How to Succeed at Mobile Marketing
But Meghann York, director of product marketing at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, says delivering the right message at the right time is “more difficult to manage when those channels are disconnected.”
“It’s really the customer who chooses the channel,” she says, “so marketers must be prepared to integrate them all seamlessly.”
And it’s difficult for marketers to “paint a complete picture of a customer’s attributes” when the data for each channel is stored and managed separately, she adds.
To ensure that their communications are personalized, marketers should pay attention to the information that consumers input into these channels. In particular, social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter offer a wealth of information about users that companies can draw upon to enhance their communications, especially if they are interacting with consumers on a one-to-one basis.
MESSAGING, THE NEW SOCIAL MEDIA
While social media channels like Facebook and Twitter were once novel, that is hardly the case today. Now messaging apps like WhatsApp, WeChat, and Facebook’s own Messenger have quickly become consumer favorites. In fact, in 2015, messaging apps surpassed social media apps in popularity around the world. The combined user base of the top four chat apps is larger than the combined user base of the top four social networks. Chat apps also have higher retention and usage rates than most mobile apps.
These apps promote quick, one-to-one communications between parties, and companies would do well to explore the opportunities they present.
“When you look at what the most commonly used mobile apps are…the ones that are really emerging are these new messaging apps. Messaging has surpassed social media in terms of total adoption worldwide and in terms of the hours spent in those apps,” Anderson says.
Ekholm agrees: “Messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, Slack, and WeChat are all moving towards becoming the go-to platform for users, not just for chat but also for commerce.” She cites Facebook’s 2015 move to link Messenger with Uber as a successful example. The integration enabled users to request Uber rides directly from within the Messenger app.
Bots are following the same trajectory. Most recently, Facebook has been expanding its bot library, suggesting that it intends to continue pursuing what’s become known as “conversational commerce.”
The Canadian messaging app company Kik has also invested heavily in bots, Ekholm says, and the Facebook-owned WhatsApp recently removed its $1 annual fee, citing the potential of conversational commerce as the reason. China’s WeChat and Japan’s Line, she notes, have been offering these types of services for years.
“A bot is a way for you to open up a channel of communication within somebody else’s app,” Anderson explains. “If we wanted to use Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp or Line, for example, we could create a bot that could communicate through those channels and those apps that we know our customers are already using.”
The emergence of conversational commerce has a number of potential impacts, according to Ekholm. First, it will de-emphasize company websites. If consumers can get the answers they need through the messaging apps that they’re already using, there’s less incentive for them to visit company websites.
In addition, it will make search engine optimization efforts less important as user preference shifts to contextual discovery within conversational platforms. It will reduce the number of steps in the purchase flow, improving the customer experience and potentially yielding more sales. Finally, as messaging platforms are enriched with new capabilities, their importance will be solidified, and the number of apps that users rely on will continue to fall.
Ekholm also identifies several new opportunities that conversational commerce could produce. By continually enhancing their integrations with messaging platforms, companies will discover new ways to engage with consumers, improving not only their commerce opportunities but also their brand reach.
Additionally, bot technology will continue to improve and could be a tremendous source of customer information when combined with the data from social media channels. Bots also can draw upon customer information to craft individualized interactions with consumers, making for a more personalized customer experience.