Implementing Mobile Marketing Automation: Step-by-Step Guide

Mobile devices are an integral part of our lives. They started as a means of communication, and now we make payments, watch movies, and do everything else through our smartphones. With new key features added every day, it comes as no surprise that we get increasingly attached to our devices.

As you’d expect, marketers immediately jumped on the bandwagon to take advantage of people’s interest in mobile devices. This created a solid foundation to promote their products and services with mobile marketing.

So, what does all this have to do with mobile marketing automation? Since technology is constantly evolving, mobile devices are also following suit. As a result, more businesses automate communications to ease the process. If a mobile marketing specialist had to manually complete a task, automated programs do the hard part for them now.

What is Automation for Mobile Marketing?

Automation for mobile marketing entails using computerized platforms and tools to complete various repetitive tasks related to marketing efforts through mobile channels. Automation platforms can do plenty of things now, starting from campaign management to targeting mobile users and placing advertisements on mobile apps. It isn't that different from traditional marketing automation, except for the fact that it deals with mobile devices.

Fortunately for marketers, it can be applied to every channel. This makes it easy for companies to promote their services to app users and get the most out of mobile messaging strategies.

Benefits of Automation for Mobile Marketing

Automaton can prove to be enormously beneficial for mobile marketers. Some of the main benefits include:

Saving Time and Resources

Automation lets you come up with contextual message flows to send the right text at the right time. You don’t even need any coding or engineering resources. 

Scaling Your Marketing Strategy

Besides saving a great deal of time and resources, mobile marketing automation helps companies scale their strategies and reach broad audiences more effectively. Without the help of automation, it can be more and more difficult to meet the needs of every user as your customer base expands. 

Re-engaging Customers

Automation can also be an excellent way to re-engage inactive users and draw them back to your business. User retention is incredibly crucial, which is why you’ll need to optimize your re-engagement plan along the customer journey with your app. 

Driving Value 

A retention-centric marketing strategy that always meets the needs of customers at key touchpoints is sure to drive value down the line. The best way to enjoy the return on investment of existing customers is to map those touchpoints and target people across mobile channels. 

Centralize Data

With marketing automation software, you can accumulate your data across channels like SMS, email, in-app messages, and push notifications. A single place for information such as user behavior, responses, and preferences will help you create better omnichannel campaigns that align with your business goals. 

Creating Personalized Experiences

A marketing automation platform lets you personalize and reshape the customer experience at scale and on an individual basis. You can leverage custom properties and behavioral attributes to deliver relevant communications through engagement automation. 

Mobile Marketing Channels

Mobile marketers can reach their target audience through a variety of channels. Integrating these mobile channels is key to providing a seamless user experience and fostering strong customer relationships.  

Email Marketing

Emails are now integrated into every mobile device, making it easy for marketers to promote their services. They have low open rates, but they are free and have a high ROI.

This type of automation allows businesses to preset a schedule and send emails accordingly. Moreover, platforms like MailChimp can develop email plans based on consumers’ activities to boost retention rates.

SMS Marketing

SMS marketing creates closer and friendlier relationships with clients. Sending messages is very personal to customers, especially since SMS has a high open and response rate. Whether you use it for transactional or promotional campaigns, you’ll soon realize how efficient SMS marketing platforms are for your business.

Mobile marketing automation platforms can handle time-consuming tasks. They can schedule campaigns, keep track of deliveries, send transactional texts, and so on. What’s more, SMS marketing is perhaps the most affordable option out there.

Social Media Marketing

We can go on and on about how social media is taking over. Most people spend their spare time scrolling through their social media feeds. And you know it—marketers took total advantage of the popularity.

But there’s a downside to social media marketing. It can get pretty tough to manage multiple accounts and keep them functional and active.

While most companies have an entire department dedicated to social media management, there are tools that help with automation. They can create plans and strategies for your social media posts, send follow requests, and conduct thorough analyses of user interactions. They can also suggest marketing plans to increase engagement levels based on previous analyses.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is one of the most important channels for mobile marketing. Every company strives to appear on the first pages of search engines because people rarely go to the second page.

There are dozens of applications that generate keywords and leads, keep track of website traffic, and more. While these apps are smart and conduct complex assignments, you still need someone to keep an eye on them.

For sustainable SEO results, marketers must focus on multiple areas of digital marketing. These include social media and email marketing, pay-per-click advertising, and so on. By ensuring that all these strategies work in harmony, you'll improve your website's visibility and E-E-A-T.

In-App Marketing

People use different kinds of apps every day, whether video games, social media, mobile wallets, or something else. These apps are full of ads that users can’t close, at least for a couple of seconds. Additionally, apps advertise themselves with mobile push notifications.

Mobile apps are great for marketing products or services. And with current automation tools, you can track apps that have more users and place marketing campaigns there. Automation tools find better display ad opportunities and conduct a detailed analysis of their effectiveness.

How Marketing Automation Improves Performance

Mobile sales automation can enhance performance in a number of ways. These include segmentation, A/B testing, personalization, and channel management. 

Segmentation

As a marketer, you can categorize users into groups based on specific attributes. These groups are known as cohorts. This segmentation allows you to figure out how you can target each group. Marketing automation makes it possible to segment customers according to pre-defined data. Depending on your marketing needs, you can segment your audience based on details like demographics, device type, or user behavior. 

