With the proliferation of mobile devices and the development of effective and accessible automation technologies, is this the year mobile marketing automation (MMA) becomes table stakes for a successful mobile campaign?
Mobile marketing automation puts your message at your customer’s fingertips at the exact moment it will have the biggest impact. While currently in its infancy — VentureBeat pegs penetration at about 1.5 percent — the opportunities are significant: Personalized real-time engagement, hyper-contextual targeting through triggers like location and behavior, analytics that allow narrow segmentation of users or customers, just to name a few. Enough to make a data driven marketer’s heart sing, for
sure.
In fact, we’ve just started to scratch the surface of what MMA can do.
In their recent report, “Mobile Marketing Automation: How the most successful apps drive massive engagement and monetization,” VentureBeat took a deep dive into MMA vendors and summarized their key product features.
The past year has seen significant moves by key players in the space:
- Urban Airship launched interactive push notifications, designed to create a feedback loop with mobile users, giving them options like “share” or “shop now.”
- Kahuna released details of a funding injection of some $11 million, to help create “the gold standard in mobile marketing automation.”
- Swrve, a worldwide leader in mobile marketing automation, secured a $10 million Series B round of of financing, taking their total funding to $22 million.
Overall, marketing automation is not new. Marketers have long been using it for web and email campaigns. But the customization available with mobile marketing automation is what makes it so revolutionary.
“It’s not about sending 10 messages. It’s about sending the best one message,” Adam Marchick, CEO of Kahuna, told VentureBeat. He claims Kahuna’s platform can more than double customer engagement, with a push message response rate of around 20 percent.
Here’s some food for thought: By 2020, it’s predicted that customers will manage 85 percent of their relationship (with your brand) without talking to a human (Gartner research via Hubspot). Don’t you think that chances are good they’ll be doing this with a device in their hand, rather than sitting in front of a computer? If you’re not yet sure how important developing a mobile marketing automation strategy is for you and your business, maybe that’ll get you to thinking.
If that type of result is typical, brands and marketers should be paying attention. More importantly, they should develop strategies that will allow them to get a share of the mobile marketing automation pie. MMA is new, it’s evolving, and it will quickly become essential. I say this so much that even I get kind of sick of hearing it, but there really has never been a more exciting time to be in marketing. We have the ability to be as creative as ever when it comes to campaign development, but what’s really cool is that we’ve also got data at our fingertips that allows us to highly target our audiences and focus on delivering that one right message, to the right person, at the right time. And make something happen as a result. Even better? We can track it, we can watch it happen and we can replicate it. I know I’m a big, fat geek about these things, but what isn’t fascinating about that? This isn’t something that is in the future, mobile marketing automation is now – and marketers and brands who are paying attention stand to reap some pretty awesome rewards. More importantly, they can deliver for their customers more quickly and more effectively – and happy customers is what it’s all about.
What do you think? Have you run across mobile marketing automation campaigns as a consumer? If there are any that have been particularly awesome, I’d love to hear about it. What about from a marketing standpoint? Are you focused on integrating marketing automation into your mobile marketing campaigns? Anything you’re interested in sharing on that, you know I wanna hear.
Other resources on this topic:
10 Cool Marketing Automation Startups to Watch
Mobile Email Clicks are 2X More Valuable Than Desktop [Study]
photo credit: Too Connected via photopin (license)
