Whether your business is mobile-first or “mobile-forced”, there are plenty of ways it can benefit from mobile messaging. This is particularly true for the eve of 2023, as the upcoming year has every chance to become a heyday of current marketing trends. Consumers’ demand for personalization is rising, subscription and hybrid monetization models are taking over, while Apple’s user tracking framework is making customer acquisition more expensive, which shifts the marketers’ focus to customer retention. Keep reading to learn how businesses can navigate the changing landscape and what goals they can achieve with the help of mobile marketing.
1. Boost sales
Mobile messaging can bolster your sales performance in case it delivers personalized and, thus, high-converting offers. To send the most relevant communications, you may want to segment your customers based on data (their favorite products, geolocation, and past behavior). Here is an example of a push notification alerting a customer that their favorite brand is running a special offer:
Also, you may want to implement behavior-triggered messaging. Once a customer takes a meaningful action inside the app (e.g. completing onboarding or adopting a new feature), they get involved in a communication flow. Your sequence may consist of push notifications, in-app messages, and emails, all aiming to nudge customers to purchase further.
Here is an example from a subscription-based app. An in-app message with a premium offer is triggered when a user completes a 7-day free trial:
This example is made with Pushwoosh Customer Journey Builder, a tool that helps you map out communication flows and send relevant event-triggered messages to customers at every stage of their lifecycle.
2. Scale marketing strategies
Mobile messaging is a powerful tool for scaling your most effective marketing strategies, especially when combined with A/B/n testing. You can try out a few options for any element of your push notification or any condition of your marketing communication: audience segments, send time, geo, language, and even entire messaging sequences.
In particular, you can run tests on customer segments you identified with RFM analysis. For example, you can experiment with communications for a “Promising” segment. This way, you can determine what messages can reignite your customers’ interest in the items they once abandoned in their carts:
You can then scale the chosen communication strategy across similar customer segments.
3. Drive customer retention
In the post-IDFA world, improving customer retention becomes more cost-effective than acquiring new customers. Therefore, you may want to strengthen customer retention by showing your value proposition at every customer journey stage. Here is when mobile messaging comes into play:
- In-app messages – for effective user onboarding and continuous training on new features and products;
- Emails – for user activation and re-activation;
- Push notifications – to distribute personalized special offers and reminders about desired products or abandoned carts.
Implementing lifecycle messaging for better retention can increase your customer lifetime value and overall marketing ROI.
4. Prevent customer churn
Mobile messaging can be effective at preventing customer churn, especially if it’s targeted to specific audiences. For example, by analyzing RFM segments of your customer base, you can pinpoint those who are about to slip away and target them with re-engaging campaigns:
5. Increase Average Order Value (AOV)
Once you retain your customers, it’s time to maximize their value. For instance, in e-commerce, you may want to cross-sell relevant products via in-app messages:
For subscription-based apps, your strategy is to prompt users with more expensive or longer-term subscriptions:
To effectively convert users, it’s always a good idea to use the combination “a push plus an in-app message”, where the push works as a hook while the in-app completes the conversion.
6. Improve customer satisfaction
While it’s important to ignite the first spark with compelling offers, you have to keep the flame alive throughout the entire customer journey. You can implement mobile messaging to get customers’ feedback for product and CX improvement. Here is an example from a gaming app that uses push notifications to promote customer surveys:
Using in-app messages for feedback collection can make the process even smoother. For example, a single-screen questionnaire keeps customers within the app instead of redirecting (and losing) them to Google Forms or NPS Surveys:
7. Provide a smooth and transparent customer experience
You can’t overestimate the role of service messaging in building trust between a customer and a brand. When interacting with brands online, customers need to be reassured that the money and product exchange will happen without a hitch.
Prompting service messaging (push notifications, emails, and SMS) at each delivery step reassures your customer and increases their overall satisfaction as it adds to a flawless experience.
Here is an example of a transactional push notification that calculates how much a customer saved on the order with the applied bonus:
8. Monetize customer loyalty
Use mobile messaging to reach the low-hanging fruit and motivate your loyal customers to spend more. This can be done with the help of product improvements, the latest features announcements, and exclusive trials or content you only share with your loyal customers. You can send individual codes by email or embed a deep link to the push and take a user to the exact screen or in-app message with more details.
Here is an example of a location-triggered push notification with an exclusive offer tailored to a specific customer’s experience:
9. Driving subscriptions
Over the past years, there has been a shift to subscription-based business models, and in 2023, this trend has every chance to get sky-high. We see more and more traditional pay-per-product companies adopting new growth strategies based on offering subscriptions.
This is another good reason for businesses to implement an effective mobile messaging strategy, as it can drive conversion to subscriptions with measurable results. From Pushwoosh customers’ experience, it is feasible to convert up to 67% of users into paid subscribers and enjoy an up to 34 % MRR increase.
Mobile messaging makes subscription benefits most apparent to customers at each stage of the customer journey – from onboarding to daily usage and new features adoption. Here is an example of welcome in-app messages in a nutrition app:
Key takeaways
You can achieve a broad range of business goals much more easily with the help of customer-centric mobile messaging. Will it be personalized communications for a better-tailored offering, lifecycle messaging for higher retention, or customers’ feedback collection for optimized CX that will make a difference for your brand? We believe it’s the combination of methods you apply across the channels that can take your customer experience to the next level and help you face the challenges of 2023.
Get equipped with state-of-the-art tools for customer engagement and best practices in mobile messaging:
About the Author
Polina Rebeka is a Content Marketing Writer @ Pushwoosh, the mobile-inspired customer engagement platform for high achievers. Using Pushwoosh’s tech-easy solutions, 80 000 companies have built effective communication strategies with the use of push notifications, in-app messages, emails, SMS, WhatsApp, and omnichannel triggered messaging.
