New Mobile Innovations Enhance the Marketing, Sales, and Customer Experience

Editor's Note: Today's post comes courtesy of Chris Lynch, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Oracle Marketing Cloud.

When I attend technology conferences, I get a chuckle when the presenter holds up a mobile phone and says: “These devices are changing everything.”

That’s because mobile is so pervasive—doing nearly everything everywhere—that it’s become passé and cliché to make such statements. According to research from Nielsen, 87% of US smartphone and tablet owners are using their mobile devices for shopping and that consumers check their mobile devices 150 times a day.

Mobile is big. We all get it.

But while today’s marketers and advertisers realize that mobile marketing should be a key component of their overall marketing mix and cross-channel strategy, they face significant hurdles to do it right.

One issue is around identity. As consumers use a mobile device, they create different identifiers depending on whether they log into an app or browse more anonymously on the mobile web.

The data they create—whether it’s behaviors, preferences, or attributes—can end up in silos across channels. In fact, 85% of digital marketers say the biggest challenge to cross-channel marketing is customer data that’s spread across multiple channels.

But help is on the way. New mobile marketing innovations can help marketers and advertisers target their ideal customer and orchestrate a mobile experience that’s coordinated with other marketing channels. Mobile touches different areas of the customer lifecycle—from acquisition to retention to advocacy. Let’s walk through these innovations with that in mind.

1. Enhance Mobile Advertising and Acquisition with Smarter Data Strategy

Now you can connect identities across disparate mobile channels and devices to one person while easily building mobile audience segments using your owned proprietary data and third-party data. To target those customers with relevant advertising, you can use hundreds of pre-integrated media and ad providers so you can serve up a mobile ad on your preferred paid media providers.

2. Increase Retention and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) with Mobile Marketing Orchestration

Too often, mobile messages don’t take into account other cross-channel interactions, especially when marketers try to reach consumers with new promotions, cross-sell offers, or in-store messages. Now mobile enhancements for B2C Marketers can be orchestrated alongside email, social, display, and other key marketing channels.

These include:

• SMS Campaign Management. You should be able to use a variety of campaign templates to support various SMS use cases within easy-to-use frameworks for building two-way customer interactions. Customers could then text in a coupon code to redeem at a store, or receive notifications when their favorite products are in store.
• Link Tracking for SMS. Go ahead and embed branded short URLs in your SMS messages to get deeper insights into how well campaigns perform by monitoring SMS click through rates, conversions, and click recency. SMS click recency behavior is recorded at the individual level and can be used for advanced targeting.
• SMS Keyword Listening. You can now listen for customers who text in keywords to short or long codes. When you receive a keyword, you can trigger a marketing program and an orchestrated response.
• Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). How about delivering rich MMS to mobile devices as part of your cross-channel orchestration strategy? What’s an example? You could use mobile coupons and promotions that include images, audio, color, and animation.
• Push Picture Notifications. On Android devices, push picture notifications can now incorporate images such as coupons. Images sent as part of a mobile message entices recipients into taking a follow-up action. This could encourage users to open the notification and further engage with a mobile app.
• Push Campaign Management. Campaign marketers need push capabilities that are fully integrated into their cross-channel marketing solution. Now you can design, configure, and manage all push campaigns with greater personalization with data tied to your contact profile table.
• Dynamic Deep Links in Push & Email Messages. Bring customers back to their mobile app by embedding dynamic deep links in push and email messages. When customers click on these dynamic links, it will open offers directly inside the mobile app, creating a more seamless mobile experience.

3. Improve the Mobile Experience for Business Buyers and Sales Teams with Better Connections

B2B marketers need mobile connections that help marketing and and sales teams support better customer interactions with their product or services while they’re on the go.

• Mobile Profile Access. Sales executives can now use their mobile device to access customer profile and Digital Body Language information such as customer web, email, and social activity. This puts rich contact data literally in the hands of a sales rep, wherever the rep is working.
• Visualizing Responsive Design. Make it easy to see how an email or landing page will scale across devices, including to a mobile or tablet experience.
• Engagement Tracking. Business marketers can include trackable links in either SMS or push messages orchestrated within their campaigns to better understand engagement with their content.
• Connected Vendor Functionality. Marketers can now connect to their mobile technology vendors of choice for SMS and MMS messaging, including sending images, managing short and long codes, and sending QR codes to their customers.

Mobile Case Study: ACE Cash Express

So what’s an example of a company successfully incorporating some of these mobile tools into their cross-channel marketing strategy? ACE Cash Express, a check cashing business providing payday loans and cash advancing services, is one. The world of lending is highly regulated, making mobile a critical channel to engage and communicate with ACE’s customers.

ACE uses behavioral data to personalize interactions across email and SMS as part of an orchestrated experience. For example, starting at sign up, ACE asked customers to opt-in for email and SMS during their loan applications in order to provide the relevant and timely messages they needed. Then they receive a series of messages personalized to where they are in the lifecycle and based on how they responded to previous messages. Each customer’s path evolves in various ways depending on when they sign up and how they interact along the way.

These campaigns have generated a 2x lift in response rates when SMS was used in conjunction with emails. Furthermore, the company reported that they saved more than 15 hours per month in company resources from this automation.

If you’re an Oracle Marketing Cloud customer, these new mobile innovations are now available and at your service courtesy of Oracle ID Graph, Oracle Data Management Platform (DMP), SMS Campaign Management Tool, Push Campaign Manager, and our mobile DMP.

While we discussed a lot about technology, your strategy is just as important.

Learn more in our upcoming webinar on Maximizing Your Mobile Marketing Strategy on May 27 at 11:00 a.m. PT / 1:00 p.m. ET, where the experts will highlight the value and benefits in using mobile marketing as part of an overall effective marketing strategy and identify the key points you need to achieve mobile marketing success.