Mobile marketing should be a vital part of any marketing plan thanks to its ability to help businesses better engage with consumers through text messages, emails, and more.

There’s no denying that smartphones have become an integral part of daily life. According to the Pew Research Center, it’s estimated that 98 percent of Americans now own one, while Harmony Healthcare IT reports that we spend an average of over five hours a day on our devices. Given this, mobile marketing is no longer just an option—it’s a requirement for business owners looking to connect with a wider audience.

To help you better understand the power of this strategy, consider the simple text message. It’s been reported that a majority of cell phone users prefer to receive a text over a phone call, and most open it within three minutes. So if you’re not texting your clients or prospects, you’re missing out on the potential for exponential growth. By leveraging this and other forms of mobile marketing, you can boost engagement, attract more customers, and drive sales like never before.

Defining this tool

Mobile marketing is a subset of digital marketing that specifically focuses on the mobile experience. While digital marketing encompasses a broader range of online strategies—including SEO, social media, and digital ads—that are typically designed for a variety of devices, mobile marketing is tailored to the unique behaviors and needs of cell phone users. This often involves shorter, more engaging content and seamless experiences delivered via text messages, emails, websites, and other like avenues. When someone can simply click a link that’s messaged directly to them, there are fewer barriers preventing them from engaging with your service or product. In turn, you can more effectively reach new customers and simplify their interactions with your brand as well as improve relations with your current clientele.

A word of warning 

As valuable as this strategy is, there are some caveats to be aware of. For one, you must only message and email people who have opted in to your communications, meaning they have selected that they want to receive your marketing content. For text messages, you’ll also need to confirm their registration and disclose that they can be subject to fees, and you can only message customers during certain hours, typically between 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. in each time zone. (This may vary by state.) And always give the option to opt out of your organization’s mobile communications, whether text or email. Besides helping you remain compliant, these steps give your recipients greater agency by allowing them to engage with your business when and how they want.

Best practices 

When crafting your mobile-marketing game plan, you need to create a seamless and engaging experience that organically encourages closed deals and drives better results. Follow these proven techniques to maximize your strategies and ensure that your efforts resonate with your audience.

Optimize your website
It’s no secret that every business needs a website to reach consumers, but many overlook the importance of checking that theirs is mobile responsive. There’s often nothing more frustrating for customers than getting on their phones and trying to navigate a site that continually hides the menu bar or has text that’s too large or small. There are many ways to go about reducing these annoyances. For instance, instead of simply shrinking down the desktop version of your website, change the code for your mobile one so that it resizes and reformats images and text for a better phone experience. By optimizing your site for mobile users, you’ll prevent many headaches and help keep customers scrolling.

Limit yourself
One of the best things about mobile marketing is how fast your content gets to users and how quickly they can then engage with it. But you want to avoid hindering that accessibility by sending too much content in too short of a time. If you’re texting clients, for instance, they don’t want to see a large body of text every day. Instead, keep it short and limit your messaging to a few times a month.

The same could be said for your emails. While the format naturally lends itself to more text and even images or videos, most users will simply skim the content for information directly relevant to them. A more effective approach is using bullet points and placing the main takeaways front and center. Even more, don’t flood your clients’ inboxes, which may lead them to quickly unsubscribe. Only send your marketing emails two to three times a week (though it may depend on what campaigns you’re currently running and the needs of your audience), and keep your subject lines concise and accurate to encourage more opens.

Personalize your efforts
Much more so than with traditional print marketing, you have many opportunities to personalize your mobile marketing, gearing it toward each person your business is connecting with. For your emails, this can be as simple as adding an individual user’s name to the beginning of the email, which services like Mailchimp can do automatically for you.

Integrate it with your other strategies
For a cohesive marketing plan, make sure that your mobile efforts align with your overall initiatives, including your current print strategies, social media campaigns, and other touchpoints. For example, include social media buttons in your emails or text messages to facilitate easy sharing and engagement. This will help create a more unified experience for your audience.

Leverage data and analytics
As with anything else in business, you must measure and track the success of your mobile-marketing efforts. Use a tool like Google Analytics to frequently examine key performance indicators like open rates for text messages and emails, click-through rates for mobile ads, and conversion rates from mobile traffic to get valuable insights into user behavior and campaign effectiveness. You can then leverage this data to refine your strategies, identify trends, and make informed decisions to improve your tactics.

Mobile marketing offers immense potential for business owners to connect with their audiences in meaningful ways. By incorporating it into your marketing plan, you’ll better position your organization to engage with consumers, enhance customer relationships, and achieve its business goals.

TAKE ACTION:
Examine your business’s current mobilemarketing efforts, and determine how these strategies may help improve them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Luke Acree is an authority on leadership, a lead-generation specialist, and a referral expert who has helped more than 30,000 entrepreneurs and small businesses grow their companies. He hosts Stay Paid, a sales and marketing podcast, and has been featured in Entrepreneur, Forbes, and Foundr.com.