A/B Testing

Segmenting your user base also enables you to analyze how various groups react to your A/B testing. Since automation does most of the work, you can devote more time to assessing which variants perform better. As a result, you’ll have more time for creative thinking and strategy planning.

Personalization

One of the best things about mobile messaging automation is that you can easily personalize every interaction at scale. You can have multiple levels of personalization. These can range from addressing customers by their names to offering highly relevant products based on purchase history. This is key to boosting engagement and offering a unique customer experience. 

Channel Management

You can use automation software to manage several mobile channels and integrate data for the best outcomes. This integrated data allows you to make informed decisions and optimize your campaigns to drive more conversions, effectively enhancing the overall performance of your marketing efforts. 

Action Plans for Mobile Marketing Automation

There are several measures you can take to guarantee the success of your mobile marketing plan. These involve leveraging the power of automation for various purposes. 

Integrate Data 

According to research, 90% of customers prefer a consistent experience across every channel. Buyers expect brands to seamlessly guide them across multiple channels, and you can only do this by successfully integrating exclusive data. That’s why it’s important to think about how you can create the best possible buying journey for your audience. The goal is to provide a unified view that spans every single channel. 

Personalize Geolocation Campaigns

An effective way to target users automatically is with their location. You can use this data in two ways: geo-fencing campaigns and proximity-based campaigns. 

Geo-fencing campaigns are based on the customer’s GPS location. This method involves designating a point of interest, like a shop location. The “fence” defines the radius inside which the campaign is active. Once a customer enters that radius, the mobile marketing automation software sends a promotional message via SMS or in-app notification. 

Proximity-based campaigns aren’t very different from the geographic fencing method. But instead of a virtual fence, they use hardware that gives out Bluetooth signals. When a user is in range, they receive a promotional text. Remember that customers often don’t mind sharing their location data as long as you offer value in exchange, so make sure to clarify the benefits of your offer.  

Test the Onboarding Experience

A/B testing goes hand in hand with automation. One key area that calls for this testing is the onboarding experience of your app. To find out how you can optimize the experience, consider segmenting your user base into groups and monitoring what works best for users with certain characteristics. 

Create a Loyalty Program

Your mobile marketing strategies aren't complete without a loyalty program. That’s where automation programs can come in handy. To create an automated loyalty program, you’ll need to set up exclusive offers that will segment users and automatically reward those who are most active. You can use an automation platform to categorize those users and launch relevant messaging campaigns that increase customer loyalty, retention, and satisfaction. 

Track Messaging Frequency

Keeping track of your messaging cycle is essential when you’re delivering mobile push notifications to your audience. The frequency at which you send push notifications has to do with how your app functions. Make sure to set frequency limits based on data to manage how often your customers are engaged. This goes a long way toward maintaining the value of your push notifications to your users. 

Prioritize Feedback

Besides the value loyal users bring to retention and engagement rates, they also generate a great deal of organic downloads. This is a result of recommendations as well as the positive reviews they leave. By using an automatic rating system to collect feedback, you can pinpoint which customers are more likely to recommend your brand to others.  

How to Choose A Mobile Marketing Automation Platform

Having automation software is essential for all businesses. It saves money, time, and effort with only a small margin of error. However, deciding which one fits your company's needs best depends on what your mobile marketing strategy needs. There are dozens of companies that provide software designed to complete various tasks.

Localytics

Localytics is a mobile marketing automation platform (or an MMA platform) designed for mobile or web applications. It provides a thorough analysis of an app’s success with built-in AI, which predicts future consumer behavior. Localytics also suggests marketing activities based on real-time data and conducted analyses.

Since the automation platform has an intuitive UI, it allows you to test your campaigns as well. This especially helps with the user experience. Localytics can send push notifications to users based on their behavior. If they seem to be quitting the app, Localytics AI will try to make them return.

Braze

Braze is an excellent automation platform that works with artificial intelligence. It can analyze consumer behavior, create patterns, and make tactical marketing suggestions. Braze also examines the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

By collecting data from mobile users' in-app behavior and purchase patterns, Braze scans demographic details like age, gender, location, and more. The platform targets the audience through emails, push notifications, in-app ads, and news feeds and helps guide them down the sales funnel.

PushEngage

PushEngage is yet another great app for push notifications that works for both mobile and web platforms. This platform integrates with popular browsers like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and others.

In addition to that, PushEngage segments the targeted audience based on their frequently visited websites in their browser history. It also increases the number of push notifications automatically, which escalates customer interaction.

Mention

What makes Mention stand out from the crowd is its ability to monitor billions of online sources by preset categories. The automation platform detects web content in more than 40 languages, providing reports on current trends and fads.

Mention can help you understand the current needs of the market and how to keep up with the trends. Despite the abundance of information, it allows marketers to filter search results and pick relevant data.

Swrve

Swrve is a smart in-app and push notification automation platform. It offers a comprehensive analysis of customer engagement and satisfaction and identifies the strengths and weaknesses of an app. Ask anyone, and they’ll tell you that Swrve’s A/B testing is one of the best on the market.

Overall, Swrve covers most of the marketing analysis essentials. Although it is the priciest among the rest, its useful features are well worth it.