Marketing on mobile devices through SMS, MMS, email, social media, and apps is nothing new, but it’s never been more important for businesses to invest in this crucial channel. Even if you’re already using mobile channels in your marketing strategy, it may be time to consider increasing your efforts to stay competitive.
Why mobile?
Enterprises that plan to integrate mobile marketing into their current campaigns must invest in mobile platforms to gain a competitive edge. For large enterprises, partnering with a mobile messaging specialist like Syniverse.com can make the process much easier.
With mobile platforms, you can significantly improve your mobile marketing efforts and benefit from the following:
- Marketing simplification: With every digital marketing channel integrated into one platform, it makes it easier for you and your marketing team to plan and initiate campaigns. There’s no need for extra training or confusing anyone as you and your team only need to familiarize yourself with one user interface.
- Effective campaigns through analytics: Most mobile platforms come with analytics and data collection programs to help you determine trends, which you can take advantage of. With data, you can also benefit from more detailed and richer reports, which can let you know the efficacy of your campaigns.
- Greater reach and broad demographic: 97% of Americans own a cellphone of some kind. With a mobile strategy, you can accurately profile your prospects and ensure you can access almost anyone with pinpoint accuracy.
Those are just the broad strokes. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty of why enterprises need to invest in mobile now, read on.
5 Reasons to Invest More in Mobile Marketing
1. The B2B mobile market is steadily growing.
If you primarily transact with other businesses, you may think that mobile marketing isn’t for you—it’s understandable. After all, when people speak of mobile, regular consumers come into mind first. However, you should know that even business-to-business (B2B) clients are now reachable through mobile as well.
Recently, more than 50% of B2B inquiries on search engines have been made using mobile devices. You can expect it to increase in the following years as more people from the digital generation who are reliant on mobile tech enter the workforce.
Currently, B2B companies that are pioneers in the mobile marketing scene say that 42% of their revenues are mobile-driven. Aside from that, they reported that their sales process has sped up by 20% through mobile marketing.
2. SMS marketing is more effective than ever.
One of the selling points of mobile platforms is the integration of SMS. Before, unified communications services only combined email, social media, and telecommunications, unlike now. With a mobile platform, you can take advantage of SMS marketing, which is crucial to the modern marketplace.
Unlike messages in email and social media, one of the most important benefits of SMS messages is their high open rate of between 90% to 99%. And around 90% of the messages are opened within three minutes. When it comes to click-through rates (CTR), SMS has been estimated to have about 5% to 10%, relatively higher than email’s CTR, which is only about 2.5%.
Aside from those numbers, SMS is proven to be very popular across demographics. Most people with mobile devices are likely to have SMS capabilities than they have an internet connection.
3. Great mobile experiences improve customer loyalty.
Mobile marketing isn’t just about advertising products and services—it can also be used to improve communications with your current customers. Overall, it can allow you to provide the best positive mobile and customer experience.
Most buyers factor in their mobile experience when doing repeat business. Around 90% of customers who received great mobile experience said they’d transact with the same company again. And even if they do have a bad experience, 50% of them are willing to continue transacting as long as it’s through mobile.
4. Mobile increases engagement and profits.
Mobile platforms improve customer engagement tremendously. Most have features and functionalities that can make it easier for companies to reach out to their customers and target audience.
Suppose a company doesn’t want to use those packaged applications. In that case, they can develop apps that they can integrate into the mobile platform or take advantage of third-party programs to improve their customer engagement operations.
According to research, businesses reported that fully engaged customers could result in a 23% increase in profits by average. Retail bankers experience 37%, consumer electronics retailers experience 29%, and hotel owners experience 46%.
5. Greater control over targeted and personalized marketing.
Mobile platforms can provide improved data collection and analytics to enterprises. Also, they can provide companies with greater control with their personalized marketing approaches. This benefit allows companies to have broader options—like targeted and customized ads—to approach their prospects and leads and turn them into paying customers.
In a study, 44% of respondents are willing to give their information such as email addresses, physical addresses, and names in exchange for personalized advertising. Having a mobile platform can allow you to farm all of them with ease.
However, tread lightly when it comes to personalized marketing and data collection. Know that there are conflicting opinions about it. In a different study, 17% believe that targeted ads are unethical, while 59% believe it isn’t. Nonetheless, you don’t need to abandon collecting data and the personalization of ads entirely. The same study found out that 43–60% of respondents still believe that companies can still be ethical when using the data they collected from them.
The Takeaway
Despite SMS being available for nearly three decades now, the future of mobile marketing still looks bright. Especially in a world that is becoming more and more digital, enterprises that invest in mobile marketing strategies will have an undeniable advantage.
