Mobile Marketing Automation Explained for 2023

In recent times, mobile marketing automation has generated a frenzied enthusiasm among marketers. With the usage of smartphones soaring with each passing day, mobile marketing automation has emerged as a decisive software to help optimize and enhance mobile experiences. In fact, data from eMarketer reveals that by the end of this year, mobile internet users will have increased to 52.3 million from 32.1 million in 2015.

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With most of the website traffic today a corollary of mobile, 71% of marketers believe mobile marketing is the cornerstone of their future business plans. This belief is not misplaced, too, with data from Statista showing that m-commerce sales were responsible for 44.7% of total U.S. e-commerce sales as far back as 2019. With this degree of expansion, forward-thinking businesses and prudent marketers are on constant vigilance for novel ways to reach out to their target audiences. This is where mobile marketing automation is coming in.

As the title suggests, mobile marketing automation involves automating routine marketing activities at scale by utilizing applications that are specifically designed for mobile use. While mobile marketing automation is not as popular as it ought to be, it is gaining momentum, with the day that it upends traditional marketing software not far away. Here, we’ll take a look at how mobile marketing automation can help improve customer relationships.

What is Mobile Marketing Automation?

Mobile marketing automation refers to the use of smart tools to execute, oversee, and automate multichannel mobile marketing strategies. While it takes mindful planning and setup, it allows you to create sophisticated campaigns with a high degree of attention to relevance to create a personalized experience for millions of customers.

These platforms equip marketers with crucial user data, such as mobile device info, location, in-app behavior, demographics, and other properties. It then meaningfully compiles this data to make customer segments and target them with personalized offerings to drive them to conduct desired behaviors.

How Do Mobile Marketing Automation Platforms Allow for Marketing Personalization?

In an ideal scenario, your CRM will be completely integrated with your MMA platform. The information available from the user profile will enable you to understand your customers in greater detail through their browsing behavior and historical data.

After you come to know of the users who love your brand and product, you can begin planning campaigns around needs that they have in common. Gradually, this information will also enable you to paint a roadmap of customer journeys to understand what pushes lapsed to re-engage themselves or to highlight the key events that lead to more long-term engagement or purchases.

Creating marketing campaigns with the help of this vital information can result in a significant increment in conversions or profits since you can act on the basis of what you know works. After you have distinguished which customer groups are important, you can begin categorizing your campaigns. If you discover that your best users react well to routine push notifications, you can offer them ongoing product recommendations to keep them from lapsing.

Benefits of Using Mobile Marketing Automation

1. Automate user engagement campaigns

Everyone interacts differently with an app. This experience that they undertake determines how captivated they will remain during their in-app journey and when they are likely to bounce.

An MMA platform helps you prevent the latter by creating specific customer segments on the basis of their in-app behavior. Segmenting customers into distinct brackets with similar in-app behavior, both negative or positive, lets you understand the touchpoints that need optimization to compel users to take the desired action.

2. Re-engage inactive users automatically

Once you know about which touchpoints need rework, you can then use mobile engagement automation to create drip campaigns on the basis of actions that they are more likely to take with a little push from you.

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Furthermore, with the help of this data, you can also isolate and categorize inactive users to create campaigns to target them with specialized offerings before they churn. Considering how the average day seven retention is as low as 30%, an MMA platform that enables marketers to automate and create re-engagement campaigns is almost a must.

It allows you to build a completely new segment containing customers who haven’t interacted with your app in the last seven days or had fewer sessions than desired in a specific period. What’s more, you can also set up triggers with personalized promotions such as discounts, promo codes, etc., to compel users to come back to your app.

3. Deliver highly personalized experiences

An MMA platform enables you to personalize and reconfigure the user experience on a one-on-one basis at scale. With the help of behavioral attributes and custom properties, you can make sure that users are targeted with relevant messaging through mobile engagement automation.

Let’s take an example.

A user visits your app and makes a few purchases. Fast forward to a week or a couple later, they haven’t made any new purchases, and you are waiting for them to re-engage. This behavior shows that while they were invested in your offerings earlier, they aren’t so now. This is when you can set up marketing automation to offer them a personalized discount or recommendation on a purchase they have been meaning to make to influence repeat purchase behavior.

4. Automate omnichannel marketing

In a world with several platforms to market your offerings, you would do good to capitalize on them to keep users engaged on their preferred platforms. With 86% of shoppers shopping across more than two channels, omnichannel marketing is the new order of the day and offering a consistent experience across these channels to create a uniform experience for customers at every stage of their lifecycle and diminish your churn rate.

