Mobile Marketing Software 2024: Ultimate Guide

Mobile marketing is a multi-channel digital marketing technique to reach a specific audience on their mobile phones, tablets, or any other related devices through websites, emails, messages, social media, or mobile applications. Mobile marketing is often confused with digital marketing and mobile advertising. Let’s quickly address that before we get deeper into the topic.

“Digital Marketing” is a strategy to reach customers using an electronic device or the internet. Businesses reach out through different digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, and website. ‘Mobile marketing’ is an integral part of digital marketing. It uses similar techniques as Digital Marketing but modifies those techniques for the audience that uses their mobile devices for searches and information consumption.

‘Mobile Advertising’ is one of the most important subsets of ‘Mobile marketing’. While there is a significant difference between the two, the terms are used in an interchangeable way these days. The key difference is this: mobile advertising is an approach to reach an audience that are mostly not yet customers or leads; and mobile marketing is an approach to build a database of customers or potential customers, whom the company can engage and to whom they can market their products/solutions.

All that a desktop computer is capable of is now available on a mobile device. Mobile marketing has become very powerful as most target audiences carry their mobile devices wherever they go.

• It’s estimated that over 82% of people will view a text message within 5 minutes of receiving it. App notifications, alerts and reminders provoke a high engagement rate too.

• Google surveys have found up to 46% of respondents report they prefer completing purchases via mobile.

• Marketo says, 65% of all emails are first opened on mobile devices.

The amount of time spent by individuals on their mobile devices is on a constant rise. As a result, with the right strategy and modern mobile marketing, businesses can stay connected with their customers and enable location-based or context-based offerings.

SMS and MMS Marketing

App-Based Marketing

This form of marketing gives marketers more time and visibility into the phones of the customers and helps them leverage the ‘micro-moments’ decisions. Mobile app marketing need not always be on a company-owned/created app. Some services help advertisers to publish mobile Ads within third-party mobile Apps. The In-App and In-game techniques would be very similar in targeting customers. App marketing is leveraged for advertising, retention, retargeting, and advance targeting

Location-based Marketing

Quick Response (QR) Code

QR codes are scannable 2D codes that prompt a specific action such as website visits, app downloads, and social media profiles, and others. Business owners, marketers, and agencies use QR codes in their marketing strategy for improving customer engagement and conversions.

Other popular types of mobile marketing techniques would be emails, voicemails, Mobile web search, Image Ads, etc.

Most omnichannel marketing happens on the mobile. One can seamlessly move from websites to social media platforms to eCommerce sites. As long as mobile marketing solutions are optimized and have access, they are the most efficient and flexible marketing strategies to adopt.

What are Mobile Marketing Platforms?

Mobile marketing platforms are software solutions that are purpose built to optimize mobile marketing communication. They specialize in capabilities such as real-time communication, dynamic content, customer segmentation and usage analytics on mobile devices. These features might appear as commonly known features, but on mobile marketing platforms, these are built and optimized for handheld devices.

Each of the mobile marketing techniques has its relevance and efficiency based on device, audience, and industry. The target audience for each mobile device may differ in a few cases. For example, people spend almost double the time on their smartphones than their tablets but that doesn’t imply that they consume all information on their smartphones. A young adult is more likely to make a purchase on their mobile phone. A tablet may be the go-to-mobile device for senior people making mobile purchases. People who have young children are more likely to have some mobile devices at home on a shared basis as compared to people with teenagers. Depending on the target audience, strategies are made to reach their mobile devices using one or many techniques such as via in-app/in-game advertising, two-way messaging, volume messaging, custom deals, social notes, lead scoring, and multiple device tracking and others.

Similarly, different techniques and channels are used to reach B2C and B2B segments. For example, E-mailers and Blogs have shown more results with B2B audiences as compared to B2C. Location-based marketing seems to be increasingly used for B2C customers.

Keeping track of everything and ensuring unified business information with different campaigns can be a challenge. Also, the frequency and number of campaigns are high as compared to traditional marketing. Ease of implementation of marketing campaigns and integrating it with business goals are the main reasons for companies to invest in mobile marketing software.

With mobile marketing software, businesses can promote their products and services by easily delivering engaging content. They can plan, implement, and control diverse campaigns that target various devices.

