Once you’ve got your email marketing automation locked and loaded, often your next best action is to ensure your mobile channels are just as seamless so your brand can achieve a truly holistic, cross-channel customer experience.
But what mobile marketing automation use cases will give you the best bang for your buck? Here are three innovative strategies we’re seeing today, all of which are easy to adopt using Iterable’s comprehensive set of tools.
And for a deeper dive into specific lifecycle campaign examples from welcome to winback, download your copy of Iterable’s mobile marketing lookbook.
1. Make SMS Compliance a Piece of Cake
As explained at this year’s Activate, SMS is the fastest and most engaging way to adopt, connect, and build loyalty with today’s mobile-first consumer. And the numbers don’t lie:
- 98% average open rate for SMS campaigns
- 90% of text messages are read within the first three minutes of receipt
- 75% of U.S. consumers subscribe to SMS marketing
- 2-10x higher click-through rate (CTR) than similar channels like email
And yet, SMS is underutilized by marketers because it’s a channel that’s perceived as having complex setup and maintenance. With modern mobile marketing automation, however, compliance doesn’t have to be complicated.
When you’re evaluating mobile marketing automation platforms, make sure your solution has the following built in:
- SMS smart opt-in that allows users to confirm their written consent in just a click
- Phone verification for enhanced security and list hygiene
- Configurable quiet hours to comply with regulations and retain brand trust
- Verified contact cards that users can add to their contacts for improved deliverability
- Frequency capping to limit the number of texts (and other message types!) a user can receive within a certain duration
- Opt-out attribution for automated tracking for every SMS campaign
Iterable’s Quiet Hours functionality allows brands to send SMS messages only within the permissible times.
With native features like these, your mobile marketing automation platform should not only follow global laws to a T, but also preserve your brand’s reputation as a welcome presence on your customers’ devices.
2. Improve App Onboarding With Personalized Push
Converting freemium to premium users is a quintessential objective for mobile apps, and Headway is no exception. The global edtech startup serves more than 15 million people in 35+ countries, making it a top-ten app in the education category.
With Iterable’s advanced segmentation, Headway can build unique onboarding journeys for freemium and premium users according to their app behavior. Freemium users are shown the app’s benefits with enticing offers to subscribe, while premium users are sent messages that emphasize lifelong learning to increase their usage.
Headway uses Iterable to personalize push notifications based on app behavior.
Additionally, Headway leverages Iterable’s AI suite within these customer journeys, including Send Time Optimization (STO) to automatically select the optimal timing of each push and Brand AffinityTM to test specific offers to their most engaged freemium users in an effort to convert them.
With the combined power of robust segmentation and AI, Headway was able to nearly double its open rate with push notifications, and its freemium-to-premium conversion increased 1.3% on average, specifically from opening push notifications. And that doesn’t even include the impressive results they’ve experienced with email and other channels.
3. Deliver Delightful Moments Directly In-App
The Body Coach intimately knows how to get personal. Founded by trainer Joe Wicks, who has one of the largest YouTube fitness channels in Europe, The Body Coach app is one of the fastest-growing mobile fitness apps and was selected as Apple’s Editor’s choice and Google’s 2022 Best App of the Year.
But how do you maintain your special sauce as you scale to millions of users? The team turned to Iterable’s in-app messaging to launch Voice Notes from Joe. These inspirational recordings bring Joe’s personality into the app and prompt moments of surprise and delight for users.
Here’s how it works:
- The Body Coach team records personal voice messages from their founder Joe
- That audio file is hosted on their content management system (CMS)
- An Iterable campaign is created for each recording using an in-app template, and the audio file is attached to that template
- Iterable sends push notifications to users to prompt them to listen to Voice Notes from Joe in the app
The Body Coach’s Voice Notes from Joe makes virtual fitness feel as intimate as a one-on-one training session.
This entire process takes less than an hour to implement, and the results have paid off big: 60% of users who interacted with a recent Voice Note completed a workout within three days.
Now The Body Coach can bring the same, effective engagement between Joe and his followers on social media into the platform with every push, email, voice note, and in-app message delivered automatically.
Mobile Marketing Automation That Marvels
Over the years, smartphones have only become smarter—and so have the industry’s leading marketers and brand-builders. Between SMS, push, and in-app messaging, mobile marketing automation continues to advance into never-before-seen territory.
And that’s only the start at Iterable. Just this spring we announced two more expansions to our channel offerings:
- Embedded Messages that give marketers the ability to create customized, native in-app messaging that increases customer engagement through real-time eligibility
- Roku as an OTT channel to build cohesive in-app experiences across mobile, desktop, and Connected TV
Now sending joy directly to your customers is right at your fingertips. We hope these strategies and success stories motivate you to roll up your sleeves and hit send with confidence.
Want to get your hands on the latest mobile marketing automation technology? Watch our Product Showcase from Activate Summit to learn about the features above and more.
