6 Ways Mobile Marketing Automation Boosts App Engagement And Monetization

"These are a few of my favorite things", mobile apps and marketing automation.  A perfect marriage.  Mobile is the channel of the future and marketing automation can enhance it to improve monetization no matter what the business model.  This article is focused on the freemium business, but I believe it applies to everyone who has a mobile app.  Marketers should start thinking of mobile as a channel instead of a business unit, then the understanding of marketing automation and true omni-channel marketing can come to fruition.

1) Understand users’ behaviors

For any type of campaign to succeed, developers must first understand their users’ behaviors and the motivations behind them.

What price point is likely to get a certain user to make a purchase? Which items or services are they most likely to pay for? What is most likely to trigger their first purchase? Their second? Their tenth? What kinds of rewards (free coins, extra lives, unlocked content) do they want most? How likely are they to refer a friend? Why or why not? Which features do they use most often, and what new features would they most like to see?

This is marketing automation at its finest.  Taking the users behavior and trying to drive additional behavior or change the current behavior if possible.  Using mobile as a channel allows for the ultimate in timeliness.  Most people have their mobile device on them all the time, so being able to communicate and knowing it will reach your intended target immediately makes mobile the best channel for marketers.  Targeting the offer and the message is just icing on the cake.

2) Build advanced user segments

Not all users are created equal. They must be treated as individuals, and in order to do that at scale, developers have to divide their user base into distinct segments.

Is there any other way to build segments?  Start small and grow your segments.  There are numerous ways to skin this cat, but segments should be grown out of analytics.  Don't segment customers by gender if males and females behave exactly the same.  Segments are built from knowledge of behavior that is different from the rest of the group.  That's how new segments are born and they are different for every business.

3) Set up custom messages and campaigns

Once cohorts are created, developers can start targeting those groups with custom messages and campaigns.

Segments are built for customizing offers and messages.  If this is not going to happen, then there is really not a need to identify the segment other then for analytical purposes.  The reason these customers stood out from the rest is they were different, so make sure they receive different messaging and offers.

4) Deliver messages during contextually relevant moments

The next step in perfecting a mobile marketing automation strategy is to pick the right moments to serve campaigns.

The right offer to the right person at the right time.  This has always been the direct marketers mantra.  Timing is very important in marketing.  In this context, the discussion is when to serve up an app in a game, but this applies to all marketers.  I bought an engagement ring at Tiffany's for my soon to be wife.  I received weekly emails after that purchase advertising the engagement ring.  This would have been the optimal opportunity to sell me a wedding band, both male and female.  

5) Select the right channel

In-app messages aren’t the only way to promote campaigns.

In the context of marketing for freemium games this is always a tough one, but for regular brick and mortar businesses, this brings home the point I started the article with, mobile is a channel.  Sometimes it will not be the right channel. For instance, as a hotel mobile is a great channel for marketing offers while the customer is at the property.  For when they are at home, they don't need to see there is a free cocktail waiting for them at the bar, bad channel and timing.  A lot of times, email is the preferred channel and mobile is used for more contextually aware needs.  But test that theory.

6) Track, measure, and optimize

The final step, as with any campaign, is to continually improve upon your results.

This is the best final step there is, because without it there is no way to really enhance the campaigns.  Be sure to capture all the relevant data and be able to access it through a BI tool that can represent data visually.  This will allow for greater insight to the data.  Once hitting a wall with the BI tool, then advanced analytics can come into play in the form of data mining and predictive analytics, but there will be plenty of segments created without those tools.  Remember, marketing automation campaigns are living and breathing.  They are never finished, so constantly be looking for that next great segment.

The Current State of Email Marketing in 9 Fascinating Stats [#SlideShare]

Some very interesting stats on the slideshow, just click the title and you can view them.  The interesting stat to me was 20% of marketers link their primary revenue back to email.  I think this number is too low.  Email is still the best channel for businesses.  

Now I believe mobile will overtake email soon because it is a more direct channel.  Mobile apps have the potential to be the greatest marketing channel in our lifetime.  The phone is always with us.  It knows where we are, where we've been.  It knows if we are moving or standing still.  It knows where in our store our customers have been.  It is also always on, always available.

