Tag: mobile marketing success

Mobile marketing has not yet come anywhere near its potential

A recent Leanplum analysis of 671 million push notifications has revealed that smartphone ads are just scratching the surface.

Mobile marketing automation platform, Leanplum, has announced that it has completed its first research study, which it has published under the title “Breaking Barriers to Push Notification Engagement.”

This research determined that the majority of push notification users were not reaching their potential.

The study was based on the results of an analysis conducted by Leanplum, which examined 671 million push notifications and 1.4 billion in-app events. What they found was that while there is a great deal of potential to mobile marketing through push notifications, the majority of the marketers around the world who were using this technique were not living up to that potential. The analysis determined that, as a whole, approximately 63 percent of marketers were missing their targets when it came to the messaging itself, the frequency of their marketing efforts via mobile apps, and even their timing.

There were a number of key findings that may provide helpful insight to mobile marketing firms.

Mobile Marketing ResearchAmong the key findings from Leanplum’s study were:

• North American app marketers were especially prone to missing engagement opportunities with their users during evening hours. App users in that region typically open push notifications at 8 p.m. at a rate that is four times greater than the ads are actually being sent.
• In terms of notifications sent versus those that were opened, the times marketers were issuing their push notifications and the times at which users were actually most likely to open and engage with them were not synchronized. This was a worldwide issue based on out-of-date messaging strategies.
• Mobile marketing firms often fail to shift their efforts with time zones. For example, marketers focusing on Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) are sending pushes that are reaching people at midnight, while the majority of recipients are sleeping, since they are aiming at reaching people during peak North American times. A change in the timing of push notifications based on the time zones in which the recipients reside could greatly enhance engagement results.

Mobile marketing isn’t well connected among many companies

Consumers are opting for a cross channel experience more than ever before while shopping in an average day.

Despite many different mobile marketing strategies and attempts at campaigns that will provide consumers with the ideal cross channel experience that will be able to reach them in a meaningful way that will encourage them to act on what they have seen.

The average consumer will easily hop from laptop to smartphone or tablet to a brick and mortar store for one purchase.

While mobile marketing companies know that this is the case, actually figuring out how to track any given consumer from one platform to the next has provided them with a highly challenging experience. This is among the reasons that many client side marketers have revealed that advertising and promoting over a string of different channels is among their lead priorities as of May 2014, when a study was conducted by Econsultancy in association with Oracle Marketing Cloud.

Over two thirds of the respondents said that cross channel and mobile marketing are a primary goal.

Mobile Marketing connectionsHowever, just because they have been taking aim at more than one platform, it doesn’t mean that they are necessarily seeing the results of their efforts. For instance, eMarketer recently stated in a report about the study that “43 percent said that they could understand their consumers’ journeys and change their marketing mix as a result, while 30 percent had implemented teams to work on integrated marketing.”

Moreover, that firm also explained that under twenty percent of the participants in the study were capable of actually measuring the financial results of having made cross channel efforts. This is problematic when taking into consideration the importance of the outcomes of online and mobile marketing, among other efforts. Moreover, these same respondents also said that they were even less able to be able to measure their customer retention rate as a result of advertising over a range of different channels.

Possibly more striking was that a mere 7 percent of the participants felt that their companies were actually ready to successfully take part in cross-channel advertising. On the whole, 62 percent of the respondents felt that their efforts were not aligned across each channel. Only 10 percent felt that their strategies that included several channels – such as radio, television, print, online, and mobile marketing – aligned from one touchpoint to the next.