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The Changing Face of Marketing Communications
The Trimurti illustrated in the feature image show the three essential aspects of Shiva: creation, protection and destruction. And that sums up the changing face of digital marketing communications. Cold calling is marketing destruction; people hate cold calls. Email is protection, as its the safe option for marketers. And mobile is creation, the new life of the marketing communication world.
The Rise and Fall of Email
Email grew massively and companies started using this type of messaging heavily. In 2013, email messaging was adopted by 87% of businesses according to Mobilesquared. This dropped to 79% in 2015, and is expected to fall to 72% by 2017. In the same year mobile messaging is predicted to overtake email as the most used form of marketing messaging, being adopted by 87.6% of businesses.
Email was a great way for businesses to target consumers. Email addresses were easy to collect and as far as permission marketing goes, as soon as a customer had submitted their email credentials they were fair game. But now, like any other medium, it has been abused and people get annoyed with it. Or they simply ignore it. And that’s not the objective for marketing professionals; to be ignored, so, what next?
Mobile is the biggest market
There were 58.8 million smartphones at the end of 2015, and if each person in the UK had one smartphone each, that would be an incredible 90.3% of the population in the UK. There were also 55.5 million app users and 53.9 million mobile internet users. And messaging is the most popular service for mobile users in the UK, which is no surprise considering our mobiles are by our side for a minimum of 16 hours a day, if not 24/7 for most people.
Therefore, mobile is by far the most popular medium for consumers in 2016. Almost everyone has a smartphone, and they always have it with them. As a platform, mobile screens are now the most lucrative advertising space in the world. Marketers can literally send a message to the palms of your hands. There’s no other channel that offers that kind of clarity and accuracy. And other messaging and social platforms such as Snapchat and WhatsApp offer businesses opportunities to make text messages part of a multi-channel campaign. Where the consumer is engaged numerous times throughout the day on their smartphone. The possibilities are many and varied, and consumer behaviour indicates it will be accepted.
The Secret to Successful Mobile Marketing
With marketing emails, people tend to flick through the latest messages in their inbox, and skim read what may interest them. The open rate for UK SME email marketing campaigns in 2014 was 22.87%. according to signupto.com and click-through rates were as low as 3.26%. So with nearly 80% of marketing emails being left unopened or deleted, email really isn’t that effective for companies trying to message consumers.
The major difference with mobile messaging is that it is built on a pull strategy, not the typical push advertising we are used to. To see an email someone has to open their emails to access it, whereas a mobile message can be waiting for a user on their phone while it is locked, and requires no action to view it. The open rates for mobile messaging will be naturally much higher because of this. Mobilesquared research from 2010 shows 90% of messages are read within 3 minutes. With smartphone users looking at their devices on an average of 150 times a day. Knowing this, it baffles us why brands aren’t in front of consumers on their phones.
Photo credit: KieferPix / Shutterstock
Companies have rushed in a frenzy to develop apps of their own, and we’ve had plenty of pointless apps such as the Zippo lighter app or the Geico Brostache app. And although some may be useless, there were more app users in the UK last year than mobile internet users, with 55.3 million people using apps. But for a company, an app represents a technological and resource-heavy challenge, that can take weeks or even months to develop. Without a guaranteed ROI, as people must download and use the app for it to be successful. Apps are a great opportunity to enhance interactions creatively with consumers, but to initiate buyer actions or anything meaningful can be difficult, therefore, the marketing message becomes distorted. Moreover, with the millions of apps out there, getting your app in front of people and downloaded makes it a high maintenance and highly expensive industry to break into. The opportunity mobile marketing presents is that businesses can communicate a message quickly, carefully and clearly, at little cost. And a clear message is the most important thing in marketing communications today.
The previous fear for businesses was texting their customers was too invasive and in their efforts to reach customers they would lose more than they would gain. But that is not the truth. The latest research from Mobilesquared has shown that 21.3 million mobile marketing users had responded to a text in 2015. That’s 52% of people, with a total of 41.1 million mobile users in the UK. So with an open/engagement rate of over 50%, mobile marketing messages prove to be not only effective but something that consumers want.
The most popular form of messaging is offers, discounts and promotions as used by 45% of businesses in 2015. This is set to rise to 53% by 2017. The frequency of communication between businesses and their customers is set to double too, as in 2013 only 21% of businesses communicated with their mobile customers once a week or more. By 2017, 43% of businesses will be communicating with their customers every week.
The future is mobile; the future is texting.
For more interesting articles about digital marketing, check out our previous post about perfecting the art of visual content marketing.