Email is not dead, but it already knows who will kill it.   

Great Brand Apps Create Loyal Happy Customers

Mobile apps are the way we will interact with all of our loyalty programs in the digital age.  Smartphone apps can do so much more than a piece of plastic or punchcard could have ever imagined, yet so many companies have built half-baked, poorly thought out attempts at creating a customer experience.  But the good news is there are some leaders that are nailing it.

The 4 qualities a mobile app should possess are:

A mechanism to capture transactions 

At the heart of the mobile experience should be the mechanism to capture data about the customer.  This data should feed into the loyalty program of the brand.  This should come in the form of transactional, interests, surveys and geo location data.  Data is the building block for a loyalty program to succeed.  

Frictionless transactions

A mobile app has the ability to eliminate the frictions of the transaction.  For example, at an Apple Store the customer can enter the store, open the app, scan the item they would like to purchase and then leave the store, all without having to interact with a human or wait in line.  That is eliminating friction.

A mechanism to communicate with your customers

Mobile is a channel.  It is perhaps the most important channel in the new digital marketing era.  The phone is always on your customers body and that will soon include wearables.  The ability to push messages to your customers through this channel is extremely important.  The ability for your customer to open the app and see their loyalty program details makes communicating with your customer more personal than ever before.  This includes beacon support to guide the customer through the offline experience as well.  This should be the channel that receives the most focus in the coming years.

An engaging experience without a transaction

Mobile apps hold a space on the customers phone.  If you make your app engaging, even when the customer is not making a transaction with you, you may keep a good position on the phone.  Think of it as search rankings, the more prominent position, the more engagement with your brand.  Get stuck in a folder on the third page, you will only be utilized as a mechanism for transactions which is not the worst thing in the world, but doesn't drive behavior. 

Starbucks has been on the forefront in the mobile app space since it introduced its mobile app in 2011.  Starbucks took the approach of creating an app that engages customers when not in a Starbucks, along with making the transaction process frictionless.  Starbucks has long partnered with Apple by giving away free music and apps, but they also moved this functionality to the app.  By doing this, Starbucks has been able to engage their customers with their application outside of the brick and mortar stores.  I consistently look at my badges from Starbucks to see what free apps or music they are giving away this week.  Most of the time I don't get the freebies because they are not to my liking, but every once in awhile I do.  But it also has trained me to constantly go to the app.  I check my points and how far away I am for a free award and I am not even a big free award kind of a guy.

Starbucks has also made a frictionless payment process that also tracks my behavior.  I always received gift cards from Starbucks and had them strewn all over the place.  Some made it to the wallet, some were in drawers, but they were never consolidated.  Starbucks also had a loyalty program that was tied into a gift card, but it was confusing on how to interact with the program when I wasn't using that particular gift card.  Plus having to manually add money to the specific gift card was far from frictionless.  So I never really used the loyalty program and I was going to Starbucks less.  The app has removed all of this friction.  It is easy to transfer gift card money to the main loyalty account, which was a main pain point for me.  It also allowed for easy addition of funds into the card through the app.  These two items made using the program much easier.  

The other app that I have been very impressed with is the Chipotle app.  This app is a little different from the Starbucks app because it is just solving one problem, waiting in line.  The app allows you to place a Chipotle order and skip the line to pick it up at a designated time.  Now I don't know if any of you have been in a Chipotle and have to wait in the line to order, but it could be a fifteen minute exercise in browsing Twitter.  The app saves your favorites and recents so it takes approximately 20 seconds to place an order.  Pay online, just walk to the cashier and they hand you your bag of goodness and you are off.  Simple, frictionless and awesome.   

Improvements can be made in both of these apps to include more of the 4 qualities.  The Starbucks app nails 3 out of the 4, but can do a better job at using the app as a personal, targeted channel.  Right now the offers they have are not very tailored to my experience.  This is a big opportunity to make the app even more engaging.  For Chipotle, they only possess 1 out of the 4.  They might be monitoring my transactions, but they don't have a loyalty program tied to the app, so I am not sure.  The app is a great start, but they could hit a home run with the addition of some functionality.  Either way, I will still use it weekly to avoid the lines.