Mobile marketing automation and the best practices for driving growth

More apps than ever before are competing for user attention, with over 3 million available in the Google Play store and more than 2 million in the Apple Store. Regardless of vertical, you’re up against fierce competition, making it essential to optimize your campaigns and your resources with the help of mobile marketing automation platforms.

Mobile marketers are wasting their expertise if most of their time is spent on repetitive, manual tasks. A recent report by PHD found that marketers worldwide spend 88% of their time on reporting tasks, including monitoring performance, creating competitive analyses, and discovering audience insights. Teams using mobile marketing platforms can effectively diminish this figure to have a significant advantage over their competitors. Let’s review what mobile marketing automation is, how it can be used for performance optimization, and best practices in marketing automation.

Mobile marketing automation is software designed to perform tasks that would otherwise need to be completed manually or would be too time-consuming to perform at all. The goal of this software is to greatly reduce the marketer’s manual workload.

Automated performance marketing can assist you with everything from user segmentation and personalization to analytics and messaging, as we’ll delve into below.

1. Mobile channel management: Automation software can be used to manage multiple channels and integrate data for best results. Social media channels, SMS, in-app messaging, and push notifications are all useful communication methods that allow you to engage with your users. Automation can also help you optimize your campaigns based on rules.
2. Segmentation: Marketers can segment users into cohorts, which are groups based on certain characteristics, to analyze how to target these groups. Automation allows marketers to efficiently segment users based on pre-defined contextual information, saving them a great deal of time. Depending on your marketing requirements, you can segment users based on identifiers like device type (for opted-in users), user demographics, or even user behavior. User segmentation paves the way for personalization and can consequently be used to optimize the user experience.
3. A/B testing: By segmenting users, you can test how different types of users respond to your creative using A/B testing. Because automation does the heavy lifting, you can spend more time analyzing which variants result in the best messaging possible for your marketing strategy. As a result, automation helps marketers spend more time on creative thinking.
4. Personalization: One of automated performance marketing’s most powerful attributes is it allows marketers to easily personalize engagements at scale. This personalization ranges from using the user’s name for in-app messages to offering hyper-relevant products based on a user’s previous activity. Personalization is an essential way to increase engagement and reduce churn, giving the user a unique experience that directly appeals to their needs.

Now that you know how automation can aid your marketing efforts, it’s essential to understand how the software works. Below we have outlined best practices for marketers wishing to automate their processes, with insights into how these processes can help achieve marketing goals.

• Integrate data for a cohesive experience

  Did you know that  72% of consumers would rather connect with brands and businesses through multiple channels and that 90% of buyers expect consistent interactions across all channels? It is now a user expectation that marketers seamlessly guide their users across multiple channels with efficacy and ease, and this is only possible with successful data integration. It’s therefore essential for marketers to consider how to create the best possible paths to purchase using proper data integration.

  For example, you can’t afford to irritate active users by mistakenly prompting them to re-engage – a problem that may occur if data isn’t properly integrated. The aim should be to create a single view that spans every channel. Knowing how your data will be integrated is, in essence, knowing how each channel should inform another channel, which, in turn, will affect your creatives.

• Personalize with geolocation campaigns

  A user’s location is another way in which they can be targeted autonomously. There are two ways this data can be utilized: geo-fencing and proximity-based campaigns.

  Geo-fencing campaigns: This type of campaign is based on a user’s GPS location. Typically, there is a designated area of interest, such as a store location, with a “fence” that outlines the radius in which a campaign is active. When a user enters the area of interest, automation can be used to autonomously send a relevant promotional message via an in-app notification or SMS. Numerous case studies highlight how powerful geofencing can be as an automated marketing tool. For example, Salesforce found that 80% of consumers would like to receive location-based alerts.

  Proximity-based campaigns: These campaigns work similarly to geofencing. However, instead of a virtual fence, proximity-based campaigns utilize hardware that emits Bluetooth signals. Once in range, the user will receive a relevant promotional message.

  Location-based campaigns can be quite successful. According to eMarketer’s Location Intelligence 2022 report, “Nine in 10 companies worldwide that use location data expect its use to become only more important over the next few years.” Note that users are more willing to share location data with marketers as long as they see the value exchange. So, remember to clarify immediately how your offer benefits the user. This creates a win-win scenario for you and your users, allowing you to improve the user experience while generating conversions and better understanding customer demand.

