Writer: CHRYSA KARAMANIDI, Chief Innovation Officer, Upstream
Every brand, and marketing team, knows that consumers are feeling the squeeze. In the months ahead, roughly 70% of people are expecting prices to go up for everyday items, shopping and utilities.
With Nigeria’s current cash crunch crippling many businesses, and consumers also feeling the impact of inflation, brands and retailers across the country, and beyond, face tough competition for every sale. As such, for many businesses, attracting and keeping customers is a growing challenge.
However, there is a superhero standing by. Mobile marketing provides brands with a scalable, cost-effective and proven way to ensure they can stand out from the crowd, as well as engage and appeal to shoppers, fulfilling their specific needs.
Why Mobile Marketing?
In February, data from the Nigerian Communications Commission indicated mobile subscriptions rose by 4.61 million in a year to 226.84 million in 2022. With mobile the de facto communication channel for most consumers, it’s important to prioritize increasing the effectiveness of your mobile campaigns. Gartner reports, for example, that SMS has a 98% open rate versus 20% for email, and a 45% response rate versus 6% for email.
From automation to creative content, clever use of data, and tools to keep ad fraud at bay, let’s examine seven ways mobile marketing can turbocharge any organization’s multichannel campaign performance:
1. Automate personalization
Shoppers want brands to care. But, looking after the specific needs of hundreds, and thousands, of individuals is an incredibly difficult challenge. That is until you deploy automation.
By building automated event driven purchasing paths into your campaigns, you can be sure to reach out to shoppers every time, and at every stage, they interact with your brand with the right content and message to suit them.
Send discounts to first-time customers, personalize offers based on their profile, or recover lost sales with a perfectly-timed friendly SMS reminder to check-out the items sitting in their 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.
2. More channels. More sales
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.
3. Prioritize getting personal
Two-thirds of shoppers expect companies to understand their needs and desires. Brands need to show customers they care by acting upon data that reveals what they want and who they are. Tools can help identify customers’ characteristics based on their demographics and profiles.
Using this information, it’s then possible to experiment with what messages, offers and channels work best for them. For example, teenagers will likely respond to, and be interested in, entirely different messages than a parent of a young family, university graduate or pensioner.
Once you know who your customers are, make sure your marketing reflects this.
4. Shortcut stunning creative
The most memorable content is often that which has the most visual appeal. Shoppers respond best to interactivity, easy-to-understand information, colour, eye-catching design, and clear instructions on what action to take next.
However, not every brand can afford or dedicate the time and resource to deploy an entire creative department.
When considering the use of quizzes, short-form video and images, as well as fun memes and gifs, to engage with your audience there are shortcuts. Easy-to-use, online, tools can help you craft stunning designs to incorporate into your campaigns in seconds, and with minimal effort.
5. Unleash the power of first party data
In response to privacy concerns, Google is set to phase out cookies in the second half of 2024. Yet, despite cookies being the main way most brands track user behaviour, many marketers still don’t have a clear idea of how they’ll continue to enable targeted ads whilst staying compliant. Here, mobile identification technologies that capture first-party data, namely the mobile phone number of a user, can save the day.
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 continue to target consumers and craft highly personalised communications that are far more likely to resonate with their customers even once third-party cookies come to an end.
6. Use data to refine and optimise every campaign
Mobile and multichannel marketing can generate massive amounts of data, allowing brands to refine campaigns over time.
By analysing key data such as engagement rates, performance-per-creative and revenue generation, brands can quickly decide to try new strategies, jump on fresh opportunities, and optimise every single campaign as it unfolds to boost performance and inform future planning.
7. Stop fraud in its tracks
PWC reports that 51% of organizations have experienced fraud in the past two years. Therefore, make sure to use mobile marketing technology to ensure every lead is genuine.
Work with a partner that can help you deploy software that automatically detects, blocks, and reports ad fraud before it happens. This is crucial in helping to protect your brand and ensure your budget is only ever spent on generating authentic leads.
As consumer appetite for mobile grows, platforms such as Upstream’s Grow can help brands across Nigeria and 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 a crucial element for success.
Armed with these seven strategies, you too can now raise the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns by focusing on turbocharging flexibility, adaptability, speed and measurement.
In a world where every sale counts, and budgets are getting tighter, make sure to consider mobile as a first port-of-call for boosting customer engagements and acquisition with minimal effort and impact on time and resources for superior results over other marketing strategies.
