Top 4 Mobile Marketing Trends for Retail Brands in 2020

With 2020 now in full view, we wanted to talk about your mobile marketing resolutions. More specifically, what we think should make your list in 2020.

Mobile has overtaken us! As we surpassed 3.2 billion smartphone users globally, the penetration of mobile in our day-to-day lives is undeniable.

It started with the hours spent on digital media per adult. In the past, adults were using desktop, laptops and tablets to consume their digital media. However, overtime smartphones grew slowly and now has overtaken all other forms of digital devices for media consumption. 

What has solidified our era as the era of mobile was when mobile actually overtook TV in average time spent by people using a channel for entertainment. This was the first time in history!

What does this mean for your retail brand? For the first time in history – from consideration to purchase – the mobile device is now the most important channel to reach your customers. 

We at Raange, have spent the last six years helping some of the largest Retail Brands in North America develop winning mobile marketing strategies. Now we’ve put our expertise to work for you. 

Enjoy our Top 4 Trends for Mobile Marketing for retail brands in 2020.

Trend: Brands will spend more resources on diversifying their mobile marketing strategies

One of the most significant changes we’ve seen in 2019, moving into 2020, is the idea that is building an app accounts for a brand’s entire mobile marketing strategy. As everyone knows by now, mobile app usage is dominated by global brands like Facebook and Tencent. For example, App users spend 77% of their time on their top 3 apps and 96% of their time on the top 10 apps. Also, the average person uses ONLY 25 apps per month. 

One of the biggest problems with mobile apps is discovery. It is not easy for users to research, discover and download apps. Brands need to go two extra miles to ensure that their mobile app will be seen, downloaded, and used by their target demographic. To substantiate how serious the competition is, here’s an approximate number of apps available on the app store alone by 2020.

For these reasons, brands will start investing more resources into omnichannel for mobile. The idea of a brand just building an app and calling it a day, is over. 

Brands will need to start mapping the customer’s journey across mobile channels and using attribution models to identify the best channels for capturing customer data, engagement, sales and retargeting during the post-purchase journey. 

The idea that your customer is going to open your app every time they feel the need to shop, is overly simplistic. You need to be able to communicate with your users across multiple mobile channels and try to drive them to make a purchase using their preferred channel of choice.

The idea of a brand just building an app and calling it a day is over. 

Trend: AI Chat Bots Will Help Close The Loop For Mobile Customer Experience

2020 will be the year that chatbots move to the mainstream for retail brands. Why? Because the technology is now readily available to capitalize on around-the-clock customer engagements at scale.

Naturally, as a part of a customer’s buying journey, they’ll have questions or seek out assistance when in-store. Retail brands need to start recreating this same type of customer service experience online. 

What is a chatbot? It is essentially, harnessing AI to hold natural language conversations with your customers. For example, customers always have questions after text message marketing campaigns, such as “What are your store hours?” “When does the sale end?” A chatbot could, if programmed correctly, answer these simple questions without forcing your customer to search for the answers online.

ChatBots will help to improve the customer experience on mobile. Whether it’s in Facebook messenger, text message or mobile web, ChatBots will provide a beautiful tool to increase two-way communication between your retail brand and the customers. This will create a more consistent customer service experience between in-store and online. 

Trend: Increased Mobile Engagements for Brick-and-Mortar Brands

Physical stores still play an important role in the customer’s buying journey. 

A recent Retail Insider piece explained that in Canada, 84 percent of consumers make their first purchase in a physical store and 40 percent still make repeat purchases in the physical store. 

From BOPIS to experiential to repeat purchases, Canadian consumers still see the value in the physical store as part of a retail brand’s overall omnichannel shopping process. 

Though global trends show fewer consumers going in-store to make purchases, stores are still a vital digital media channel for your retail brand. There is no better place where you have a customer’s attention, where you can provide a more visceral experience or where you can attach a physical or emotional element to your brand, than in-store.

Retail brands need to stop measuring stores as sales channels and start collecting more customer data in-store to measure attribution across your sales channels. 

What better way to connect with in-store customers than through the very device they use to research or run cost-comparisons while in your store: mobile.

Trend: 2020 is the Year of Text Message Marketing 

I believe we’ve been proclaiming this idea for a while, but I truly believe this is the year text message marketing becomes a mainstream channel for retail brands. And for several reasons: 

  1. When you have some of the largest retail brands in the world and influencers like Gary Vaynerchuck start using text message marketing, you start to understand that adoption is now becoming the mainstream. 
  2. Email open rates continue to plummet. 
  3. Pricing for sms has gone down drastically over the years. Now that brands are used to paying for social media ads, text messages are just a fraction of the price. 

Those are the 4 biggest mobile marketing trends we see for Retail Brands in 2020. 

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