically detects, blocks, and reports ad fraud before it happens. Not only will this help protect your brand but your budget as well, making sure it is spent on generating authentic leads, leaving the bots alone.
As consumer appetite for mobile grows, platforms such as Upstream’s Grow can help brands across Africa deliver highly engaging multichannel and mobile marketing campaigns to achieve rapid revenue growth.
Recently, we worked with a popular South African retailer to boost its digital traffic after previous campaigns gave an underwhelming performance.
By introducing creative RCS messages to encourage people to visit the retailer’s homepage and view current deals, they were able to achieve 12,000 clicks in two weeks with a click-through rate of 22.2%. Deploying an intelligent mobile marketing strategy was just the ticket needed.
Going forwards, you too can maximize the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns by shining a spotlight on flexibility, adaptably, speed and measurement. With every single sale vital, focus on mobile to boost customer acquisition strategies with minimal impact on resources and less effort than other forms of marketing.