With a mobile marketing automation platform, you can effectively drive omnichannel campaigns through in-app notifications, push notifications, and personalized delivery with webhooks.

This platform automatically utilizes user behaviors (user segments data) to understand their behavior across channels and help you design the customer experience journey across every touchpoint. These platforms also make use of social listening data, CRM data, and online search behavior of the customer to accordingly create a solution and re-engage them by triggering timely campaigns that enhance the user engagement rate.

Types of Mobile Marketing Automation

As mentioned above, every user has a different way of interacting with the app. So it goes that every app has distinct target users as well, which is why there is no unilateral approach that is fit for all when it comes to mobile marketing automation.

Based on their app’s performance, marketers might want to re-engage users, incentivize them, or reward brand evangelists. Whatever the case may be, there exists a native MMA platform for all these actions. Here, we will take a look at the different types of mobile marketing automation that you can set up for these actions:

1. User-based Automation Customer Journey

This kind of MMA is about creating and setting a flow that is triggered automatically whenever users enter a specific user segment or are already a part of it. These run on a predefined schedule for a particular audience base, which is your user segment divided by the total users in your user base, to create a segment on the basis of data characteristics such as in-app events, purchase behavior, app sessions, etc.

You can also set the duration of the schedule and when it should be triggered, along with the frequency of the flow. This type of mobile marketing automation is useful whenever you need to categorize your users on the basis of historical data, such as users who partook in a session a while ago, or users whose purchase count or value was lesser or greater than a specified amount, etc.

2. Event-based Automation Customer Journey

This type of mobile marketing automation is created whenever you wish to conduct and trigger your mobile engagement campaigns as soon as an occurrence takes place in your app. These engagement campaigns are then triggered in real-time, where there is no need to act upon historical data.

For this, you first have to describe the event or occurrence that will trigger the engagement automation in real-time and keep filtering it on the basis of user and event properties, which will be tracked throughout the event. Take, for example, whenever a user makes a purchase above a specific threshold, you can deliver those users a special offer or a discount for the next purchase that they wish to make, thereby encouraging future purchases.

3. Prediction-based Automation Customer Journey

Where event-based automation makes use of real-time data, and audience-based automation makes use of historical data, prediction-based automation utilizes customer analytics through deep learning of user data to gain a comprehensive understanding of their behavior. By understanding their behavior and the dynamics of their interaction with your app, you can accurately predict their future actions. With the help of these predictions, you can target users proactively with specialized offerings and marketing promotions.

How to Select the Best Mobile Marketing Automation Platform for Your Brand?

Mobile marketing automation applications can help you improve your mobile business in a host of ways; however, before you deploy your multichannel mobile strategies, you’ll have to ensure that you pick the MMA platform that’s best suited to your needs.

Given below are a few tips to help you choose the right automation platform to get you started:

• Ensure that your website/app is optimized for mobile-optimized so that you can get the most out of your MMA platform.
• Learn of at least a dozen ways to optimize your mobile marketing campaign before you start considering a new MMA platform.
• Commit assets and allow time to create your Request for Proposals (RFP), evaluation demos, and your MMA’s setup.
• Utilize this RFP as a guide to assist your team in identifying what you require on your MMA platform and the right questions to ask potential vendors.

There are a host of mobile marketing automation platforms out there that you can consider. Learn why you want a mobile marketing automation platform and then choose one based on your business needs and objectives.

Move Beyond Mobile Marketing Automation

As mCommerce grows in popularity, businesses need to come up with new ways to draw mobile visitors, convert them into customers, and retain them.

Mobile marketing automation can help these businesses by allowing them to build trustworthy relationships with their leads and guide them along the sales funnel by:

• Creating detailed greeting sequences to welcome new leads, along with informing them of your products and services
• Categorizing leads on the basis of quality and information such as the lead’s company, industry, and job title to create personalized emails and marketing collateral.
• Deploying email nurture campaigns to inform prospective buyers about your products or services in greater detail.

Mobile marketing automation is slowly gaining a foothold in the market and will be as important as conventional marketing automation in the times to come. As mobile marketing automation evolves, marketers that adopt it as soon as possible will be able to execute targeted and automated user engagement campaigns for mobile and acquire better ROI for acquisition campaigns.