July 28, 2017
With 71% of UK adults owning a smartphone, a mobile marketing strategy should be a priority for all automotive retailers.
People check their phones up to 200 times per day. If your marketing strategy isn’t mobile first, you are certainly missing out on business.
Speed Demon
When it comes to mobile marketing, it’s essential that mobile website upload speeds meet consumer demands. As Mike Frazzini, Chief Technology Officer at eBags says; “If your customer can’t find what they’re looking for in three seconds, you won’t win the mobile moment.” Speed is everything in mobile marketing.
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are a great way to ensure your pages load quickly. AMP works by shortening the waiting time for the publishers who use the correct AMP code. AMP simplifies the HTML code and enables it to load quicker when searched, primarily, through Google.
Alongside this, having a mobile friendly website is essential, whether that’s a website that has a mobile version or a native website.
Formatting issues with a non-mobile optimised website, such as text cut-off at the end of the page, means consumers missing valuable information.
And if they are unable to see everything they need, it’s easy to move on to a competitor website that is mobile friendly.
Listen to your audience
An intelligent mobile marketing approach, using different methods to understand your audience, means you can connect with them about subjects they actually want to read about.
Email marketing is still a great way to deliver that content on mobile and with two-thirds of emails read on either smartphones or tablets email still works.
But poorly designed emails will give you a bad reputation as they won’t format properly on mobile devices.
The type of content you send is another critical element.
Repeatedly sending promotional emails to customers who don’t want to see them won’t help you achieve good results. A poorly executed email campaign is a waste of time and effort for both you and the recipient.
Surveys are a great way to understand the interests of your customers. When placed correctly, for example, nestled within a valuable and interesting digital magazine, people are willing to provide valuable feedback about their interests.
By taking this approach you can then start to measure engagement. Start by looking at survey results to discover what customers are showing an interest in.
When you have discovered what this is, it’s important to follow through by sending relevant information to keep current customers happy whilst looking to venture out and test the water with this approach to entice new ones.
Data
Data will also help you identify areas of interest. Looking at engagement levels on previous blog posts, digital magazines, email newsletters and social media updates will give you an excellent insight into current areas of interest.
Because mobile, by it’s nature, is all online, you are able to generate substantial data about the interests of your customers.
The challenge with data is how you actually make it practical and useable.
This is why we put together extensive reports that analyse our client’s campaigns and then provide these in easy to action follow up reports.
It’s important not to get paralysis by analysis. There’s so much data you can look at, don’t get stuck in the detail. Find out what you can action, such as recent customer interest and customer trends, and make use of this data.
Pop-Ups
Even though pop-up ads can increase activity on mobiles, as they’re the first thing a visitor to your site sees, they can also give an impression of spam.
This can put people off from continuing with their purchase or even visiting the site again.
And consumers are now able to fight back against pop-ups, whether it’s advertisements, free offers or requests for information, with various ad blocker instalments available.
Google is also cracking down on them by punishing websites whose intrusive pop-up ads lead to a bad customer experience.
This means the money spent on designing and making the pop-up ad may be wasted. For those visitors who don’t have an ad blocker, these pop-ups are just another obstacle between them and the content they want to read on your website.
On top of this, if the site isn’t mobile friendly, pop-ups can be impossible to exit and lead to closing not just the page but the web browser itself.
While some pop-ups can benefit visitors it’s worth testing the results. Try A/B split testing a page with different types of pop-up and no pop-up at all. Ideally you’ll test to see how these variations effect number of enquiries and conversions as these are your highest value website activities.
Target the people who want to engage. Engage the people you target
As with all types of marketing, it only works when it’s considered valuable by the people you want to attract.
This means that it doesn’t make sense to continue to market to people who aren’t currently or won’t ever be customers.
This is especially true on mobile.
Allowing the recipient a simple method to opt-out saves time for everyone.
Letting people easily opt-out of your campaigns allows your marketing efforts to be focused on those who are engaged.
Mobile devices now play such a key part in our lives. With an effective mobile marketing strategy marketers can target specific consumers and take their needs into consideration to create successful, targeted and profitable campaigns.
If you want help in creating a powerful mobile marketing strategy that is proven to generate new customers and increase customer lifetime value then get in touch at info@goldsanddigital.com or call on 020 7287 9233