Mobile marketing is booming beyond the benchmarks this year. Retailers have been investing a lot of money into mobile marketing and it is really paying off. As we just wrapped up the week of Cyber Monday, statistics show that mobile sales alone totaled $1.07 billion dollars. This was a huge 34% increase according to Adobe Digital Insights. Walmart also reported that 70% of its Cyber Monday sales this year were placed on a mobile device.

So, what can you do to step up your game with mobile marketing?

 

1. Understand Your Audience: Think about the digital profile of your customer. Ask yourself the following questions. Where is your customer located? How much time do they have? Are they at work, or out shopping? Are they single or married? Do they have kids? Answering these questions will help you start to develop a better marketing plan.

Respect Their Time: Since you are gearing up for mobile marketing, be respectful of your customer’s time. Keep things short and to the point. They might be checking their email in between meetings, or visiting your website while ordering coffee.  

Identify Their Device: Start using tools like Google Analytics to identify the types of devices your current website visitors are using. You can log into your Google Analytics account and click on “Audience” then click on “Mobile” and then “Devices” and it will show you a listing of the devices people are visiting your site with.

 

2. Design with Mobile in Mind

You are going to want to make sure that your website and email campaigns are mobile optimized. Make page load time a high priority and optimize your images so that they look perfect and load fast. Additionally as we mentioned before respect the user’s time, keep your content on mobile sites short and sweet.

Don’t forget to think about  thumbs. You want to design clear call to action buttons which will be big enough to click on with your fingers. You DON’T want to have one of those situations where the user has to zoom in hit a hyperlink.

Test, test, and test some more. This is one that really cannot be stressed enough. You need to rigorously test your mobile sites and email campaigns. There are many mobile browsers across smartphones and tablets and you want your design to be consistent.

Other PRO TIPS for mobile design:  

- Use scalable vector graphics (SVG)

- Make use of video wisely

- Use fonts that pack a punch instead of graphics

- Use contrasting colors

- Minimize your use of Java in mobile

- Use CSS3

 

3. Have an APP for That
You have a mobile optimized website, but so does Amazon, Target, and Walmart but they have APPs too. There are many reasons why retailers build out both a mobile website and make an app available as well. It could even be as simple as gaining more exposure.  Just having an app in the app store can help new customers stumble across you.

One of the benefits to having an app is that it is a simplified space that lets customers navigate more easily from their mobile device. It also gives you more opportunities to connect with your customer by sending them notifications through the app to alert them when you are having a sale. Some sophisticated shopping apps even will notify the user when they are near a store location and send them a discount enticing them to come in and buy.

 

4. Mobile Data Collection
Mobile marketer’s beware, one of the bigger problems associated with mobile marketing is data quality. Xverify reports that mobile users are more likely to input data entry errors since they are using their thumbs rather than a real keyboard. Built in smartphone auto correction has also been known to sabotage email address entry by trying to convert the spelling of an email address into an actual word.

We recommend that if you are doing mobile marketing, especially if you are buying traffic then you will want to have something in place to validate that incoming data in real time. You can use a tool like XVerify to alert users when they do make a mistake so that you can have them correct it on the fly.

 

5. Encourage Social Media Interaction
What’s the best way to acquire more customers? Word of mouth marketing. If you know your customers are already on their mobile device it is very convenient for them to just switch over to Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. If you have an app you could give them an incentive to share something on social media to get a special discount.

For example, you might ask them to share what’s in their shopping cart to reveal a special discount code they can use at check out. Keep in mind that customers want discount’s NOW not necessarily for their NEXT purchase so give them a little more incentive and you will see them buzzing about it to their friends.

 

Today’s article was provided by Xverify

A Trusted Solution for Intelligent Email Verification with Services Designed to Meet Your Digital Marketing Needs.