"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.