• A/B test your onboarding experience

  A/B testing is nearly synonymous with automation, and one of the key areas in which you should perform these tests is your app’s onboarding experience. For instance, in our 2022 Mobile App Trends report, we found that from the time of install to Day 1, fintech apps will retain 23% of users. This figure highlights the importance of efficient onboarding. To better understand how to optimize the onboarding experience, segment users into cohorts and observe what works best for users with particular traits. For more details on what makes a good retention rate, you can gain further insight with our in-depth article dedicated to finding benchmarks for retention on Day 1, Day 2, Day 7, and Day 30.

• Generate autonomous loyalty programs

  Research from loyalty management platform Antavo shows that 60.5% of companies surveyed said that they had either increased or significantly increased development efforts for their loyalty strategy during the pandemic. As a result, loyalty programs are more integral in marketing strategies than ever before, and automation platforms can help enable them.

  Creating an autonomous loyalty program requires setting up special offers that automatically reward your most active users. Automation platforms can help you segment those users and set up campaigns to boost brand loyalty, user retention, and customer satisfaction.

• Monitor frequency of messaging

  When sending push notifications to your users, monitoring your messaging cycle is critical. How often you send push notifications to your users will depend on your app’s vertical and the specific functions of your app.

  It’s imperative to implement frequency caps based on data analysis to control how often your users are engaged. Frequency caps ensure that your push notifications remain valuable to your users.

• Focus on feedback

  Loyal customers aren’t just of high value due to the greater revenue they bring in or their impact on engagement and retention rates. These users can also generate organic installs thanks to their recommendations and positive reviews. By prompting users for their feedback with an automated rating system, you can learn which users are most likely to recommend your app.

  You can then offer different actions based on the feedback you receive. For example, if a user gives you an unfavorable review, ask for more detailed feedback to highlight areas for improvement. Conversely, if the user offers a positive rating, you can autonomously redirect them (with permission) to the app store, where they can publish their review. Doing so can boost your ASO ranking and increase your monthly organic installs. To learn more about ASO and how it can help your app, check out part one of Scaling your app to 1 million users: The ultimate guide.”

  While there are many other ways automation can help your overall marketing strategy, these best practices are examples of the variety of methods available to marketers. These best practices will free marketers from manual tasks. With more time to invest in analysis and optimization, automation features such as Adjust’s Control Center can help you reach your most ambitious targets.

While it’s true that buying across multiple channels can provide the maximum volume of traffic at the desired ROAS, new channels can also make your workflow more complicated. New channels mean more dashboards, more data to act on, and more complex analyses when calculating ROI. However, automation can streamline buying from multiple channels without complicating your team’s current process. With Adjust’s Control Center, your team can efficiently implement your multi-channel marketing strategy.

How does Adjust help marketers automate?

Adjust’s Control Center provides spend aggregation and campaign optimization in one interactive report. Designed to simplify ad management, this feature also enables you to view data across all your apps with ease.

Benefits of Adjust’s Control Center

1. All of your marketing data is aggregated in a single dashboard.
2. You can, therefore, identify the best-performing campaigns across multiple channels.
3. You can adjust bids to the level of campaigns or ad groups.
4. Gain hassle-free executive reports on spend, volume, and ROAS.
5. You can consolidate reporting into one dashboard, saving you time to optimize campaigns.

Advantages of Datascape

Now Adjust also offers marketers our latest analytics solution, Datascape, which extends the capabilities of your Adjust dashboard with the following features:

• Cross-app, cross-partner, and cross-network reports
• Deliverable, cohort, and cost reports can be seen in a single view
• Grouping by multiple dimensions across apps
• Reporting on costs, cost per event, and ROAS
• Cross-app filtering by event completion

Within Datascape, you can view data for attribution, post-install performance, cost, revenue, and fraud – everything you need to optimize your campaigns in one place.

Adjust enables you to respond to new information faster with these essential benefits – a prime example of how automation should be used to optimize your time management. For a demo of the Control Center and Datascape, contact your sales representative or email sales@adjust.com.