8 Features You Absolutely Need in a Mobile CRM

business2community.com

“Mobile CRM” – it’s a fairly new term, but as a tool is growing increasingly crucial to marketers, developers and product managers. Your customers are going mobile, interacting with your brand on custom apps that help them get what they need, and sooner. And now, you need a way to:

• Track their in-app behavior & usage
• House their self-identified attributes, including location, gender, preferences, interests, and more
• Create advanced user segments & audiences to draw insights on mobile usage according to their profiles (a combination of behavior and attributes)
• Export, import, report on and share these mobile insights
• Tie together mobile usage and outside-of-the-app interactions (i.e., how your customers interact with your brand across all of your channels)
• Use your analytics to improve user acquisition strategies, such as which organic sources, ad partners, and campaign creatives are the most successful
• Use your analytics to run relevant & targeted app messaging campaigns, including push and in-app notifications, and email marketing campaigns
• Show changes in app behavior, feature usage, engagement & retention, plus lifetime value, overtime

Your mobile CRM of choice should act as home to all of the information you have collected about your app user, plus their interactions across other channels. But it’s more than just an analytics hub – your mobile CRM should also enable you to run strategic engagement campaigns straight from within the tool. Essentially, it should act as both the analytics and the action.

Don’t fall into the trap of buying a system of point solutions for your analytics and marketing. Yes, we’re biased, but the need is real – whether you’re a startup strapped for budget and resources, or an enterprise-level company who needs an efficient and accessible infrastructure, the best way to ensure real-time data and use that to inform your marketing campaigns is by investing in a closed-loop solution.

The first reason is simple: if you have disparate analytics and marketing software, in order to run any targeted marketing campaigns the burden is on you to import and filter the right user data. This not only costs time and resources, but opens the process up to human err, and means your marketing is done in real-time or using the most up-to-date user analytics. Your push and in-app messaging and email campaigns will be less powerful when not rooted in real user behavior, interests and attributes, and you’ll spend more time creating each campaign.

Then, what happens after your campaign is completed? In a point app messaging solution, you’ll have critical metrics like open rate and click-through rate, but you won’t be able to track resulting conversions in-app, or if users in that campaign had subsequent higher retention and engagement rates.

Acquisition management allows you to track the acquisition of users from organic sources, referrals and paid ads on different channels, and, more importantly, allows you to measure the ROI of campaigns and user segments by lifetime value (LTV) – instead of just downloads. Acquisition management and the insights you gain from it help determine the paid channels with the best ROI, and concentrate your acquisition efforts on those areas that have seen the greatest return.

Choose a tool that allows you to record a value with every subscription, every product purchase, and every ad view, so that you can compute a total LTV score for your users, segment that by the same channel sources or campaigns, and shift your ads then to those that are generating the most actual value. Without this form of ROI tracking, you’ll only know which sources drive downloads, and not which ones deliver high-value and long-term users (remember: downloads don’t always turn into new users, or even repeat users).

You’ll want to be able to track:

• Total spend on acquisition campaigns
• Individual campaign budgets
• Individual campaigns by ad partner and creative
• Number of new users
• Number of return users (after 1st app open, 5th, etc. – based on your retention goals)
• Cost per user
• Individual campaign revenue
• Total campaign revenue
• Lifetime value of users generated

Having the right tool in place means you can easily run these campaigns and determine where the value lies in user acquisition programs. Acquisition is so important that tools without it are not complete mobile marketing solutions.

Understanding your app users totally hinges on tracking the metrics that matter. These metrics are also the key to identifying just how well your app is performing, how to improve, and where the growth areas are. You want to choose a robust platform that can track practically everything you want to see, from the download source, to organic usage, to the performance of your app marketing campaigns.

You also want to ensure that all of your data is coming in in real-time, and that your CRM of choice doesn’t use any canned or pre-populated data. That’s a recipe for misinformation, and won’t accurately reflect your app users.

The terminology for app usage and metrics varies from tool to tool, so be careful not to mistake that for competitive advantage. When talking to vendors, be clear in communicating what you want to see from your app analytics, and they can help identify which parts of their tool can accomplish this.

