Mobile marketing automation or MMA for short is another new term in the mobile marketing industry that has popped up over the last few years. In this article, we take a look at what mobile marketing automation is, and explain how it could be useful for businesses in the next few years.
The Origins of Mobile Marketing Automation
Like many mobile marketing efforts, MMA was first originated from standard desktop marketing automation, something that is surprisingly still quite new. With typical marketing automation, platforms are capable of providing their users with technology that can help to effectively market across multiple online channels, such as email, social media or SEO, and make repetitive tasks automated.
The whole idea behind marketing automation is to replace manual tasks required to make sales and marketing with fully automated tasks that are void of human error. In most cases, once a service has your email, it can use marketing automation to automate certain emails. Social networks could also send out automated messages when certain actions happen on the website.
The key to automated marketing on the desktop is to create messages via email or other media streams that people will want to read, otherwise it may come across spam-like. This is the same for MMA, however, it is aimed towards mobile user interaction.
The Step up to Mobile Marketing Automation
Pretty much everything is going mobile now, and many marketing efforts that were once useful on the desktop are being reimagined for mobile devices. This is no different for mobile marketing automation.
As you can imagine, automated tasks can now be set out for mobile-specific situations, and this is where the term MMA would come into play. Mobiles have a wide range of communication potential, and mobile marketing automation may be able to take advantage of those.
On mobile, SMS messages and push notifications are two great examples of streams that could be used in MMA, and unlike email, they are typically viewed by smartphone owners very quickly.
With MMA, you can automatically send push notifications or SMS messages that are catered to each user. For example, Appboy’s MMA service can intelligently estimate when a user is most likely to open an app and send out conveniently timed push notifications as a response to this. You could also use similar services to provide location-relevant content for your audiences.
Where Is MMA Being Used?
In most cases, mobile marketing automation is being used to market applications or other mobile-specific content. Because of this, there are a few specific areas that are easy to automate with MMA platforms today.
Two of the most used MMA streams that are useful for retaining and re-engaging old app users it through push notifications and email. Once a user is within your app, you can also use in-app messages or a news feed system to provide other information to each user.
The whole concept of MMA is to send relevant content to your users at the most useful times across these main streams so that users feel engaged and not swamped in spam. The overall process can be completely automated with MMA so that you can sit back and keep track of the results via app analytics.
