See how the Emarsys customer engagement platform helps marketers deliver personalized, 1:1 experiences across multiple channels and drive business outcomes.
See how the Emarsys customer engagement platform helps marketers in a range of industries deliver personalized, 1:1 experiences that deliver measurable results.
We are the purpose-built platform that gives power to the marketer. Build, launch, and scale personalized cross-channel campaigns that have measurable impact.
Mobile has been an unavoidable marketing channel for several years now for brands whose consumer audience is active on smart devices. As mobile continues rising in popularity, B2C brands should shift their focus to include these main areas: SMS, push messaging, and in-app contextualization and personalization.
Mobile experiences are faster than any other channel, and the more customers use your app, the more loyal they likely are. Through better personalization, you can drive more purchases more often from more loyal customers.
Among the requirements for inclusion in the Forrester WaveTM: CCCM Q4, 2019 report — where, as a shameless plug, we were selected as a leader — Emarsys delivers “robust mobile capabilities including push messaging, in-app personalization, SMS, and messenger platforms.”
We feel the report affirms this undeniable fact: mobile is as vital a component to an integrated marketing approach as any other channel.
Learn Why Forrester Ranks Our Mobile Capabilities a Perfect 5/5
In an always-on digital ecosystem where the lines are becoming increasingly blurred between personal relationships and brand interactions, texting may well be the most intimate option for communicating with brand fans.
And the SMS marketing channel is growing at a steady pace — compared to 2016, 23% more people will opt-in to receive SMS messages from companies by 2020 (Mobile Xco). This equates to about 48.7 million people who will choose to receive business SMS messages by 2020.
For busy marketers juggling dozens of other channels, campaigns, and projects (and trying to scale personalization on all of them), merely creating and sending SMS messages isn’t really enough anymore.
Marketers need to be able to effortlessly execute SMS campaigns with automation and real-time capabilities. If you can use tech to help, you can spend more time creating highly compelling content and messaging.
With the right tech, you can automate SMS messages that seamlessly integrate with existing omnichannel data. This will allow you to connect with customers wherever they are to build loyalty without raising costs. You can integrate mobile with your website, too, in order to send real-time abandoned browse and cart messages.
Just about the worst thing marketers can do today is damage their ROI with mass SMS blasts that don’t even target recipients. Additionally, the Emarsys Marketing Platform helps to truly maximize budget efficiency by removing all hard bounces, invalid numbers, and duplicates before sending.
And, you can track SMS campaigns and message-level performance in real time.
“Marketers need to be able to effortlessly create SMS campaigns w/ #automation & #realtime capabilities” CLICK TO TWEET
In-app personalization is an emerging opportunity for brands that want to provide that “little bit extra” for users. But, customizing your application experience when customers are using it means that you need a contextual, data-driven understanding of real-time behavior.
Real-time in-app personalization allows you to understand customer behavior during a user’s current session with personalized messages which look and feel like part of the native experience.
This underscores the importance of orchestrating the in-app customer experience from a unified marketing platform where all customer data is stored.
You can also combine in-app messaging with behavioral segmentation to track, activate, and convert users automatically. Mobile-first companies are leading the way and even differentiating freemium and premium users, and targeting them accordingly.
Runtastic is a mature mobile brand that helps customers track and stay up-to-date on their fitness goals.
The brand has amassed more than 30 million app downloads, with about 60% of those people registering once downloading. They send 8 million messages per month via 16 apps.
The goal is to funnel users toward one of the four core mobile applications, then to ultimately create a subscriber.
Based on how each user interacts with the app, Runtastic can optimize how it prompts registration time-wise and discount-wise. Through a personalized newsletter and in-app and push messages — powered by AI marketing technology — Runtastic is able to engage users, retain them as loyal customers, and ultimately monetize them via subscription.
Runtastic sends strategic push messages geared to boost engagement.
As soon as users enter Runtastic’s database by downloading and signing up via an app, data is being generated about who they are and what they’re interested in. The brand can immediately make inferences about what particular users may be interested in and begin messaging them at scale.
Connect with Push Notifications
According to CleverTap, the average U.S. smartphone user receives 46 app push notifications per day. And, 40% of web push notification senders belong to either the e-commerce/media, publishing, or blogging vertical. The e-commerce sector primarily uses push notifications to announce offers and discounts, with five out of six businesses using them for this purpose (Business of Apps).
Personalized push notifications help enable 1-to-1 mobile experiences. Our customers use the Emarsys Mobile SDK to send personalized push notifications including product recommendations.
To go back to the example provided above, push messages are always trigger-based at Runtastic. When customers finish a workout, the brand does not want to solicit them with product-related messages. Instead, they want to summarize the workout, offer ideas for recovery, and build a relationship in that moment. After a workout, users might receive a push notification to visit a blog post with post-workout meal recommendations based on their preferences. Once it started adopting this philosophy, the brand saw a 90% engagement increase.
You can use rich behavioral data to trigger campaigns at the time individual users are likely to be most receptive. The machine will determine activity patterns and then automate push notifications to strike when individuals engage with the app the most, regardless of if they’re night owls, early risers, or something in between.
“Use #behavioraldata to see when people engage w/ your app most & automate push notifications based on those patterns” CLICK TO TWEET
How it works in our product:Push notifications are orchestrated inside of Emarsys Mobile Engage. When a user installs your app and gives you permission to send push messages, a push token is generated. This is created using data unique to the application and the device. It is later used to deliver the push message to the device. Messages are created and saved here, and can also be added to an Automation Center program node. Finally, the message is delivered to the end users’ apps, with the necessary conditions for triggering them on the device.
Conclusion
Personalized mobile messages allow you to react to customer behavior in real time. You can build automations and deliver the right messages the moment customers interact with your mobile app.
Mobile is a perfect way to connect with customers with native product recommendations, in-app messaging, SMS, and push. With automatically triggered messages that become more personalized as the app is used, you’ll see increases in conversion rates, active customers, and revenue.
Mobile provides ripe and valuable data captured directly from people’s personal “brain extension” — their mobile device. With the ability to track various app events from installs, to key interactions, in-app and website behavior, and more, mobile is a can’t-miss channel moving into 2020.
Michael is Digital Content Manager at Emarsys. In conjunction with his team, he manages the Marketer + Machine content hub and podcast – creating best-of-breed, educational material for e-commerce and digital marketers. Michael is a published author on industry publications including Content Marketing Institute, JeffBullas.com, Business2Community, and others.