There are a number of metrics you’ll want to track for your app, but essentially, you want to track measures of usage and engagement/impact:

Usage

• Number of new users
• Time in app
• Session length
• Session interval
• Usage by user segment
• Feature usage/popular features
• Screen flow
• In-app events & event completions
• Funnel completions 

Impact & Engagement

• Retention
• Abandonment rate
• Organic conversion completions (without app messaging to prompt usage)
• Push & In-App Messaging CTRs
• Push & In-App Messaging conversions
• Email opens
• Email CTRs
• Email conversions
• Customer lifetime value
• Revenue per customer
• Transactions or conversions per customer

In addition to these metrics, look for a tool that allows for the addition of custom dimensions and attributes, such as:

• Timeline
• Campaign
• Source
• Medium
• Platform
• Operating System
• Location
• Gender
• Age

These dimensions add life to your analytics, and give you a granular understanding of your audience. The more information you can gather about your user, and the easier it is to draw insights from their app behavior, the closer you are to knowing your customers in-and-out.

How do you better understand your app users? By understanding their actions and attributes and creating audiences that reflect these.

User segmentation is done based on a series of custom dimensions, some of which are standard within app marketing platforms, and others which you should be able to categorize yourself based on brand goals. Segmentation allows you to identify your audience based on key attributes, like device, location, in-app behavior, retention, and more, and is critical to determining engagement trends.

Segmentation is the underlying factor of all app marketing, as audience insights drive successful campaigns. This is where the closed-loop system becomes more important – when you can use your analytics to launch app marketing initiatives. Once created, dimensions can then be cross-tabulated, filtered or combined to analyze your app usage and discover actionable insights and user segments. All of these user insights work to create more personalized app experiences and to drive app messaging that actually engages users with valuable content.

Your app users don’t exist just within your app – they are real-life people who research, purchase, choose and interact with your brand across other channels. Your app marketing should reflect this, and your mobile CRM should collect all of the relevant information about your users.

You want your mobile CRM to be able to track in-app usage and act as your central system of other customer touch points, such as when a user has interacted with you on the web, in your brick-and-mortar store, or via email. For example, if you have an mCommerce app, user profiles can tell you when an app user has a $30 credit at your store, prompting you to send him or her a mobile notification.

Here are some examples of the kind of data you might want to collect from outside of the app and combine with in-app data.

Interest Categories:

• Sports Teams = Boston Red Sox, Liverpool FC
• Music Artists = Paul Simon, Dr. John
• Hobbies = Guitar, Marketing, Traveling
• News = World, Technology, Finance

Static Data:

• Birthday = 1982-03-10
• Gender = Female
• Hometown = Checotah, OK
• Annual Income = $200,000

In-App Info:

• Subscriber Type = Trial
• Linked Twitter Account = True
• Registered User = False

Outside Channel Attributes:

• In-Store Purchaser = True
• Frequent Buyer Member = False
• Rewards Status = Non-member

These user attributes make your targeting and analysis much more valuable across your web and mobile apps. Ask of your potential vendors: who has user profiles available, or what their plans are for building out this capability in the near-term. This will give you a sense of who is thinking about the convergence of web, mobile and offline user journeys.

Your CRM isn’t just a collection of user data – it’s actionable information for creating better experiences. Even if you don’t think you’ll use tactics like push and in-app messaging anytime soon, there will come a time when you need them to engage your users, and it will save you a lot of time and headaches if those solutions are already built into your analytics and CRM.

Our research shows that push messaging clearly drives app retention, further opens, and interactions – in-app messaging, alternatively, is huge in facilitating engagement with users who are already in the app, and email ensures that you’re reaching out to app users across every relevant communication channel.

In choosing a mobile CRM, think of the best ways you’ll be able to use that data to engage your users. You need a platform that offers push notifications, in-app messaging and email marketing with advanced targeting and testing options. 

Marketing automation is a necessary weapon in an app owner’s arsenal. Automation enables you to run targeted marketing without the legwork – and it changes according to user behavior in real-time, even when you’re not there to see it. It’s also valuable to your end user; mobile marketing automation ensures that they are receiving the most relevant content to their interests, immediately. Some things to look for in a tool that claims to have automation are:

• Recurring push messaging and segmentation
• In-app messaging that triggers based on real-time in-app user actions
• Notifications or email campaigns that automate after conversions or purchases
• Ability to define frequency, timing, and content on different automated campaigns
• Frequency capping and the ability to limit the number of messages per campaign or in a given time period

With a little marketing creativity, there are many other automated campaigns that can be run, but these basic functionalities are necessary. Automation makes the ability to measure success and running marketing campaigns a much more robust offering.

