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If you’re looking to improve your customer retention rates you’re likely drowning in a deluge of proposals from every mobile marketing platform. Take a step back from that tempting list of shiny, new martech tools and breathe.
Simply adding mobile marketing automation for mobile apps or some sort of marketing workflow automation to your processes will not magically enhance your retention numbers.
Let me be clear: tools are great. Almost every mobile app marketing automation tool can solve the problems of “sheltered” martech software refusing to interact nicely with others, even though they’re all on the same playground.
Plus, these tools help solve the volume problem that marketers face. Automation is a real boon for those struggling to accomplish a lot of the tedious, admin-type tasks related to marketing.
Simply throwing a tool into the mix isn’t the solution.
As your organization struggles with retaining mobile app users, you have to do your due diligence on each possible platform, looking for that one magic solution among literally a dozen or more alternatives that all sound alike.
Don’t expect this platform to solve your retention woes the second you switch it on.
At the end of the day, it’s like buying a wrench when your faucet is leaking. No tool will fix the problem unless it’s used the right way.
When evaluating a tool for your stack, there’s a lot of marketing hype you have to get through, not to mention the buzzwords and jargon that must be deciphered.
Plus, every brand is unique in its needs, existing martech stack, and user base. You need to ask the right questions from each vendor so you can properly vet each option.
Solving your retention problem needs more than just an app marketing automation tool. It also requires:
The “mobile marketing” definition is simply this: it’s the art and science of reaching and engaging with a prospective audience through mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. It brings together a wide range of tactics designed to deliver targeted messages, advertisements, and promotions to mobile users.
Mobile marketing is important because mobile devices have become such an integral part of people’s lives, with smartphone users using an estimated 6.23 billion smartphone subscriptions in 2021 — a number that is expected to rise to 7.7 billion by 2027*.
If you need a way to reach these mobile users, the actual mobile marketing definition fits the bill. And if you’re going to be doing this kind of marketing at scale, you’re going to need mobile marketing automation.
Mobile marketing automation is a software tool that allows marketers to execute and manage marketing processes. These processes can be anything from scheduling email nurture drips to sending out a series of onboarding push notifications or in-app messages.
The point of the marketing automation for apps is to make marketing tasks easier to accomplish, and allow the system to take care of executing mundane tasks, including: segmenting users, scheduling messages, and personalizing offers.
An important note though: automation here does not mean “zero human interaction.” Marketers still have to create nurture drips, omnichannel campaigns, and most importantly, write the persuasive copy that gets the prospect into the marketing funnel.
With that said, automation does provide a powerful lift in all processes that deal with retention. When you use it to properly aid your strategies, it can effectively drive up conversions, and grow revenue for your business.
Here are 4 ways mobile marketing automation for B2C apps can drive user retention and growth.
In a recent survey, 68.5% of respondents say that improved message targeting is the most important benefit of marketing automation.1
And their opinions are backed by results: personalized push notifications have been found to boost engagement by almost 10%, according to our own data.
And it’s even better if these segments can be automatically built by looking at how users behave. That’s the secret power behind our RFM analysis tool, which breaks users into groups based on how recently or how often they’ve engaged with your brand.
Automation makes it easier to segment them, which makes it clear which offers and CTAs will resonate with users in each group. And you’ll know your segments are working when engagement, and retention, rises.
We define the customer experience as the sum of all interactions between a user and your brand. And automation can improve these interactions in two areas: timing and personalization.
Multi-channel Marketing Automation Timing
One huge area is the timing of omnichannel and multi-channel campaigns. With multi-channel marketing automation tools, you can carefully plan out a strategy that personalizes which offers to send out and lets the system choose what to send on each channel or device… and when.
This way, your mobile marketing automation tool can use the data behind each user segment and say: “This user segment checks the app first thing in the morning, so on day 1, let’s send them an in-app message at 7 AM when they get up.”
Content Choice
The second way automation can aid in CX is by sending content a user wants to receive.
Remember that 77% of buyers want different content at each stage of their research.2 So sending a loyalty program invite to a someone just learning about your brand will be an easy way to lose that user.
Take a look at your email nurture drips — this is a solid channel for sending relevant content to a prospect and moving them through the AIC (Acknowledge-Interest-Conversion) framework of engagement until they convert into paying customers.
For example, a user in the Acknowledge layer is someone who has clicked on a push notification, or has just launched the app. You don’t want to inundate them with product bundles and promo codes just yet. Send them reminders to complete certain in-app actions or spotlight key features instead.
And having automation work out which material to send to whom is key.
Automating your onboarding process seems like a default setting nowadays, but you’d be surprised how many mobile apps still send onboarding communication in a haphazard manner, cobbling together email and push notification drips that rely more on luck and manual oversight than actual strategic thinking.
The trick is to use automation to make your onboarding easier — send a chain of emails and push notifications that are specific to a user segment, and allow the campaign to run its course.
One of the most important benefits of marketing automation for B2C organizations specifically, is its ability to solve for abandoned carts.
The average cart abandonment rate in 2022 was 66.5%.* And one of the most useful ways marketing automation can make a difference is to assist your brand in reclaiming those unfinished purchases on a daily basis.
Have your marketing software send out an automated reminder to a customer who has left an item in a cart.
Have it keep sending reminders on a daily basis until that item is either bought or deleted from the cart.
Allow this data to send out retargeted ads to the customer so that they see the same item when they’re browsing Facebook or reading their emails from an online service.
One of the best mobile marketing examples using automation happens every year during the Indian Premier League (IPL), the annual cricket season in India. In 2021, our CleverTap platform sent out 14 billion push notifications for customer brands throughout the entire IPL season. Over 700 campaigns had IPL-related keywords attached to them, triggering over 2.6 billion notifications to end-users as part of these campaigns. This would not have been possible without any sort of automation.
In the end, whatever marketing workflow automation you choose, keep in mind that it’s just a tool that still needs to be used properly in order for it to solve your engagement and user retention challenges.
Of course, it helps if you select a mobile platform like CleverTap, which gives you a complete set of marketing automation tools. Take our platform for a spin today and find out how we provide brands with real-time analytics and a full suite of engagement tools.
See how today’s top brands use CleverTap to drive long-term growth and retention
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