Performance Series, Season 2, Episode 3: 2022 Mobile Marketing Strategies: Push, SMS, In-App, & Conversational Channels

Hey. Thanks for joining us today for the Amarsis performance series. I'm Nick Odom, and today I'm joined by William Chan, one of our technical adoption specialists over in APAC. William, do you wanna do a quick intro before we jump in? Yeah. Hi, everyone. My name is William. I'm coming from, Hong Kong. So, basically, I'm, as a technical adoption specialist to look after the adoption plan of our one of our of our largest clients in the APEC region, including Hong Kong, China, and also Singapore. So my daily, work is, like, I will be acting as a technical adviser to answer all the technical questions and also lead the technical conversation, including, like, how to how to make our integration better between the masters and the client system, how to drive, our clients to use more use case in our masses. So, basically, it it quite, depend thing on the needs of our clients, and then I will be the one who always, help them to to make some suggestions so that eventually, they can, you know, take our suggestions and then come up with a very, good business plan, and then they know how to execute those strategy, on through our eMasters platform. Awesome. Yeah. I you know, just chatting with you in the past, William, I I I you know, just hearing some of the use cases that you support. You know, today, we're gonna jump in and do some of the, you know, conversation around mobile and just, like, the trends in mobile and just the different channels that we can utilize, you know, for clients on a mobile device. You know, just jumping in a bit, you know, in, in the APAC region. I mean, the it mobile seems like it's always been trending a little bit faster than Amer. But, you know, what we've seen in the last couple years is, you know, probably, like, a forty plus percent increase in mobile traffic, mobile checkouts. I mean, a lot of brands putting a lot of effort into, optimizing their site for mobile, not just for browsing, but also for that checkout process and and even starting to look into apps. You know, a lot of brands going d to c now and and investing in their own their own websites in general. You know, what are some of the things that you've seen and that you work with clients on, you know, being one of those more forerunner, you know, regions for this for this channel. Yeah. I totally agree with you. So, although email is the traditional way to engage with our customers, it's also the most most favorite channels that our clients is are now using. But I can see that, there's a trend that our clients want to explore more different kind of channels. Because right now, for email channel, recently, Apple official officially, introduced the privacy policy, which doesn't allow our marketers to easily check the email opens from those iOS fifteen users. So, because of that, it's hard for us to measure the success of the email channel. So I think it's time for us to explore the other channels. So like you said, we can explore the, website, whether we can, you know, consider showing the pop up on the website, or we can even though send a post message to their browser. And for the mobile app, I can see there's a chance that, our clients, is they are eager to put more resources. Either they hire more people internally, like the app developers, or they they hire the third party agency to help them to build the mobile app because, we can see that, everyone everyone have their website. Right? The ecommerce website. So how we can differentiate, our business. So, and and also in APAP, we have a lot of mobile users. So to be honest, I think mobile app is also, a very hottest trend, I would say, because it's shorten the distance between the users and your brand. So it's it's kind of very easy to engage with them. So let's say for mobile app, once I install the mobile app, then you can put some interactive elements. For example, like, you can send a reminder, push notification, or you can even though when when they entered into your mobile app, you can send some personalized personalization messages. For example, like, if they have their birthday month, then you can send out the birth birthday wishes with some birthday voucher code and some recommendations. So I can see there are a lot of, possibilities around the mobile app. And one more thing to mention, we have a lot of o two o business, in APAC. Like, they have their online store as well as they have their offline shops. So how we can use the mobile app to, you know, get those people back to your website or mobile app? Mobile app is the key. Like, we can make sure make sure of, some, geofencing feature. Like, we can identify the location of that, those customers, and we can easily send them some, product accommodations or the the the announcement about, your store, that kind of thing so that when I go to your your store, I can feel more personalized, and I can feel more connected, to the business brand. Yeah. Yeah. No. That's so interesting because, I mean, at the end of the day, you know, if I'm getting, you know, most of the experience that I would in the app on the mobile mobile, you know, website, like, it might not be worth it to me to download that app. But but to your point, like, if you're offering me a really highly personalized and valuable experience and even merging that offline and online experience through the app, that's something that, like, that becomes, one, something very valuable to me as a consumer because it makes my life buying with you easier. But it also, to your point, gives you a lot more, access to data on the marketer side, and and taking advantage of something like mobile engage giving you, you know, the geofencing that you're mentioning, you know, some of the in app messaging. All of that can really enhance that experience for the customer and kinda move us away from, you know, traditional channel like email. Now in the case of, like, them getting the app, like, are you still kind of utilizing that channel of email? Or, like, how does how does the relationship between those channels kind of change as you as you unlock some of these other, other channels to to reach your customers? Yeah. I will stay I will say step one. They need to understand about their customers, like, like, the customer life cycle, but, they are inactive, active. They are first time customers. And how how will their behavior like, how will their website behavior? Are they