Is the platform easy to use, edit, and update? In looking for the right tool, flexibility and ease of use should be top-of-mind. A good question to ask vendors is who the tool was created for. You’ll want to invest in something that everybody could use, so that internal education and implementation is a breeze. Here, it’s important to distinguish between an advanced platform and a complicated platform – look for advanced capabilities paired with usability.

A good mobile marketing platform will allow you to deploy campaigns without any engineering assistance or additional code creation. With the right system is already in place, you won’t have to concern yourself with the technical build of campaigns, or the implementation of redesigns that require a resubmission to the App Store. This way, marketing can run, measure and tweak campaigns often to see what works quickly and efficiently, and can run all programs in-house.

You’ll also want ease-of-use when it comes to generating and pulling reports on user behavior and attributes from your mobile CRM. Email delivery, quick import and export, and the ability to change the date range on reports and save for future use is a hallmark of good CRMs.

Capping it all off: look for constant innovation

This post outlined your must-have features, but there are other mobile CRM considerations to take into account, such as advanced product elements, the team’s roadmap, customer success stories, and the vision of the company. You want to end up with a tool that is constantly being improved upon – where the team is always looking for new ways to help you better understand and engage your app users.

Mobile's role in healthcare is still experimental

mmm-online.com

Nelli Lähteenmäki, CEO of Fifth Corner, which founded You-app

The role of mobile technology in healthcare is still widely considered experimental, but increasingly sophisticated mobile apps and wearable technologies are believed to be promising new tools that will drive behavior change and improve people's health.

Many of the speakers and much of the talk at the Lions Health creativity festival this week in Cannes, France, focused on technology at a time when the US healthcare industry is grappling with long-standing issues such as medication adherence and rising costs while also seeking new ways to improve the health of people with chronic diseases.

“This is just the start of the new digital and mobile health economy,” Peter Ohnemus, president and CEO of mobile health company Dacadoo, said in an email. “We see outside players such Apple, Google and Samsung moving into the industry at a speed healthcare and pharma have not been used to.”

Ohnemus founded Dacadoo, a mobile app that provides users with a health score that changes in real-time based on lifestyle, body and emotional wellbeing. Dacadoo earlier this month closed its Series A financing round. Samsung Venture Investment was one investor.

Most applications of mobile technology in healthcare now gather basic data, like heart rate and weight, and some systems provide incentives that encourage healthy lifestyle habits, but experts here say the manner in which that data will be used to improve health is expected to become more tailored and sophisticated as the technology moves out of the experimental phase.

“It's not enough to do it the traditional way,” Nelli Lähteenmäki, CEO of mobile company Fifth Corner, said during a talk she gave Friday at the festival. “How do we change behavior?”

The company developed You-app, a mobile health and wellbeing app that encourages people to take “micro-actions” to improve their health, based on food, movement, mind and relationships. An user uploads a photo or shares his or her micro-action for the day into the app and then the app's functionality as well as online peers who are connected to the user provide support. You-app officially launched in April.

As the costs of monitoring have gone down and there is less of a need to test the technology, the focus now is figuring out the relevancy of mobile technology in the healthcare industry, said Shawn DuBravac, chief economist and senior director of research for the Consumer Electronics Association. DuBravac spoke Friday at Lions Health about digital health transformation.

“If it doesn't drive change or change behavior, it will fall to the wayside,” he said during an interview.

DuBravac described a program at auto insurance company Progressive that encourages people to provide GPS data such as sudden changes in speed and how much someone drives in exchange for lower insurance payments. He noted that a program like this could have wider applications for healthcare insurers and others that are seeking new ways to drive adherence and encourage healthy behaviors in patients.

Make The Most Of Your Mobile Marketing

business2community.com

Print is dead, radio is dying and pay per click is too confusing. You need a spark. The marketing you’re doing isn’t clicking the way it once did. Get ready to revamp your business model. The popularity of mobile apps is the key to changing your marketing approach. So what steps should you take to make the most of your new venture? There are several things to consider when you start a mobile marketing campaign.

