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If you haven't overhauled your mobile strategy in the last year, you might as well be showing up to the hottest club in moon boots and a comb in your back pocket. Mobile marketing has quickly become the most integral part of the marketing mix landscape.
By following these best practices, you will maximize your mobile power. Ignore them and your marketing might as well be yesterday's news.
Even with all of the communications tools like social media, texts and chats within apps, email marketing remains, at the core, of every solid marketing strategy. Email is interwoven in marketing campaigns and expected by most companies to generate revenue. What many of even the most savvy marketers fail to recognize is that email is one of their most important mobile marketing tools.
They probably realize that 51 percent of consumers most often check their email on a smartphone or tablet. But they don’t know that if an email doesn’t look good on a mobile device, 80 percent of their readers simply delete it! Even more sobering: 30 percent of us unsubscribe from future emails after opening just one message that does not read well on mobile.
Your best practice in mobile means sending mobile friendly emails. Key elements include:
And be certain that every link in your email lands in a mobile-ready destination.
If your email service provider offers mobile email templates, begin to use them immediately. If they do not, then get a mobile email template made for you.
Want more? Listen to this podcast on the Essential Elements of a Mobile-Friendly Email.
When a website is mobile responsive, the same content is served to every visitor, but the layout of the site automatically adjusts based on the device accessing it. In other words, the same website will look great, yet possibly very different, on each device. Your website should be mobile responsive for two important reasons.
First, visitors to your website on a smartphone or tablet will be able to access your site more easily, and experience it more fully. Bottom line, they are more likely to stay longer. After all, that is what you want site visitors to do, right?
Tip: Check your analytics now to find out how many mobile visitors you are already getting. It may be more than you think.
Second, you must understand Google’s clear stance on mobile websites. Google sends mobile searchers to sites that use responsive web design, sites that use dynamic web design (different content and different design to mobile sites) and those that have a separate mobile site. While their algorithms are not an open book, when Google says responsive Web design is their “recommended option,” it seems prudent to go with that option in order to maximize your organic mobile search traffic.
Best practice here suggests a site overhaul is in order if your site is not yet responsive. If a redesign is currently not possible, then get a mobile version of your site up as soon as possible. Otherwise consider yourself invisible to mobile searchers, who have been predicted to be a bigger group than desktop searchers by 2015.
Your business listing on sites like Google Places, Bing Places for Business, Yahoo! Local and even review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor are prime real estate for mobile searchers. Four out of five people use their smartphone to look up local information. Chances are they will come across business listings at the top of their small screen. You want to be there.
A complete and accurate listing is a good first step, but it is only the first step. Include as many photos and videos as allowed. Use their coupon or deal features whenever possible to maximize your exposure.
When your listings are robust and your site is mobile responsive, mobile searchers will have a seamless mobile experience from start to finish. See how these best practices layer upon each other?
5 Popular Business Listing Sites
Reviews are important. The more reviews you have the higher you will show up in search results. Proactively encourage reviews from your customers. Mobile makes it easy.
Once upon a time, businesses had to send their customers home with business cards and cross their fingers that those customers would leave and tell their friends about their positive experiences. Now, businesses don’t have to wait.
Virtually every customer in your place of business has their mobile phone with them. Many of them are already active online reviewers and all it takes to get them to do a review is to remind them. You can do this with signage that gives that gentle nudge to pull out their phone.
Let me give you a quick example. A couple years ago I was at a restaurant and when I got the check there was a small flyer tucked inside the folder. It was a review request and had a QR code that took me straight to their Trip Advisor listing where I could do a review on the spot from my phone. In the time it took my server to run my credit card I had posted a 5 star review for their Fried Pickles & Friendly Service. They asked for what they wanted and made it easy for me to do.
Do that.
Unless you have a clear, compelling reason for your customers to download and repeatedly use an app for your business don’t go down this path. Although it may be fun to imagine your company’s app featured proudly on all of your customers’ home screens, the reality is that it is harder than you think to get your app onto those screens. And the vast majority of apps downloaded are abandoned. Don’t let the siren’s song of an app cause you to waste time and money on an app that will not be useful to your customers or to your business.
The only reason to produce an app for your business is if your customers will undoubtedly use it repeatedly for something they couldn’t do just as easily by visiting your mobile website. For example, interacting with their account at your company on a regular basis or using it to track rewards and payments.
Want more on whether to consider an app for your business? Check out The Everything Guide To Mobile Apps: A practical guide to affordable mobile app development for your business (F+W Media Inc.).
Now that you have considered these best practices, think of ten people you know. How many of them can live without their mobile devices for more than a day? An hour? Or even a few minutes? Remember how much your customers are using their mobile devices in their daily lives. Make sure your business is doing everything possible to make it even easier for your customers to interact with you via mobile.
Learn more about mobile apps with the free Salesforce e-book below.
