Incorporating mobile solutions into your nonprofit organization’s or higher education institution’s marketing strategy is a vital key to modern marketing success. Choice is key in the mind of the consumer. While some people will only engage with your marketing content through email and some will only engage through short message service (texting), only utilizing one marketing solution will result in missing out on valuable points of contact. Additionally, ensuring mobile marketing is incorporated into your marketing strategy opens up opportunities to widen and deepen the connective relationship between your organization or institution with the user.
Crafting Clear Communication
SMS remains the best way to get information to people quickly. And due to the nature of the way people interact with SMS and the ease in which these messages can be sent and read; the open rate of these messages is essentially 99%. Solutions like Marketing Cloud’s Mobile Studio allow you to reach customers on any device by personalizing your mobile marketing with not only SMS messages but push notifications and chat messaging as well.
This translates to engaging SMS and MMS (multimedia messages, such as images, videos, or previewed links) that can be built and automated through Marketing Cloud with custom templates for outbounds, text-response, email opt-in campaigns, info capture, and messaging. Higher education institutions can utilize these tools to send notifications for campus alerts, approaching registration deadlines, or overdue payments.
Likewise, nonprofit organizations can instantly reach donors to announce a new fundraising campaign or remind volunteers about an upcoming event. With the appropriate targeting, you can ensure that only the people who will be most impacted (or provide the greatest impact) will receive these timely alerts.
Efficient Engagement
Across industries, people are turning to mobile marketing technology to solve communication issues of the past and pave the way forward for clear communication of the future. This goes back to the way people interact with SMS compared to email. Anyone with even the slightest marketing experience knows how difficult reaching people exclusively through email can be. But with mobile messaging, almost all texts get read, even if it’s just for a brief moment.
There is also an added level of trust on the part of the consumer when they agree to receive these messages. While mobile messaging is more reliable and more easily accessible for consumers, it’s also easier for the consumer to disengage with the messaging if a marketer abuses that accessibility and sends too many texts. People are more likely to unsubscribe when compared to email messaging where people might stay passively subscribed over time. Marketers must strike a balance.
Mobile solutions and Marketing Cloud can work together to transform marketing efficiencies. Using Marketing Cloud, you can build automation and multi-channel journeys that send relevant messaging based on the marketing data you’ve cultivated, such as customer preferences and behaviors, to drive engagement. Triggered SMS messages can then be put in place to meet people where they are at the right time.
For example, if someone was recently added to a contact list, you can send automated welcome messages. Or, if someone has a field change in your CRM, you can then trigger a journey to follow up with that person through targeted messaging. Thank you texts can be sent following a donation in the nonprofit space or a successful enrollment in higher education. The possibilities are near endless.
Amplification Through Automation
Automating mobile marketing also ensures you never miss an opportunity to create a new connection or deepen an already existing relationship. By scheduling marketing efforts that trigger messages at the right time and place where they’ll be noticed, marketers connect with consumers more efficiently based on predetermined events and/or user behavior.
This allows marketers to spend less time creating ad-hoc sends and messaging in hopes of breaking through the noise, instead letting the tools do all the heavy lifting. You can also create goals within each marketing journey to track the success of these messages that will then allow you to perform a/b testing with different messaging to maximize effectiveness.
One of the most important things to keep in mind when incorporating mobile solutions into your marketing strategy is to make sure you have clean data before you implement said solutions. It is imperative that the email addresses and phone numbers in your system are correct and that you are messaging consistently so that you can gain a clear, individual view of each subscriber. This also means cleaning out all landline numbers to ensure delivery rates stay high and spam scores stay low.
If incorporating mobile solutions into your marketing strategy is of interest to you, there are a multitude of resources available to educate and guide you on the best path forward. The “Develop Mobile Strategies in Marketing Cloud” trail on Trailhead is a great starting point to begin your journey and, of course, we at Cloud for Good are always here to help guide your technology transformation. Visit our Marketing Automation page and contact us today to learn more.