Mobile marketing tools allow companies to:

• segment the target audience

• create templates for messages, campaigns, and promotions

• reach the target audience’s mobile device

• analyze engagement and use automation to enhance customer management

• calculate mobile marketing ROI

The software can, most times, collect a mobile user’s data, including web history and location, and use it to execute custom and timely interactions with existing and potential customers. This results in a quick turnaround in making sales or gaining subscribers.

Which Industries Benefit from Mobile Marketing Software?

Mobile marketing solutions can be used by any business, irrespective of which industry or vertical they belong to. The major industry verticals would be:

• Retail and eCommerce

• Travel and Logistics

• Automotive

• BFSI

• Telecom and IT

• Media and Entertainment

• Healthcare

• Government

• Education

• Real estate

Who are the Users of Mobile Marketing Software?

While the need and features may vary between small, medium, and big businesses, it is fair to say that using mobile marketing solutions has become a necessity.

Sales and Marketing teams are the primary users of mobile marketing solutions. Customer relationship teams are also frequent users. Business heads use it to understand the usage patterns and calculate marketing ROI.

Omnichannel Engagement

Mobile Marketing Software needs to have the ability to engage with customers as they switch between devices and still provide seamless customer experience. It needs to deliver consistent marketing messages across all channels.

Push Notifications

The software needs to support push notifications to send contextual, personalized and relevant messages directly to the user’s mobile device. It should also have the ability to send in-app notifications in a timely manner based on the user’s identity and real-time behavior within the app.

Message Prioritization and Frequency

Mobile Marketing software provides a feature to control message prioritization and frequency to maximize impact. Triggers can be set based on behavioral triggers so that messages are relevant, timely and delivered at the right place.

Audience Segmentation

A key capability of the Mobile Marketing software is automated segmentation of the audience based on their interests, hobbies and personality traits. This is also referred to as psychographic segmentation. Segmentation done based on behaviors is referred to as Behavioral Segmentation. Audience Segmentation is the key to delivering the right messages to the right people. User segments can be dynamic in nature and are defined based on real-time behavior. Such segments are very powerful to deliver the right content to the target audience at the right time so that conversion possibilities are higher.

Proximity Features

Proximity features are an important functionality to have in your mobile marketing software if your company belongs to industries such as retail, restaurant, and hospitality. Proximity marketing is about communicating with the customers at the right place and at the right time, with a personalized mobile message. Beacons, geofencing, and push notifications are key features.

In-App Advertising

In-app and in-game advertising help you integrate a range of ad types. This is the type of marketing gaining ground and is very effective.

Custom Dashboards

Marketers need the ability to see how their campaigns are performing. Access to the right metrics is key to measure and monitor performance. Mobile Marketing Software provides customer dashboards to organize, monitor and collaborate on metrics. Specifically, to monitor mobile app performance, custom dashboards will be very useful. Dashboards are also a good interface to view reports.

Audience Analytics

Customer insights are key to drive effective campaigns. Many of the popular Mobile Marketing software comes with built-in analytics that helps to collect, analyze, process and act on customer insights. Such data is collected from the various channels that are in use and collated for further analysis. Out of the box reports that help monitor various KPI makes it easy for users to deeply analyze user behavior. This helps in building better products and campaigns.

Mobile marketing has opened up a communication channel between businesses and customers that is more personal than it ever was. By combining multiple variables intelligently with the huge available data, new solutions based on AI will enable marketers to reach way closer to the real customer than ever before.

AI has enabled a rapid increase in the personalization of marketing techniques and many aspects of mobile marketing. It is no longer a futuristic alien trend but a realistic component of today’s strategy.

Some of the key ways AI can enable and enhance Mobile Marketing

• AI-Powered content creation and optimized content delivery will make the content management efficient

• Using Intelligent Targeting and Retargeting can enhance Ad performance

• NLP trained Chatbots can bring seamless Customer Experience

• Voice Search Recognition is another upcoming technology

• AI-based voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and likes are iteratively learning from customer interactions, queries, requests, language used, etc. It gives marketers more data to profile users and segment them to target with relevant messages at the most relevant times.

