Mobile Marketing: An Inside Look at Today’s Leading Strategies

Bottle Rocket was featured in Iterable‘s most recent research report, view the article and report below:

Consumers spend a lot of time on their mobile devices. There’s no use in trying to hide it anymore. In fact, we’ve reached the point where the average person is on their mobile device nearly four hours each day.

That means we’re on our phones almost a quarter of our days, assuming the average person stops scrolling through Instagram or TikTok long enough to get eight hours of sleep.

That’s a lot of time on one device.

For mobile marketers, that’s hours worth of opportunities to interact with users. And when considering that mobile shoppers view over four times as many products per session in an app than through mobile browsers, the use of mobile channels for marketing goes beyond opportunity; it’s a necessity. 

Nowadays, it’s less about driving the download of the app—that’s happening in droves—and more so about what marketers are doing after the download. What does the modern cross-channel experience, with seemingly endless data at the marketer’s fingertips, look like?

We wanted to find out firsthand. Push notifications. SMS. In-app messages. Mobile inboxes. They’re all integral pieces of our mobile experiences, but we were curious how marketers were incorporating mobile behavior into their marketing campaigns.

Well, the results of this curiosity are now available in our first-of-its-kind study, The Inside Look at Mobile Marketing, the latest Iterable User Engagement Report. 

OUR METHODOLOGY

With mobile activity an essential part of our daily lives, our study sought to analyze mobile marketing in various lifestyle sectors. We selected 30 leading brands from six different industries and analyzed all of their cross-channel messages for a three-week period.

From shopping (Fashion Retailers and General Merchandise Retailers) to eating (Restaurants and Cooking) to fitness and relationships (Running and Dating), the report covers industries that are fundamental to the average consumer’s lifestyle.

We initiated our activity for each brand through their mobile apps, creating profiles and opting into the various mobile channels. We browsed items, completed actions like going on a run, and abandoned carts to trigger responses. From there, we identified how they incorporated behavioral data into campaigns.

Additionally, in order to identify any data silos, we completed one action in the desktop browser to see if the interactions with brands changed.

In the full report, you will find the use cases per mobile channel, examples pulled directly from the research, best practices, and insights from our valued partners who have provided recommendations based on their extensive experience in mobile marketing and data management.

The report dives into each of these in detail, but for a quick glimpse, here are a few takeaways.

KEY FINDINGS: THE INSIDE LOOK AT MOBILE MARKETING

1. Data silos still exist. Mobile data is not being incorporated into email campaigns—and vice versa. Despite having downloaded the app, almost a quarter of companies studied (23%) included a “download the app” prompt in their email campaigns and only 20% of companies had a cart or browse abandonment campaign.
2. Cross-channel balance is key. The overall messaging breakdown showed a balance between mobile and email messages, with 53% of all messages coming via mobile channels. However, over 50% of brands in the study sent fewer than ten emails, indicating mobile behavior is not integrated into email campaigns. 
3. Push is the preferred mobile channel. Of the 30 brands in the study, 70% sent at least one push notification with an average of 8.4 push messages sent over the three weeks. One third (30%) of brands in Iterable’s study did not send any push notifications at all, indicating a potential missed opportunity for brands to engage with mobile users.
4. SMS is the most underutilized channel. Despite texting’s integral role in consumers’ daily mobile usage, only 8% of all mobile messages sent were SMS, and 80% of companies did not deploy SMS messages at all.

Download the full report to gain access to more insights for better mobile marketing and cross-channel personalization.