Key Speaker: Mr. Josh Todd (CMO, Localytics)

This write-up explores the intrinsic mistakes that most marketers are making with their mobile engagement strategies. Overexposure is not helping the business or its buyers. Thus a proper solution has been suggested based on extensive research.

Premise

Majority of the companies involved in the business of digital marketing on mobile phones have adopted a holistic approach. So beyond social media, content marketing or e-mailers, such agencies have also adopted ‘Push’ messaging as an aggressive option. However, excessive usage of the same has robbed the marketer of its actual uses. A kind of crisis has emerged in mobile engagement strategies and this needs to be rectified sooner rather than later.

Vital Statistics & their Deductions

Marketing research conducted by Localytics has found out that nearly a fourth (23%) of apps downloaded are used only once. This when measured against the backdrop of the fact that app developers evaluate their success based on number of downloads, appears quite stark. Measuring the number of downloads is not the right metric to evaluate performance as a substantial number of them are used only once. Also once people change phones, loyal customers re-download the previous apps found useful. While this does take into account loyalty, yet it also counts the same user twice or more number of times. The research also found out that about half the users of smartphones found Push messages as irritating.

What is quite remarkable is that a third of marketers do not segment their audience on any basis and blindly broadcast their Push messages to all. This is a very bad strategy as it leads to huge erosion of brand value as customers get inundated with excessive of what they consider ‘sales pitch’.

A simple arithmetic conducted shows that on average a single smartphone user receives more than 3,500 useless messages in a year. All this can alter if segmentation is applied to this.

Solutions to Mobile Engagement Crisis

The time has come for marketers to forge deeper and more meaningful relationships with the customer base. Two key ingredients have been suggested to achieve that which are as follows:

$1·         Data driven decision making

$1·         Truly knowing customers

Data Driven Decision Making

Customers these days are giving us so much information inadvertently. So much of data is available that with proper datawarehousing, marketers can get access to exact profiles of customers depending on their app usage patterns, shopping trends, feedback provided, time spent on website and exploration of competitor websites even. Marketers must track this information and make decisions accordingly. It has been understood that eighty eight percent more app launches are there for those that have Push messages enabled alongside.

Knowing Customers

Business intelligence procured on customers can allow deep personalization. Here personalization does not merely mean tracking of birthdays or sending a mail with the person’s first name being mentioned. It is about understanding what exactly the customer needs and likes. One company that has truly embraced such thinking is Nike with its running app.

Nike + Running

Nike’s app which measures and tracks the miles run by the user, is one example of an organization that has used all this data and subsequent business analytics to deliver value to its customers. It has used the real world A/B Testing methodology. It has also extensively studied data to know exactly when to push which message. The app can even predict when the user needs rest in between running, when he / she must restart or when to push the runner to endure more.

Segmentation

Let us compare the two methods of push messaging which are Broadcast messaging and Targeted one through the following table:

Segmentation may be done in two ways which are as follows:

$1·         Behaviour based

$1·         User profile

Behaviour based Segmentation

Here users are segmented on the basis of their purchase and search history. Trackers are adopted which measure the different pages where customers visit, how long they stay there and what they buy.

The New York Times app uses this method for its sports pages. It tracks whether readers are more interested in the NFL or other major leagues of North America. In case of the former, draft picks especially of New York or nearby teams are pushed aggressively as they elicit heavy readership.

User Profile

This methodology segments the user base depending on basic demographic trends such as gender, location and language.

At times these two approaches are combined and then give far better results, much greater than the sum of its parts. The benefit of such tracking is that it is all in controlled group with similar likes or dislikes. Clicked message rate is a vanity metric which does not yield any results but simply makes the marketers feel good.

Conclusion

It has been found out that 52% of smartphone users have Push messages enabled in their systems. However, this also means that 48% of users do not have it enabled and this presents a massive business opportunity. These people need to be brought onside. A method where they are simply asked to sign up on the launch of a new app will not work. Instead a unique well designed, in-app message needs to be launched for all.

Mobile engagement provides a massive opportunity to marketers globally but it needs to be target with sensitivity. Marketers must think like customers. Also the knowledge base presently is still growing and it is imperative that individual firms only enhance that. 

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