Trends in Mobile Marketing: Q&A with Matt Bailey

Matt Bailey is a bestselling author, digital marketing expert, and global corporate trainer. The owner of Site Logic Marketing, Matt recently sat down for an interview to discuss some of the hottest trends in mobile marketing.

Q: How can businesses get started with mobile marketing?

A: If you’re just getting started with mobile marketing, first have a plan about how you think it will increase the customer experience in ways it can’t now. How will it better and more quickly meet their needs? Mobile marketing will either cut out noise or create more noise, so it’s essential to define your expectations for what you want to do with it and then use that to guide you toward building a mobile campaign or presence. Don’t do it just because everyone else is doing it, and don’t try to do the same thing your website does. There has to be something that makes life easier for the customer. It’s also important to understand the legal aspects of what you want to do. For example, if you’re trying SMS marketing, you’d better make sure you’re using permission-based marketing.

Q: With more than half of all emails opened on a mobile device these days, how do you recommend improving mobile responsiveness?

A: It starts with the email itself. Even if you’re sending emails to a 90 percent desktop audience, you’re still sending 10 percent of it to mobile. For this reason, it’s essential to make sure you’re optimized for mobile and that you’re using analytics to see which devices people are using when opening your emails. If you’ve merged event stream processing (ESP) and analytics data, you can learn most of this information. Also make sure the email is optimized, as well as any landing pages you’re including in your messaging. Next, think about the customer scenario. Who will get the email, what time of day will they receive it, where will they be and where might their mindset be, and what do you want them to do with it? It’s about mapping the customer experience. An excellent example of this is a landscaping business and nursery I recently worked with. It sends out an email each Thursday with the weather forecast for the weekend, and this has become a significant predictor of the company’s sales and activity. People usually haven’t made weekend plans by then, so if the weather looks good, they’ll get that forecast in the email along with weekend sales information. If it’s supposed to be rainy, they’ll get an email with tips on how to plan out their yards. It’s about building that customer scenario, then building an entire email around it to enhance the experience.

Q: What do you think about using Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) feature to produce visually immersive content?

A: Google AMP was developed for publishers to build pages that load faster, especially on mobile devices. The next generation of Google AMP will be about creating immersive methods of storytelling. While I like the idea, I would be more excited about it if it weren’t Google. The company doesn’t have an excellent track record for these types of things. It tends to start offering something for free, then integrating others’ content and eventually taking over that content. They’ve done it with reviews and are now doing it with travel, so it feels a bit monopolistic. More importantly, you don’t need Google AMP to create a more immersive experience. You can produce amazing content on your site without being tied to Google. For example, sites like The Pudding tell stories using data. There was one interactive article they had about how often people misspell celebrity names. Users could start typing a celebrity’s name, and they could see in real-time how many others had spelled the name that way. In the end, they would learn whether they spelled it correctly. It’s presented in such a unique way by pulling live data feeds from other sources, which automatically update the article. This excites me more than AMP because the technology is there to tell better and more immersive stories.