Do you know chat bots and short codes make complex mobile marketing simpler? It is quite natural if you find that mobile marketing is harder than other usual marketing mediums. Most brands face a tough choice to make between chatbots and mobile apps that are supposed to be the best tools to engage smartphone users. It is due to the complexities involved in it as well as the set guidelines that need to be followed.
However, there are lots of things that you can do about it to make this complex job look much simpler and the best way is to use short codes for text messaging. Apart from that it will also help in ensuring the best and most result-driven customer engagement through a mobile device.
Chat Bots and Short Codes for Mobile Marketing
With the advancement in information and technology along with the advent of smartphones, it really is very tumultuous for brands that want to make mobile phones their effective marketing tool. Moreover, the rapid advances in chatbots, use, and exponential incorporation of virtual reality have made things more complex. Improper uses of these by different brands in their marketing campaigns will eventually slow sales and at the same time explode the phones with unwanted messages and apps.
Change in thought
There is a significant change noticed in the use of mobile phones with the advent and exponentially increased use of smartphones. These changes are significant for mobile marketing outcomes. The changes noticed in a few specific fields are:
- Personal and unique use case of mobile phone
- Fragmented landscape and
- Establishing connections with users.
At an early stage, the usual consent was that any iPhone app beyond the ads was the best and most effective jumping-off point to build and carry on with a relationship with a mobile user. Over time and the use of more and more iPhones, this prejudice and favor changed because the apps proved to be more beneficial for only a few specific brands. These changes as always have posed a considerable challenge to the marketers.
More importantly, the emergence of a new cohesive vision of the figuring user experience helped marketers seek better ways to connect to the users using the most relevant online information. This provided the marketers with more seamless incorporation and use of the different opening and closing multiple apps.
All these may sound pretty cool but there are still a few more concerns for the marketers that are practical and quite natural to exist. These concerns are:
- Should the apps need to be developed
- Should the chatbots need to be updated and used more or
- Is it better to take time and follow a wait-and-see approach?
If you too are perplexed by such questions and are frantically looking for the relevant answers you must first know that the apps are still the most popular and are easy to understand by any type of mobile user. However, there is also a noticeable divide in the universe that is emerging when it comes to the user’s expectation to get engaged with their favorite brands and services through different apps, digital assistants, chatbots, and any other integration into any other app.
The enigma of apps
There is an app conundrum to deal with as well if you want more and more mobile users through your marketing campaign. This aspect is much more important than ever due to mobile commerce which is showing a significant rise. As per the survey reports of e-Marketer, it is found that:
- Mobile commerce was 26% last year and
- It is expected to rise up to 32% of the entire online sales figure this year itself
This rise is due to the reason that most mobile users spend half of their time online looking and sifting through different mobile apps. This figure is also corroborated by another report from comScore. All these figures indicate that there is a lot of promise in modern mobile marketing strategy.
However, in spite of all these promising figures, there are several marketers who find it still difficult to meet the challenges and demystify the app enigma to figure out the best mobile marketing strategy.
Though apps are very popular, a research report from Forrester revealed that most mobile users typically spend a significant amount of time with just five apps, messaging apps as well and the most popular social media apps. This is an impressive fact that encourages brands to invest millions of dollars to create an effective and exceptional app.
Use of text messaging
To deal with the hard time that marketers find breaking through these complexities and get used to it, all brands will typically need to design an effective and easy-to-use app apart from those brands that do not require customer loyalty or offer any utility to justify their investment in such apps which the mobile users will seldom download or not come back even if they happen to download at their whims and fancies.
Apps and mobile marketing are essential for specific types of businesses such as airlines and banks. These may also be essential for large and important events such as home buying, the Olympics, and others.
However, mobile is not all about apps anymore in this modern digital world. SMS marketing using a short code is also very helpful and in fact more helpful than having an app. This will help you to make the best and most use of the chatbot opportunity to meet the inherent challenges.
You can do this on your Facebook Messenger or any other messaging app. With this insignificant investment, you can engage more users as chatbots seem to work best for establishing quick interactions. It will also ensure that opening an app to perform a task does not result in too much friction.
However, these are still the early days to experience these as many of these are still developing and may not be a decent fit for everyone. It is best to take the help of an expert.
Hope you like the article on chat bots and short codes for mobile marketing.