By judiciously leveraging AI, businesses can free up more time to focus on the creative and strategic aspects of marketing. AI-driven software equips marketers and analysts with unique, location-based data that they can use to offer customers a highly personalized ad experience to improve the customer experience and customer loyalty.

AI also helps to adjust prices in real-time based on market demand and how much a customer can pay. One can use it to ascertain the need for discounts or special offers to convert potential customers.

AI brings efficiency for Marketers to precisely target their audiences and not scatter their efforts on irrelevant leads. This results in sending more personalized advertisements to users without frustrating them with irrelevant and intrusive banners, which in turn can result in negative user experience and decreased customer loyalty.

The relationship between AI-powered technologies and mobile marketing will keep getting deeper. It will keep empowering marketers to generate intelligent insights from available large quantities of data, and use it for campaigns efficiently using automation.

Free Trial Availability

There is much mobile marketing software available in the market. So, it’s best to use free trials or demos to shortlist solutions and test the solution's capabilities to meet the business needs of the organization using the software.

Technology and Feature consideration

Depending on the company’s marketing strategy and the type of usage, businesses need to look at the capabilities of the Mobile Marketing software - bulk SMS capabilities, scale, and performance, AI support, personalization, segmentation capability, in-app advertising, and analytics support.

Omnichannel Support

Based on your marketing strategy, it is important to choose the software that supports the optimal number of channels which not only meets your current needs but also future expansion.

Integrations

Mobile Marketing software needs to integrate with several other marketing applications in the organization and you need to assess its compatibility with your existing tools.

Challenges in adopting Mobile Marketing Software

Leveraging mobile marketing allows a business to reach potential new customers and existing ones, keep them engaged, and guide them through the purchase journey. But it is a crowded, complex, and complicated space. Despite the army of techniques and choice of available solutions, it has its own sets of challenges.

Mobile Marketing techniques and channels are evolving fast, demanding timely adoptions. At times, the newly shortlisted software may become obsolete too soon for economic viability due to such fast-evolving techniques. It becomes imperative to select the software which not only addresses the current requirement but is capable of scaling, upgrading or co-functioning with other software easily.

Understanding each platform is very important, and not every software can handle the depth for all available Mobile Marketing Platforms. Also, some may cater to only B2B or B2C type of campaigns. Or are very industry-specific.

Users may not have the expertise and experience to design cross-channel mobile marketing. Attempting to optimize the interface for use by various teams may end up making it even more complex.

Omnichannel marketing is the most efficient and flexible mobile marketing strategy to adopt in the current crowded and competitive market. This results in too much data, and marketers aren’t sure how best to use it. Reconciling data from so many channels, and figuring out how to sync them appropriately can be overwhelming. Not all available software may have robust data analysis assistance capability.

With so many channels and ways of marketing, regulatory bodies are being strict about compliances. Compliance requirements may exist in several areas, such as consent-based messaging, personal data collection, privacy, etc. Implementation of consent management platforms, and preventing unauthorized collection and use of location data on mobile devices is still a daunting task and a big challenge to address.

Design and content, both, need to be optimized for mobile marketing, for the software to work efficiently. Reliable mobile marketing assets such as responsive websites, mobile apps, etc. are essential. One must define a marketing strategy before investing in any marketing software.

There is one customer across multiple mobile devices. How well does the software track that? Also, multiple data scandals have eroded user confidence. Balancing the need for collecting data and giving consumers control over their digital marketing experiences is a big challenge.

ROI of Mobile Marketing

Mobile Marketing ROI tells us whether we are getting our money’s worth from the spending on marketing campaigns on multiple mobile devices. But it is not as easy as it sounds. Not all marketing campaigns are about a sale. Some could be for awareness or retention.

Mobile marketing ROI measurement depends on how businesses align it with their short-term and long-term goals. Some of the metrics could be conversion rate, cost-per-click, cost-per-acquisition, average order value, customer lifetime value, among others.

Mobile now represents almost 7 in 10 digital media minutes, and smartphone apps alone account for half of all digital time spent. Average mobile conversion rates have gone up 64% in the last couple of years. Hence, marketers and advertisers are putting more than 50% of their budget into mobile marketing. Half of the revenue is influenced by social selling in 14 common industries, including retail, computer software, healthcare, and marketing and advertising.