Mobile Apps

First and foremost, a mobile app should be the your top priority and the flagship of your new marketing program. Design an app that caters to smart phone users with important details, usability and convenience. Assets like contact info, marketing information, engaging graphics and interactive features will help you achieve that. Use a responsive design that mirrors your “look” and website but is also simplistic and retains functionality.

Location
Smart phones have location-based technology and users are becoming more and more comfortable with this. So are marketers. You can hone in on the users who meet your particular geographical demographic by using things like users in your target regions with locations-based coupons and geo-fenced push notifications. Use localized marketing to bring the right customers to you.

Loyalty

Using loyalty/rewards programs like incentives, coupons, special deals, sharing opportunities, and more can make a huge difference for your business. These kinds of incentives create brand loyalty through customer engagement. Customers will learn to expect more from your brand and they’ll stick around to watch you meet those expectations. Delighted customers like to talk, which means more referrals coming your way.

Money Talks

Mobile payments can be a big obstacle to users but the ability to accept them is incredibly important. If your app or ordering system isn’t streamlined and functioning properly customers will be turned off and won’t come back. Taking the time to make a simple and effective payment program is important. Many are built in to apps, making mobile apps that much better because they allow customers to choose items through the app and pay through it as well.

Email

Consider sending newsletters via email. It may seem old school but many customers still appreciate this type of communication because they can go back to it later when they have time. Make sure to include calls to action and contact info. And links to your app(s) since so many people check their emails on their phones.

Room service: How IoT creates a custom hotel experience

blogs.microsoft.com

In the hospitality industry, financial success is driven by engaged employees and satisfied guests. Wow them, and they’ll return. But today the expectations of guests are changing: Online bookings are up. Mobile payments are becoming a thing. Technology is transforming the business in a big way. And consumers want to spend less time waiting in line and more time enjoying their stay.

Serving customers in this industry really is a journey. Companies must look at how they can improve reservations, arrivals, check-ins, the stay itself, the check-out process and the relationship after the guest has departed. To address all these areas requires more than just a device or an app. It demands a set of solutions that mirrors all aspects of that customer journey.

Hospitality companies are introducing new ways to transform the actual stay experience. This week at the HITEC conference in Austin, Texas, we’re demonstrating how hotel rooms might look in the future with a concept called the “Connected Room.” This is just one way we are helping companies from around the globe take a digital approach to serving customers while maintaining the essence of every hospitality brand — people.

The customer journey

On average, a typical hotel guest will spend about 12 minutes figuring out the thermostat, light switches, TV controls and how to find hotel amenities. The Connected Room is designed to streamline that process.

While hoteliers are increasingly looking at tablet PCs and other devices to facilitate this change, the Connected Room, developed in partnership with Intel, Teknikos and Technovation, is taking the concept a step further with a voice-activated solution built on Windows 10. Multiple pieces of technology are coming together to make this solution possible — bringing together environmental controls, room service menus, information about the property and in-room entertainment into a single system controlled by voice commands.

While our Connected Room is just a prototype, other companies are already using this approach to great effect with specialized industry devices based on the Windows platform. Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group’s iRiS solution is a suite of touch-enabled apps delivered in each room through a Surface Pro tablet. iRiS gives guests immediate access to information about restaurants, spas, exercise facilities, room service and what’s happening in the local area, along with the ability to request essential hotel services.

Replacing bulky binders in the room with a sleek new device is a great way to enhance the brand while also letting guests find information the way most people do today — digitally. Other opportunities to enhance guest experiences with technology include kiosks, beacon technology to provide location information or push offers to customers, and even lobby tables with touch interfaces. Properties like Caesar’s Palace and the Hyatt Hotel in Bellevue, Washington, have taken the latter approach, creating a digital lobby space that incorporates touchscreens into tables to make a new experience for guests.

Empowering staff

While the guest experience is the most visible element of the transformation in hospitality today, there is a lot going on to connect and empower the organization too, with mobile devices, the cloud and the Internet of Things. Providing the right tools can enable organizations to not only serve customers better, but also to gain insights on everything from guest satisfaction to financial reports to energy use.

