Tag: mobile marketing

Smart businesses know that understanding your audience is key to your overall success. It doesn’t matter if you’re business-to-consumer or business-to-business focused – your audience, and their interaction with you, is what defines how well you meet your goals.

Which is why this new report from Exact Target is key reading for any business, small or large.

Taking a look at the way different mobile phone users interact with different digital channels like Facebook, Twitter and email, etc, the report shows a definite split between smartphone users and non-smartphone users.

And for any business wondering where to allocate their marketing spend when it comes to social media, it’s a split they need to take into account.

Mobile Excess Needs Mobile Access

According to the survey, smartphone users are far more active digitally than non-smartphone users across the major platforms. For example:

45% of smartphone users check email constantly throughout the day, compared to 28% of non-smartphone users.

23% of smartphone users check Facebook constantly throughout the day, compared to 12% of non-smartphone users.

32% of smartphone users check Facebook at least once per day, compared to 28% of non-smartphone users.

5% of smartphone users check Twitter daily, compared to only 2% of non-smartphone users.

In pretty much every example, it’s almost double the amount of interaction by smartphone users than that of non-smartphone users. Which is understandable, given the superior browser functions of the latest smartphones.

It’s also a great pointer as to how you approach your online marketing strategies.

Are You Thinking Smart?

Do you know the breakdown of your current customer base and how they use their mobile phones? Do you know if they’re smartphone enabled or not? If not, now’s the time to find out.

Use your database – you do have one, right? – to contact your customers and advise them you’re updating your records to make their shopping experience with you the best it can be (because you will be). To do so, you just need to know if they use a smartphone or a standard cell phone.

If you don’t have a database, then use your analytics information (you are using analytics, right?). See how many visitors to your main site or other online outposts are via mobile browser, and then see which platform they’re running on.

If the majority of people that are invested in you – existing ?or potential – are smartphone enabled, then you need to start making some decisions.

Do you make your site more interactive for smartphone audiences or easier to browse for non-smartphone users?

Do you build a mobile app that can be used to build your knowledge of your customer base (and be used as a further lead generation tool)?

Do you become less active on Twitter and concentrate more on Facebook for potential customers?

Do you build a mobile-enhanced micro-site that allows you to make quick offers and use push SMS marketing to promote?

Do you refocus on email marketing, knowing that your (potential) audience checks that more often than social networks?

These are just some of the basic questions you need to start asking. There are more, but these depend on industry, demographics, manpower and investment ability. amongst others.

The key point is, most businesses are looking at social media as the next big thing for their marketing pushes. But that should only be part of a much bigger overview – and the real gold could be just sitting there, waiting on you to hear its ringtone…

You’re a customer that does all your food shopping at your favourite grocery or deli store.

When you get there, you see the normal weekly flyer that has the current offers. Some you might be interested; others, not so much. So you flick through the flyer, then leave it at the bottom of the shopping cart.

You wander around the store, grab the things you need, then go to pay at the checkout. You might have a loyalty card for that store, so you swipe it and grab your points, and leave.

Job done for another week or so (more, if you do a large monthly shop instead). Then you’ll repeat the routine in a month’s time, and then the following month, etc.

But it could be so much more.

The Relationship to the Sale

According to a new report from eMarketer, consumers aren’t just looking for the latest and greatest offers. Sure, price plays a part in any sales process, but that’s just part of the story.

The biggest part? We want to be educated as well, as this chart from the eMarketer report shows.

What’s interesting from this chart isn’t the fact that consumers want to know how your prices compare – that’s a given. Nor is it getting or redeeming coupons – again, that’s almost a given with any retailer.

It’s the remaining pieces of information – the parts about getting nutritional information, reading product reviews and visiting the company’s site for information.

Oh yeah – and the part that this is all via smartphones while the consumer is shopping.

So, looking at the report a bit further, it’s essentially saying we, as customers, are on our smartphones while shopping to not only see if there are any online discounts available, but to see if we can find more information about what we’re about to buy.

Now how could you, as a retailer, use that information? Because it’s clear our normal shopping methods are changing, and you need to change with that. So where do you start?

Loyalty on the Go

If you’re a retailer, there’s a good chance you already have a loyalty program in place to reward frequent shoppers (I’m looking at this from a medium-to-large retailer point of view; although smaller retailers could benefit as well from a low cost loyalty program).

But how well are you using that with mobile marketing? Are you using it at all?

In Canada, for example, loyalty programs are hugely popular, with almost 94% of consumers belonging to at least one loyalty program. If you’re a Canadian retailer (or have a presence there) that equates to almost 15 million consumers to target (working on the assumption half the population are minors or children).

We know that population is increasingly smartphone savvy – as this 2009 Nielsen report shows, Canada accounts for 12% of the smartphone market (which is probably more now that the iPhone and Android are available in Canada). This equates to about 4.8 million Canadian consumers on smartphones.

So let’s think about that a second. Loyalty is huge in Canada; more Canadians are using smartphones – so the obvious next step is to combine the two with your marketing (and this can be across markets – I just used Canada as an example as that’s where I live).

Tie in your loyalty card to a mobile app. When consumers sign up for your card, advise them of your mobile app. When they download, they enter their loyalty card number and that ties their accounts together.
Monitor the usage of the app. Is it for coupons? In-store specials? Research? Build a database of your consumers’ use of your app, and build loyalty offers into that. Offer small tips on nutrition, product energy usage, etc, depending on the products you sell. Give shoppers a reason to stay in your store.
Make it easy to shop with you. Best Buy and Future Shop currently have an app that offers a ton of features to make the consumer’s experience more enjoyable. Browsing and buying options, easy check-out, barcode and billing options are just some of its features. Tie that into the Best Buy / Future Shop card, that rewards your app use with physical points, and you can see the benefits immediately. (At Bonsai Interactive, we’re currently building a bunch of apps that take this to the next level for multiple retailer industries).
Have price comparisons at the ready. Saying you offer the best value is one thing; showing it is another. Have mini-chart comparisons on prices for you and your competitors – that keeps consumers off your competitors’ mobile sites and interacting on yours.
Pro-active use of loyalty points. Because your mobile app is tied into your loyalty card, you can instantly advise consumers of when they’ve reached a certain plateau. The app recognizes how many points has been accrued and lets the consumer know via an alert. They can then buy direct from the phone with smart, targeted and mobile-friendly ads and purchases (which then gets added to the loyalty card).

And on it goes – these are just some ways you could combine your offline loyalty card with your online mobile marketing. And we haven’t even discussed where social media or location-based marketing comes into the mix – combine that with existing marketing and mobile promotions, and the sky really is the limit.

We’ve all heard the line, “Social media is changing the way we do business”. But perhaps the real line should be, “Mobile and loyalty is changing the way consumers need us to do business.”

So how far along the line are you at making your mobile customers loyal?

Image: LearnVest