very active to browse your website or browse your mobile app? Do they really engage, you know, by putting something on your shopping cart or even though they eventually make a purchase either on the website or on your mobile app? This kind of behavior are quite valuable when we try to analyze our customer base. So once we get up all the behavior and also understand about the customer life cycle, then we can kind of, you know, build different kind of customer segments. And then based on different kind of customer segments, then we can, you know, use the best or right channel to engage with them because different kind of people, they might have their preference to receive your marketing messages, on different kind of channel. And another thing is that, sometimes our clients, they they find that it's quite hard to understand which is the right channel, to engage with their customers. For example, like, they may not have enough data or many of their customer, they are quite new, to the brand. So we can actually make use of our automation program rather than just, sending out, you know, blasting batch and blasting some messages to the customers. So Yeah. I just yeah. By using our automation program, we can incorporate incorporate all the channels together. So let's say, for example, step one, you want to send a welcome email to them, and then you can wait for some time, and then you can see if they open or click your email or not. If you cannot see quite a good response from them, then you may also try the other channels. Like, you can try sending out SMS message or you can try, you know, sending out the web push or website overlay or even though you can try sending some, mobile push messages. So it's it's quite convenient if you are using the MASA's automation program to set up the whole omnichannel, strategy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I know, you know, you kinda mentioned, like, you know, that person's kinda new to the brand. We we have a lot of conversations with our clients around, you know, when do we take advantage of some of that implied, you know, data that we've you we've, you know, been able to aggregate and, like, you know, build, you know, some of these affinity models and just, you know, looking at their engagement and understanding if they're engaged in this channel and that channel. We also have a lot of conversations with our clients around just trying to collect some first party data, just asking for some of that. Like, what channel would you prefer here or there? Like, you know, maybe having a use case in mind for a particular channel so that, you know, you know, they want SMS to be used for, like, this back in stock alert or some sort of, like, price drop alert or some something very specific that they want that channel used for because it's maybe time sensitive or whatever. But, that that's really interesting that you kinda mentioned just the way that you can, you know, leverage automations just to orchestrate across those channels and really try to get to know that customer and their preferences throughout it. You know, speaking of SMS, you know, in the past, you've you've mentioned some really interesting stuff that you guys are doing in that channel. Is there anything, that you've done kinda recently that's been, you know, kind of interesting or cool in in the SMS channel? Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. I have one recently. It is coming from our Singapore client. So they are the, news media publisher. So, basically, when you go to their website, you can subscribe to different kind of newspaper or the magazines. So recently, they have an idea. They want to, send some voucher numbers to their loyalty members, so that below team there are a lot of team members, they can use the voucher numbers to subscribe to the other magazines and newspaper. And they find that, SMS is is a very useful channel to engage with them because they they use SMS quite frequently to, to update the news or even though to confirm the subscription plan, with their members. So that's why they think that SMS channel should be the right channel to send the voucher numbers to them. But the challenge is that we are thinking about how we can put the voucher number inside the SMS message. Then, we we make we are making use of, our eMasters two way SMS meet, features as well as the external content. So let me explain a bit about how we execute the use case. So, basically, the client would like to send out a SMS message, to their loyalty members. Right? And then for this best SMS message, it's kind of, reminding the loyalty members, hey. You have, something that's we have some we have a voucher number, that we can give to you. You can reply the SMS message with the voucher keyword so that you can retrieve your voucher number. Right? And then once they reply with the voucher number keyword voucher keyword. Right? Then our SMS messaging service, we got this notification. And then at that time, we will connect to our external content. So as external content is a feature allow EMAS to call the third party system API endpoint. So at that time, our client is using a a vendor to store all their voucher numbers with all the users. So they have they have the whole database containing all this kind of information, And they can develop this API endpoint, so that the masses can call this API endpoint to retrieve the voucher number. And then we can retrieve this voucher number and put it as the personalization token in the SMS message. And, eventually, we can send out, this SMS message with the virtual number to the loyalty member. So I would say for this use case, we are we are helping the clients to to to, build up a more personalized SMS channel with their low loyalty members. And, also, the content is quite useful because, the voucher number is really value added to their loyalty members. Right? They can use different Yeah. Version number and subscribe to more, valuable, magazine and newspaper. Yeah. No. That's, that's really interesting. So you've got, you know, you've got this two way kind of, you know, channel that you're you're using SMS for. So they're actually kind of engaging to actually receive that voucher. But, really interesting use of the external content feature, which I think a lot of people aren't necessarily familiar with. You know, it's it's it's available in the account. But it can be really powerful when you hook it up to, like, a CMS or in in your case, a a third party voucher system