Top Gear: Useful Internet Marketing Strategies & Tips to Move You Forward: What Role Does Mobile Play in Cross-Channel Marketing?

Friday, 4 December 2020

What Role Does Mobile Play in Cross-Channel Marketing?

Cross-channel marketing continues to be a primary strategy as customers jump from one channel to another to do their research and complete their purchase. Here’s what you need to know about the role mobile plays, so you optimize your cross-channel marketing efforts.

Personalization

The first part of mobile’s role is to assist with deepening the personalization of all interactions with customers. Reaching customers about something they’re interested in while they are participating in it — such as a sporting event or concert—and likely using their mobile phone, is one of the most effective ways to personalize marketing efforts.

Personalization is an opportunity to deliver additional value for your customers. For example, you can send customers promotional offers, coupons, or contests while they are in a store or at an event through SMS or a mobile web app. Consumers will appreciate the real time communication with value offerings while they wait in line or browse a store.

Customer contact

There’s more to mobile’s role beyond personalization. Customers tend to be on the move. Although the movement has declined due to shelter-in-place orders in 2020, mobile devices are still the go-to channel for consumers whether they’re on the couch, in their vehicles, or in retail locations. Mobile allows brands to interact with customers, regardless of their location.

Differentiation

Mobile offers different features and functionality unique to the channel, providing an opportunity for marketers to exploit these and provide a rich experience for customers on a mobile device. This can become a significant differentiator if your competition isn’t doing the same.

Content

Another role for mobile in cross-channel marketing is delivering consistent, relevant, and valuable content. That means being able to share responsive and correct landing pages with customers.

Doing so encourages these mobile users to check out your content on other channels. In contrast, doing it wrong means a high bounce rate and missed opportunities to funnel that traffic to your other channels.

Data insights

Mobile also plays a key role in delivering valuable insights to help your marketing team understand customer behaviors, preferences, and mobile usage. Since it’s such a highly used channel, mobile has significant amounts of data available.

Experienced brands use APIs to connect mobile data with the data from other channels to get an incredibly descriptive view of how their customers use and interact with channels, including how they use mobile as part of their purchase journey. In return, this brands gain intelligence that can better inform their marketing strategy, tactics, content, and delivery.

One piece of the marketing strategy puzzle

Today’s consumers interact with brands in so many different ways across more than one channel. Smart brands understand how their customers behave across all channels and at all touchpoints.

To fully engage with your audience, consider leveraging the mobile platform to its full potential as you do with all channels. As part of the marketing strategy puzzle, mobile tactics should be creative and directly aligned with customer needs and expectations.

What you can do

Now that you see the importance of mobile’s role in the overall marketing strategy puzzle, it’s time to act. Here are some things you can do to start ensuring mobile takes on a larger role.

Optimize everything you do for the mobile environment

This includes the content, graphic design, and format of all ads, promotions, messaging, website and landing pages, email campaigns, and more. Check that everything you do delivers an exceptional customer experience on mobile.

During this step, find how to connect and consolidate cross-channel customer data. This is a must in order to make the most of mobile’s role in providing some of the greatest amounts of information about customers and their behaviors.

Start building out more personalized targeting tactics

This includes creating a mobile app, if you don’t have one, to offer a loyalty program, as well as location-based and personalized offers. In return, offering a way to provide more personalized and proximity-based experiences through mobile will encourage customers to share more information about themselves, increasing the mobile data that can be consolidated with the data from other channels.

During this stage, ensure that your mobile channel offering enables customers to easily share what they are doing or receiving from your brand on a social basis.

Expand functionality

This might include customer service and in-store interactivity, fulfillment tracking, and mobile checkout. Technology investment will be critical here because of the complexity in adding to these areas of your mobile channel efforts.

Understanding and acting on the role of mobile in cross-channel marketing can deliver a more comprehensive way of reaching these “anywhere, anytime customers.” In return, this increases the likelihood of engagement across the rest of your marketing channels. 5 Pro Tips to Optimize an Email for Mobile

For more information about mobile and cross-channel marketing, check out: