Sruthi Narayanan — November 7, 2016 Follow @getzaiusYou’d be hard-pressed to find a person today who isn’t glued to their mobile device around the clock – psychologist Sally Andrews revealed that adults check their smartphones up to 85 unique times a day, spending up to five hours per day on their devices. It’s unsurprising, then, to learn that most customers bring their mobile devices along with them at each checkpoint in the shopping journey: 90% of customers will use multiple channels to complete the same task (according to a Google report), and Internet Retailer revealed that 3 in 4 smartphone users will shop or compare prices on their phones while in a brick-and-mortar store.
With the rise in mobile, there’s a rise in brands marketing themselves as “mobile-first” – they’re strengthening their push capabilities and developing mobile apps geared towards this demographic, exclusively tailored to the preferences customers demonstrate when using mobile. And a decent number of push campaigns are, in fact, specifically geared towards pulling customers into the mobile app – after all, if a customer is mobile-first, getting them to use your mobile app should make the most sense for them and for you. Right?
Not necessarily. Here’s the thing: Customers might be mobile-first, but being mobile-first isn’t customer-centric. And trying to force mobile (or being pushy with push) not only leads to missing key behavioral signals across other devices, but it focuses on the channel itself instead of delivering what your customer wants.
Push campaigns that are intended to pull customers into your mobile app, or are specifically tailored based on the preferences demonstrated via mobile, aren’t going to fall in line with whatever real-time behaviors your customers need responses to. Mobile is no longer a unique, siloed channel, and mobile-first doesn’t mean mobile-only – a customer who shows interest in men’s jeans on mobile could simultaneously be browsing women’s blouses on web, and marketers need to be able to tailor push messages to reflect each new action. And push campaigns that aren’t informed by customer behaviors will end up being little more than irrelevant noise.
The key to behavioral push, then, is about informing your messages with customer data from other channels and devices, to create a mobile campaign that truly speaks to the 360-degree customer profile. We mentioned multi-device moments as being second nature to customers who are shopping, and if you’re not informing your push messages with every new action you learn about your customers, you’re not actually going to be driving engagement or impacting customer lifetime revenue.
What does this mean? To execute the most effective behavioral push, marketers need to:
- Look at what customers are doing across all channels – not just mobile – to be as informed as possible about what they want the moment they want it.
- Use what they’ve learned to personalize each push campaign for maximum contextual-relevance.
- Deliver app-related when customers are already in the app, instead of using them as a tactic by which to convince non-mobile customers to start using it
- Use each message as an opportunity to help customers progress to the next logical step in their individual customer journeys (based on the personal preferences they’ve demonstrated on multiple devices and at multiple checkpoints).
Learning how mobile fits into the omnichannel marketing experience is critical to being customer-centric and to delivering only the most contextually-relevant push messages. When you can tailor your push messages to the actions demonstrated across multiple channels and devices, you’ll be better equipped to deliver the kinds of push messages that directly impact whatever long-term metrics your brand needs to drive in order to be successful (like Average Order Value, First-to-Repeat Purchase, Purchase Frequency, etc.) And, not only that, your push messages will be better aligned with the overall customer journey.
To learn more about how you can drive customer lifetime value across all channels (including mobile!), feel free to download our whitepaper, “4 Steps to Maximizing Customer Lifetime Value.”
This post originally appeared on the Zaius blog
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