Here again, new devices such as enterprise-class tablets or mobile phones can help staff get out from behind their desks to have real, personal interactions with customers. Collaboration software such as Skype or SharePoint portals can help staff remain on the same page when it comes to giving each guest a unique experience on the property. Staff are also using social media to make the customer experience better. Socially connected staff can communicate and collaborate with their peers and properties much quicker, which allows them to share insights and customer feedback to improve the overall experience across the company.

All these interactions create the kind of data to build real business intelligence as well. In hospitality, this often means developing a better understanding of guests’ preferences, whether it’s meals, wines, room settings or the way they use various amenities. Recently, Holland America Line began taking advantage of robust BI tools to dive more deeply into this form of real-world personalization. By taking this data-driven approach, Holland America has been able to quickly fine-tune offerings aboard its ships, simultaneously increasing customer satisfaction and sales revenues.

An ongoing relationship

As great as the stay may be, ultimately it’ll be checkout time. While technology tools can streamline the process of getting guests smoothly on their way, it’s also important to look at that ongoing customer relationship and social media’s role in growing that relationship.

It all comes back to helping properties provide a personal experience for each customer and making that customer journey more seamless. By putting the right technologies in the right places, organizations have a chance to make the entire interaction more personalized and build loyalty based on those experiences.

Investor Advises Freemium Model for App Analytics Developers

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All kinds of advice is available for enterprise mobility strategies, but much of it comes with vendor bias. Weighing in on the issue from a more objective perspective is venture capital firm Emergence Capital, which studies the mobile ecosystem because it invests millions of dollars in the mobile ecosystem.

The company recently outlined some practical, real-world tips gained from interviewing more than 200 mobile players, such as advocating the freemium model for "mobile app enablers" that provide mobile app analytics SDKs.

"Once a mobile app has integrated one analytics SDK, the bar for ripping it out and replacing it with a competitor is very high," said company exec Joe Floyd in a contributed post on TechCrunch. "We have observed the most successful SDKs like Mixpanel have targeted developers early with freemium offerings. Consequently, we have observed that getting your SDK distributed widely with freemium has enabled early leaders like Flurry to evolve their product offerings into other areas."

Mobile enablers are defined as companies that provide SDKs, APIs and development platforms to help organizations create, market and monetize mobile apps.

Mobile app SDK makers need to fight for mindshare, Floyd said, because "mobile app developers are simply not willing to integrate an infinite number of SDKs" in the mobile arena, which has longer development cycles than Web app counterparts and features devices with limited storage and capabilities compared to other platforms. The freemium model, Emergence Capital has observed, helps mobile enablers fight for that mindshare.

The investment firm also addressed the Web vs. native development approaches, noting that established leaders in the Web arena don't necessarily hold that position in the mobile app world.

"Mobile app development is fundamentally different from Web app development -- from the programming languages to the hardware resources available to run an app and ultimately to the app store distribution model," Floyd said. "As a result, Web app technology incumbents do not have an advantage in most categories."

New leaders have come forth to solve mobile-specific problems, he said, offering app testing specialist Crittercism as an example of a mobile-centric company that emerged to solve specific problems stemming from the explosion of mobile devices.

"With app stores serving as the gateway for user acquisition and monetization, we found that startups like App Annie (app store data) and ZenMarketing (attribution) started to solve very specific needs that their Web counterparts like comScore and Convertro were not solving," Floyd said.

The company provided an infographic breaking out the mobile landscape into three catgegories: technologies that accelerate app development; the API layer used in mobile apps for connecting to cloud-based services; and the sales and marketing technology layer driving user acquisition, engagement and monetization.

[Click on image for larger view.]Summing it All Up (source: Emergence Capital)

Along with the need for mobile SDKs to fight for mindshare and the native vs. Web leadership issue, Emergence Capital provided a final insight: point solutions are evolving into suite. It noted that Leanplum and Swrve evolved from simple A/B testing to offer more services, Mixpanel expanded from analytics into marketing automation, and Kahuna and Appboy moved on from only mobile marketing automation to e-mail marketing, usurping some Web incumbents in the process.

"As we look ahead, we know the number of mobile enterprise apps will continue to grow and this will benefit the ecosystem of enabling technologies," Floyd said. "However, as enabling technologies mature, competition will increase -- both from other startups and from the Web incumbents who rapidly attempt to catch up. We anticipate consolidation within the major categories on our landscape, particularly as the early leaders broaden their capabilities into product suites."

