How often do you shop online on your smartphone? Probably more frequent than purchases made via desktop. A smartphone can nearly perform as functional as a personal computer to offer marketers multiple channels to make the best sales pitch.
What is mobile marketing?
If you clicked on pop up ads on the apps in your smartphone, you are already exposed to mobile marketing in practice. To put it simply, it is a marketing attempt to reach out to potential customers who possess smartphones. As opposed to waiting for customers to notice them, mobile marketers bridged the gap by ringing up their phones.
Why mobile marketing?
Reach
Greater reach translates to greater opportunities for profits. This is afforded by ownership of smartphones. The smartphone penetration rate among Malaysians stood at 70% and approximately 89.3% of users relied on smartphones to go online. Unsurprisingly, Malaysian spend more than 5 hours on their smartphones in their daily lives. These avid smartphone users are walking opportunities for mobile marketers to showcase their products and services.
Responsive
Taking text messaging as an example, it is reported that the open rate exceeds 99% which warrants fair attention in future mobile marketing activities. In addition, 90% of text messages are read within 3 minutes. High priority is usually associated with text messages delivered to a personal smartphone.
Cost-Effective
Mobile marketing costs less than other counterparts. Running a full-fledged traditional marketing campaign involving multi-channel media is costly. For instance, launching a TV ad on national television require generous budget to coordinate multiple components. In comparison, mobile marketing can deliver the same or personalized messages via push notifications.
Mobile E-Commerce
The mobile e-commerce is expected lead growth in Malaysia for even bigger impact in online sales. In retrospect, total online sales amounted to RM6.6 billion for 2017 which doubled the figure in 2016. Mobile marketing played an instrumental role in catapulting this trend as it empowers users to shop irrespective of physical stores presence.
Getting Started With Mobile Marketing
Meticulous planning is required to reach campaign goals of marketing, To achieve this, selecting the ideal delivery method is the first step to secure their attention. Mobile marketing is surprisingly easy and low cost – if your enterprise is not taking advantage of this platform, money-making opportunities are waiting for you in each smartphone owner.
Text messaging: SMS marketing can do wonders for all campaigns. Composing the messages are essentially fuss-free and instantaneous delivery provide speedier results for success measurement. As they are also trackable, any clickable links can be traced for the purposes of generating leads and evaluate consumer data.
QR codes: Research has shown that humans only have attention span of 8 seconds. Can your current marketing message achieve its goal in such short time frame? When there’s too much to say, it might be ideal to code the message in QR format. The small matrix barcode can support marketing objectives by directing users to landing pages, shopping apps, or dial the business number.
Mobile web: While smartphone apps makes up the home screen of smartphones, mobile websites are nowhere near obsolete yet. Backed by the privilege of optimizing it for SEO, marketers stand a better chance in vying for consumers’ attention online. Unlike apps, mobile webs do not require any download and installation to be utilized. This makes it user-friendly, hence, a wider reach irrespective of users’ smartphone operating system – Android or Apple OS.
Mobile advertising: Myriad of mobile advertising methods are at marketers’ disposal to optimize that aligns with their goals best. For instance, 90% of consumers found that video products are helpful to aid their decision-making process. The good news? Marketers can launch their video ads online plus other assortment such as search and display ads to synthesize the campaign delivery.
Mobile app: People spend more time on mobile apps than mobile websites in which the practice consumed 87% of their mobile time. The real question is – how to engage and retain consumers who frequented marketers’ apps? Try push notifications. A study has found that average click rate for push notifications continued to increase compared to 2 years ago. Marketers should also take advantage of in-app messages to provide immediate updates and promotions which are better alternatives to e-mail.
