According to statistics, 50.48% of web traffic worldwide comes from mobile devices. More than 63% of all online traffic came from tablet devices and smartphones in the US alone. These numbers are expected to increase at least one-third in the coming years.
The statistics discussed above show that more and more people are using handheld devices to browse the web. This should motivate you to invest in mobile marketing to ensure that your e-commerce store becomes more visible and reaches more audiences.
What Is Mobile Marketing?
As the name suggests, mobile marketing is a type of digital marketing strategy that aims to reach a specific target audience through tablets, smartphones, and other mobile devices. This multi-channel online marketing technique focuses on marketing your business, products, and services to mobile device users.
When done consistently and properly, mobile marketing provides potential and existing customers personalized information, so they can get what they want when they need it. Being able to provide tailored-fit content to customers can drive purchasing decisions, resulting in more conversions, customers, and better branding online.
How to Integrate Mobile Marketing into Your Ecommerce Store
With the number of e-commerce stores opening every single day, it’s crucial to build and implement an effective mobile marketing campaign. Mobile marketing can become your key to standing out from the competition and achieving long-term success in today’s ever-competitive world of business.
Here’s how you can integrate mobile marketing into your e-commerce store:
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Create a Mobile Buyer Persona
You won’t be able to enjoy the benefits of mobile marketing if you don’t know for whom your ads are. How can you create personalized ads if you don’t know who your audience is in the first place? Do you think you can win and retain customers if this is the case?
To integrate mobile marketing into your e-commerce store, start by creating a mobile buyer persona. You should define the general characteristics of your target audience to create campaigns that suit their lifestyles, needs, and wants. The more equipped you are with your audience, the easier it’ll be for you to create ads that grab their attention.
In general, a mobile buyer persona includes information about your audience’s gender, age, education, job, hobbies, and pain points. You can also dig in deeper by knowing more about your audience’s devices, namely the type of devices they often use, how long they use these devices every day, and what everyday tasks they use these devices for.
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Run Personalized Campaigns
One of the biggest campaigns marketers make nowadays is sending generic messages to thousands of recipients, hoping that they can get at least a hundred responses. This strategy isn’t guaranteed to work as customers expect to receive personalized marketing efforts from brands. This is especially true for returning customers as they expect that the brand knows at least one thing about them.
Personalization will continue to become a trend in mobile marketing, so make sure to hop on the bandwagon. Besides, when you know who your audience is, it’ll be easier for you to create personalized messages across different platforms, such as email, SMS, and social media.
One of the easiest ways to create personalized campaigns is to consider a mobile user’s online activity. For example, did they fail to checkout from your e-commerce store? Send an SMS reminding them of their abandoned carts. Did they leave your website after seeing your product catalog? Send an SMS offering new products and prices.
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Create Mobile-Friendly Content
When running an e-commerce business, your webpage is one of your most powerful tools in marketing your offerings and engaging with customers. Your web pages function as a platform for you to do business with your audience. For this reason, you shouldn’t only create high-quality content; you should also pay attention to its formatting.
Another way to integrate mobile marketing into your e-commerce store is to make sure that your content is mobile-friendly. Keep in mind that mobile and handheld devices have smaller screens and can’t accommodate content the same way as desktop computers do.
To optimize your content for mobile use, see to it that your webpages adapt to the size of various smartphone screens. Your e-commerce store should also load fast when accessed on mobile phones and offer seamless navigation to users. Most importantly, the fonts of your web pages should be large enough for mobile users to read them easily.
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Optimize for Voice Search
Because of its convenience, thousands are now speaking into their smartphones more than to their laptops. Nowadays, people around the world are using their mobile devices to talk to virtual assistants and participate in video conferences. This goes to show that voice search has become a growing trend in recent years.
Many are choosing to start their searches online using voice rather than typing their queries, which is why you should optimize your e-commerce store for voice search. There are many ways to achieve that goal: you can use long-tail keywords, transform queries into questions, and use more conversational language in your content.
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Harness the Power of Text Message Marketing
Mobile marketing isn’t just about creating mobile-optimized websites or browsing the internet using handheld devices. If you want to make the most out of mobile marketing, you should use traditional yet highly effective tactics, like text message marketing.
Connecting with your customers via text is more personal because it’s a direct and immediate channel. Ensure that your text message marketing works to your advantage by keeping your texts personalized but short. Aim to send text messages that provide value to your customers. Use text messages to show that you genuinely care about your customers by highlighting their pain points and demonstrating how your offerings can ease these problems.
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Use Videos
Studies indicate that humans’ attention span has dropped to eight seconds. This means that if you want to grab the attention of your customers online, you need to produce content that’s short but highly engaging. Fortunately, videos can help.
Mobile users watch videos at very high rates and even use videos to influence their purchasing decisions. Research even shows that 85% of millennials bought a product after watching an engaging and informative video online.
You can utilize videos as part of your mobile marketing strategy in many ways. For example, you can create mobile-optimized videos to show how your products work or how they’re assembled. To make your videos more relatable, feature customers who have already used your products and highlight their experience.
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Invest in Mobile Apps
If you want to build a stronger, more memorable brand while connecting with your customers in the easiest, fastest, and most convenient way, invest in mobile apps. Apps are becoming a trend today and can become your business’s competitive edge in your niche.
Mobile apps are customizable, which means you can use the tool to support the efforts of your e-commerce store. If your e-commerce store currently has promos and discounts, display them the moment users open the app. You can also send alerts about new products in the app based on the items users recently bought from your e-commerce store.
Your Consistency Counts
Mobile marketing can provide tons of benefits for your e-commerce store, but only if you know how to integrate the campaign into your existing business. These platforms are beneficial to your business when used individually, so can you imagine how your business will scale up once you use the two together?
Take note of the information presented here and start adapting them to your online business. Just make sure to remain consistent with your efforts, as mobile marketing doesn’t provide results overnight.