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Today, with the help of landing pages, custom links, SEO, social media and more, nearly everything can be measured and tracked. And consumers are interacting across several different devices and platforms (laptops, tablets, mobile, etc.). It’s no surprise that even the smartest brands can struggle with the complexities of identifying the right data to model, predict and improve performance across multi-channel campaigns. When you are swimming in data, you run the risk of “success theater,” which are metrics that make you feel great about your work but don’t actually report meaningful data that can illustrate the success (or lack thereof) of a campaign.
However, if marketers focus on a mobile-first strategy, they can capture more intelligent insights than ever before. That’s because mobile is the most consistent customer identifier. For example, if your marketing campaign relies on mailers, you’re likely sending them to a new resident since, as FiveThirtyEight says, the average American moves 11.4 times in their lifetime. If your campaign focuses only on email, you’re somewhat likely to get a bounce back; according to marketing pundit Jay Baer, 17 percent of Americans create a new email address every six months. But a recent report from Pew Research suggests that even when moving to a new city or state, more Americans than ever are keeping their old phone numbers. They found in 2016 that 10 percent of U.S. adults use a mobile number outside of the state where they live, and they expect that number to keep growing.
Instead of adding yet another measurement tool to your growing pile of reports that never get viewed, marketers should be thinking about how mobile marketing can help them understand more about their customers, especially as it relates to shopping insights and behavior.
When building a marketing strategy to increase sales, the goal is to create the best experience possible for the shopper across all physical and digital channels and to make the buy happen for their brand. Mobile analytics will never fail to give accurate insights into the following areas.
Really know your customer
We all know by now that consumers prefer personalized ads. No one has time or patience for something that feels irrelevant. Because cell phone numbers don’t change, brands have an opportunity to grow with the consumer and understand how their tastes or interests change as time goes on. For example, most parents don’t want to continue to get special offers for diapers once their kids grow out of them, right?
Find your customer
Think about the last time you left your phone at home (or worse—lost it!) and how unnerving it was. The truth is, phones go where the consumer goes. Technology solutions services provider Asurion found that Americans check their smartphones 80 times a day on average. What would we do with our hands without our phone? Given the constant companionship of our phones, marketers can generate rafts of untapped contextual data about these individuals. Being able to glean, for example, that a potential customer is at a nearby restaurant midday, a coffee shop could send an offer for a post-lunch dessert at a discount. Or if a customer is at a kids’ gym, a toy store could send a coupon for active play equipment. When 70 percent of Gen Z consumers in the U.S. tag brick-and-mortar options as their preferred shopping channel, marketers have got to make sure they leverage this capability.
Understand your customer’s buying behavior
Consumers are getting increasingly comfortable with mobile wallets for coupons and loyalty cards. 451 Research recently found that demand is increasing and will continue to do so. And we know from our own surveys that consumers love getting personalized offers through them. Since mobile wallet is tied to consumers’ mobile numbers, it gives marketers direct insights into what types of offers do and don’t work, which can be tied to data on their location and previous behaviors.
Also compelling is the speed in which marketers can access these insights when leveraging mobile analytics. Open rates for short message services (SMS) are close to 99 percent (compared to 20 percent for email). Text messages are intimate and immediate. Try to identify a more relevant, timely channel for marketing communications. Real-time access to contextual details makes it possible to interact with the user in their moment of need, taking customer engagement to whole new level.
The bottom line is that mobile analytics have given incredible power to marketers with the ability to explore the behavioral patterns to unlimited depth. So why not use it?
