Choice: The Ingredient That Drives Higher Mobile Engagement Across All Marketing Use Cases

Photo above by Joshua Coleman.

Creating and implementing a mobile marketing strategy should tie into the preferred way each consumer wants to engage with retailers and brands via their mobile devices as well as the kind of messages they want to receive. In essence, this is the hallmark of an effective business engagement strategy for mobile users.  

A report from CodeBroker on Consumer Mobile Engagement Research shows the way. The company surveyed 1,500 consumers, asking them questions on diverse mobile engagement topics, and the results provide actionable insights into the ‘consumption of marketing information’ on mobile devices.

These findings paint a very clear picture for your mobile engagement strategy. To appeal to all consumers, you must use a mix of mobile channels, such as text, mobile wallet, and apps. Your consumers have a specific preference when it comes to receiving retailer promotional messages. Your mobile marketing strategy must cater to this preference.

Consumers prefer marketing messages that help save money

There is a certain kind of information that consumers love receiving—the kind that helps them save money. Eighty-eight percent of consumers want retailers to send text message marketing promotions that offer mobile coupons or discounts. So, if you want to zero in on the kind of messages you want to send across to your consumers, you have an answer—coupons.

There is another interesting statistic that will help you zoom in on the right mobile marketing channel for sending your coupons. Text message marketing is all set to overtake email, with 34.85% of consumers preferring to receive mobile coupons through text messages. The idea here is to use both channels and increase your focus on sending mobile coupons via text.

Another interesting finding from the report is that more than 75% of consumers are perfectly willing to share their name and address while signing up for a retailer’s text message marketing list, provided they get a high-value coupon in return; this is quid pro quo at its best.

Consumers prefer accessing loyalty programs through mobile

CodeBroker’s 2018 Shopper Loyalty Survey generated an interesting result—75% of consumers said that they were more likely to participate in mobile loyalty programs rather than traditional loyalty programs. The mobile engagement survey results say that 37% of consumers prefer accessing their loyalty rewards through a link in a text message, while 32% prefer to access them via a mobile app; 29% want the retailer to email it to their device. A minuscule 2% prefer to access these rewards via the retailer’s mobile website.

Couple the findings of both reports, and you have enough reason to use mobile marketing as a means to drive purchase behavior with increased sales.

The power of text message marketing

If you have any doubts in your mind about whether your target consumer will love hearing from you or whether it makes business sense to invest in mobile marketing, throw these doubts out the window. A massive 60% of the 1,500 people surveyed said they have opted in to a text message marketing list. This means consumers are highly likely to respond to text message marketing promotions.

If you are planning to send promotional information to your target consumers, which includes discount offers and mobile coupons, it’s also a good idea to use email. A large number of consumers access emails from their smartphones, and this makes email a preferred mobile engagement channel. Forty-one percent of consumers said they prefer to receive promotional information via emails, 38% said they favor receiving such information via text, and 21% of consumers desired such information to be sent via push notification.

Consumers have a specific choice in mind when it comes to receiving marketing messages from retailers on their mobile phones. As a retailer, you must ensure that consumers receive their preferred messages through their preferred mobile channel. It’s all about making the right choice from the marketing perspective as well as ensuring you are able to deliver the right choice to the target consumer from the messaging perspective.

Your marketing message across all mobile channels must be relevant, effective, and most importantly driven by consumer choice, for that’s the key ingredient that makes the definitive difference. You can be well on your way to achieving this by keeping the above findings in mind while crafting your mobile engagement strategy. This will help take your mobile engagement to the next level.

Dan Slavin is CEO and co-founder of CodeBroker, a provider of mobile marketing solutions. He was CEO of Framework Technologies, VP of Open Market, and CEO of International Testing Services. He earned a BS in Electrical Engineering from Yale and an MBA from Harvard. You can reach him at [email protected].