Mobile marketing will continue to be on the rise with new innovations to help increase the ways to market on mobile. New apps and tools are continuously being developed to help make mobile marketing easier for business owners who might not have the time to generate ideas themselves. I have listed five tools you may or may not have heard of before, but all can help to increase mobile marketing.
Swipely
The Mobile functionality of Swipely allows customers to sign up for your loyalty program with a simple text message. Forget about the old punch cards or plastic key chains, with the “text to join” mobile loyalty program customers can sign up with their credit and debit cards.
When signing up it requires you to enter in your email address. This is a great thing because you can now email your customers and frequently keep in touch with them.
This is also a great service because it tracks everything. It tracks how much each customer has spent that week or which food items has sold the most, along with how much that customer has spent the whole time since signing up. This relates back to developing a marketing plan.
- Track ROI long after campaigns end to see how many customers return
- Monitor Yelp, Tripadvisor, OpenTable and Google+ reviews on a single dashboard
- Understand how promotions, social activity, and even weather impact sales
- Target customers with messages tailored to their tastes and preferences
This is mainly a service for a restaurant to help track everything financially, run promos and develop marketing plans based on the data all from your smartphone. This is a simple tool that could make a restaurant owner’s life much simpler. For more details check out Swipely.
MailChimp
Email marketing is one of the best ways to stay in touch with current customers. Now there are a lot of tools that help you create mobile enticing emails to keep in touch.
MailChimp is mobile-friendly, user-friendly, application when it comes to running email campaigns. It allows you to view your email campaign statistics, see who interacts with you on twitter and manage your lists and subscribers all on your mobile device. MailChimp has plenty of mobile-friendly templates for newsletters, they also have a great drag and drop template builder to create your own templates.
MailChimp offers a free plan that includes all of these mobile-friendly features and more. Their free plan includes 2,000 subscribers and up to 12,000 emails per month.
TextUs.Biz
The way smartphones are used constantly, society has been growing into a texting world. This is where TextUs.Biz comes into play. It allows businesses to send and receive texts from customers via their computer or iPad. Businesses can use this service to send customers reminders for appointments, promotional offers, along with allowing customers to text the company’s main business phone number to request an appointment or reservation at a restaurant.
The company says the service is ideally suited for customer requests such as restaurant reservations, changing hair appointments, answering questions about car repairs and situations related to these which are often easier to manage via text messaging versus a phone call.
This service can potentially free up a lot of standing at a desk and waiting for a phone call situations. It allows you to work on other things and answer text messages at a convenience without being interrupted immediately like a phone call would.
TextUs.Biz is free for the first 100 messages, which includes web and iPad access. The “basic” package cost $24/month for 1,500 messages, “premium” is $44/month for 5,000 messages and “pro” is $74/month for 10,000 messages.
Facebook is still one of the most used social media platforms available, with a mobile app that viewers check into multiple times a day. Facebook’s latest advertising products consist of Facebook Offerings and Promoted Posts that reach and engage your target customers on mobile.
Facebook Offers is Facebook’s virtual coupons that are available on both desktop and mobile. The Promoted Posts allows business owners to easily turn an engaging post into an ad to reach more people with their messages that work well on mobile.
According to Facebook, Sam’s Chowder House, a local restaurant in Half Moon Bay, CA, used promoted posts to drive a 19% increase in both their monthly number of guests and monthly gross revenue.
The Facebook Pages Manager App allows restaurant owners to manage their Facebook page, posts, photos, comments and ad campaigns all from your phone.
Facebook has great mobile features and so many users that this is not something to be ignored. A lot of company’s might be using Facebook already but might not be using it to its full advantage. These features and can be great for businesses.
Periscope
Periscope is a mobile video streaming service that is quickly trending up. It allows users to stream video content right from their smartphone. This is such a fresh platform for the marketing world only a few companies have started to test out its capabilities.
Spotify is one that is testing the waters on Periscope by streaming behind the scenes videos of artists. A stream of Irish folk singer Conor O’Brien from the band Villagers recorded 382 viewers on the live stream with 1,534 hearts, the equivalent to a like on Instagram or Facebook.
This is just starting to catch on as bigger brands are starting to figure out how to advertise with live streaming like this. I would think as these big brands pave the way to marketing on Periscope this will catch on and become another big platform for advertising.
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