9 best practices for mobile marketing automation

With half of the world’s internet traffic originating from mobile devices (just under 51 percent in 2020), marketers need to interact more with customers via mobile. And mobile marketing automation is necessary to keep up with this burgeoning segment of the industry.

In this post, we’ll share a brief overview of mobile marketing and a list of best practices for getting started with mobile marketing automation.

Mobile marketing explained 

Mobile marketing aims to reach a target audience on their mobile devices — smartphones and tablets — through email, SMS (text), MMS (text with images or video), social media, websites, and apps.

Mobile devices are ubiquitous — almost everyone uses them and keeps them within reach throughout the day. With SMS, MMS, and apps, mobile marketing channels offer an immediate connection that other digital marketing channels can’t achieve.

The majority of searches that result in a local purchase originate from a mobile device, so even small businesses need to consider including mobile marketing in their overall digital marketing strategy.

Mobile marketing automation helps automate the repetitive tasks associated with marketing, and it gives marketers an overview of all the messaging various channels are delivering to mobile users. It gives you the ability to track, evaluate, and refine your marketing efforts for maximum impact.

9 best practices for getting started with mobile marketing automation

The best practices that apply to other marketing strategies apply to mobile marketing as well — but you’ll also find some that are unique to mobile campaigns. The following are the most important:

1. Define your objectives. As always, your goals will determine your messaging strategy. Whether you want to reach new prospects, nurture existing leads and customers, or maximize customer satisfaction, you need to tailor your message to your goal to effectively engage your mobile contacts.
2. Design your campaign. Identify your target audience, develop your strategy, and create content/messaging for your campaign. You’ll base a lot of things — phrasing, layout, keywords, short codes, and the timing for sending messages — on your target audience.
3. Build your mobile database. Promote keywords and short codes for your campaigns through other marketing channels to encourage customers to sign up for promotions, special offers, and information. You can promote your short code  in email or print marketing or on social media or websites. Make the opt-in process clear and concise so it’s easy for people to sign up.
4. Send marketing messages. Use SMS, MMS, and RCS (rich communication services, which can include high-resolution video or images, file sharing, or forms such as those you create with Jotform templates) to share relevant content and capture customers’ interest. Brand your messages so your customers recognize them and their message services don’t dismiss them as spam. Also, be sure to include easy opt-out instructions.
5. Measure the success of your efforts. Define key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your marketing efforts. For mobile marketing campaigns, these will include the number of opt-ins/opt-outs, sales or revenue generated, and the click-through rate to your website or landing page. Your mobile marketing automation platform will help you track the success of your campaign.
6. Test and learn. Test every variable that you can — new content, the time of day messages go out, and audience segments to gauge audience reaction. Pay attention to the number of opt-ins and opt-outs; a high proportion of opt-outs indicates that the content or message isn’t relevant to your audience. Your mobile marketing automation software will track the relative success of each variable and automatically update your list of opt-outs so you don’t continue to contact unreceptive customers.
7. Keep keywords simple. A short and simple approach to keywords works best. Avoid special characters, and choose keywords that autocorrect won’t change. Keywords should get straight to the point to capture attention — sale, discount, special offer, etc.
8. Maintain clarity for customers. Set the right expectations so customers know what they’re signing up for. They should know the purpose of the campaign and understand how often they’ll get messages. And don’t forget those opt-out instructions — they need to be in every message. Taking these steps will help assure customers that you won’t spam their phones.
9. Offer incentives. Incentives are the easiest and best ways to drive opt-ins for text messaging campaigns. Sales and coupons are good options. Coupons are especially helpful with building brand awareness and generating loyalty. You can also incentivize customers with new product previews or content relevant to their interests.

With so much internet traffic now originating from mobile devices, you can’t afford to overlook mobile channels in your digital marketing strategy. By following these best practices — and leveraging your mobile marketing automation system to test and track your results — you can be up and running with a successful mobile marketing strategy quickly.

Want the complete rundown on marketing automation? Check out this complete guide we created on the topic.