3 Ways How the Internet of Things Will Revolutionize Marketing

datafloq.com

An industry that is expected to add $ 19 trillion to the Global GDP will definitely have an impact on all aspects of organizations. As such the Internet of Things will revolutionize marketing. Within a few years, thanks to the Internet of Things, a marketer’s job will look totally different than today. When products will be connected to the Internet, it means that we can start communicating with those products and that opens a whole new world of exciting possibilities for marketers:

Communicating With Your Products

Think of the possibilities that are created when brands will track your engagement with their products through the Internet. All of a sudden they have information about how you use, when you use them, who uses them etc. Information like how long you sleep and how often you toss and turn or how fast you empty your bottle of beer on a hot summer day can be very interesting for marketers. This data will completely change the way brands interact with their customers and that requires a new approach by your marketing departments.

Creating New Innovative Partnerships

When devices create so much data, it becomes interesting for organizations to partner with other companies to create exciting new campaigns. Think of your car communicating with your Nest thermostat, so that when you driving your standard route from work to home, your house knows that it should start warming up. Or what about a beer company that creates smart beer bottles that interact with the music and with a club to give visitors a completely new experience when they are on a night out. That adds a lot of value for your customers and it creates thrilling new possibilities that where not possible until a few years ago.

Obtaining Better and Smarter Market Information

For many manufactures, they would only knew where their products where bought, but would not receive detailed information about who bought the product and/or where the product would be used. The Internet of Things radically changes this and offers the marketer with a lot of new data to understand their customers and who their market is. Instead of just Point of Sales data, marketers will have access to detailed information on their customers, where they live, who they are, what there preferences are (if they link social media accounts) and, as mentioned above, how they use the product. All this information enables marketers to create truly personalized messages that will have a lot higher conversion rate than today’s generic messages.

We are just at the beginning of the era of the Internet of Things, but we can already foresee that it will drastically change how brands should interact with their customers and how they should organize their marketing department. How do you think the marketing profession will be changed due to the Internet of Things? Share your thoughts in the comments below. 

How mobile apps are transforming the industry

supermarketnews.com

One area of explosive growth in the retail supermarket industry is the number of mobile apps that have come on the market to assist shoppers.

Take a look at the Center for Advancing Retail and Technology (CART), and you’ll see what I mean. A year ago, there were only a handful of apps featured; today, more than a dozen are available, with more coming.

In the aggregate, many of these mobile apps hold the potential to transform, if not revolutionize, the way food consumers interact with retail grocery stores. Let’s take a look at some of the areas consumers are utilizing these applications:

Coupon and discount aggregators: These apps scour retail sites and collect the latest promotional offers, enabling shoppers to find in one place the best (or most current) deals. Jingit, Grocery Pal, KleverShop and Coupon Sherpa are some examples.

Informational: Increasingly, mobile apps help customers find out about new product introductions or the availability of locally produced items, organics and GMO-free labels. Farmstand, for example, assists consumers in finding locally raised produce and meats. Apps like these appeal to content-oriented consumers — people who want lots of information about the items they purchase.

Shopping lists: Probably the most traditional of the grocery apps, this category enables shoppers to create a digital shopping list in advance of a trip to the store. GroceryPal is a typical program, and a somewhat similar application, GroceryTrip, scans recipes and assembles a corresponding item list.

Front-end pay: Much of the recent action in app development comes in creating programs that accelerate checkout and ease of payment — clear benefits for consumers and the stores themselves. One such app is PowaTag, billed as a payment and engagement technology that allows consumers to perform instant personalized transactions using their smartphone through use of adapted QR codes, audio watermarking and in-store beacon technology. The most prominent app in this category is Apple Pay, which is rolling out nationally, and has already been launched by a number of independent supermarkets across the country.

Many of the apps in the marketplace are increasingly becoming multifaceted, offering a variety of features that enhance the shopping experience. For example, Bright Aisle, an app developed by Media Solutions Corp., allows consumers to search for coupons, create shopping lists, build recipes, and sign up for email offers.

Without a doubt, the lineup of grocery related apps will continue to expand. Already, the potential of application platforms to alter the store shopping experience (if not the future of the traditional store) is beginning to be felt throughout the industry.