to to really go and fetch some of that information at the time of send for that customer. And so you've got this, you know, kind of dynamic message that's kinda sitting here, but then you're you're constantly keeping it up to date with with some sort of external, you know, you know, mechanism that's that's kinda informing that channel and that message of what it should be saying for that person. And that's, really an interesting, you know, evolution in some of this, some of this outbound, you know, communication because it can make it super relevant. It can make it really conversational and and really, you know, make it more engaging and add value outside of just kinda that batch of blast. Because I think that's kinda what I see a bunch, with newer brands getting into SMS is that they they almost use it as a replacement for email. And and it it just becomes this, like, you know, constant batch of blast, you know, spray and pray method of, like, just trying to get the most out. And and we see a lot of list fatigue with that. Right? Like, we get Mhmm. We get a lot you know, it's it's it's it's a challenge. It's really easy to opt into, but it's also a challenge. It's really easy to opt out to. So, like, you know, just as far as a a client getting into a channel like SMS or even push, you know, what what's some advice that you you give or things that you've seen that, you know, work really well or or not so well? I I can observe that actually, like like, nowadays, many clients, they have both they have both website and mobile app. Right? And for the website, actually, all the website are are mobile responsive. So they need to find out a way to differentiate between the the mobile website and the mobile app. Why the customer choose to use your mobile app instead of the mobile website? If they are they are they are providing the same function, then I would just go to the Google Chrome and, you know, that that they navigate to the mobile website to browse the products. Right? So they need to have a better, user experience, the UX flow in the mobile app, and they need to make sure that the content inside the mobile app is personalized and also interactive. Yeah. So I have some examples. So, for example, like mobile app, you can put more, product recommendations based on the the the app user behavior so that I I'm really browsing some, products that are really relevant to me. Right? And, also, you can introduce some loyalty scheme, I would say, because I I observe many mobile apps. They have the, loyalty scheme. So when I log in to the mobile app, I can know how many points that I have and how many vouchers or coupons that I have can use. So that is kind of, like, the mobile app can embed the, most up to date content about your brand and also embed the customer wallet, I would say. So it's kind of, like, like, streamline the whole, user user flow or user experience. So once I Okay. Really, you're kinda like you stay logged in there. Right? Like, it it's like Yeah. It's less barrier to entry. Right? And I and I scenario where it's like you're you're very invested in this loyalty program. You wanna see what your current status is. Like, it's not consistently, like, logging me out, logging me back in. Like, I could kinda just Yeah. Jump in. It might even be integrated with my base ID, so they've got some security behind me. Yeah. Exactly. It's frictionless. It's frictionless. Right? Yes. Frictionless. You know, I think I I think even in that example you gave with SMS, like, that's a really good example of, like, you've made it you know, you've, one, made them kind of engage with you to to get that voucher, but you've made it this very conversational thing. You know, something that I've, you know, been really curious about with you guys, you know, in APAC, is, you know, some of the WeChat stuff and some of these some of these different channels that you guys plan. And I know that we're kind of, starting to, you know, get into our pilot with the conversational channels. But even outside of Amars, it's just in general, the trends. Like, what are some of the things that you're seeing in those conversational channels that, you know, we're starting to see emerge in the US, but I I think have been more prevalent in your region? WeChat is definitely, a channel that our customer frequently ask us. So we all also have some, projects with our our some China clients. You know, they need to approach their clients for WeChat channel. So, basically, we we we help them to line up with a WeChat, channel partner, then we we kind of, incorporate the we WeChat channel with our automation program so that they can use our automation program to send out the the WeChat messages. And for WeChat channel, they are quite specific, I would say, when when we need to decide the message type that we are gonna send. So they have they have the marketing message that you can batch and blast, to send out to your all of your, reach out users. And they also have the personalized messages that you can pick up some templates to use. Like, for example, you want to send send out, a a a a welcome message, then we can pick up the welcome message template from the WeChat channel and then use it. And another channel, I would say is WhatsApp. So we are also, you know, exploring, you know, the way to incorporate, the the the WhatsApp channel, with the automation program. I think WhatsApp is also, like, all of us are using right now in Hong Kong, like and also in data no matter its personal use or business use. And, also, we can see the trend that, many of the merchants, they already, have have their own registered business reach out account for the for their daily conversation with their clients. So I think we can also leverage the WhatsApp channel in future. Yeah. Very cool. Well, I think we're we're kinda coming up on time here. Just to close out, like, any anything you're, you know, kinda anticipating? Or, like, what's your kind of, your own personal kind of forecast for the the mobile channel and just the trends that we're seeing and, like, what what you think the next five years might have in store for for, you know, just the ecommerce industry as a whole? Yeah. I I would say, the the after the COVID nineteen period, actually, many users take gap used to browsing, you know, browsing products and also buying online. But, we still need to embrace the, offline channel experience. Like, for APAP, actually, many of our end customers, they love going shopping, like, for their weekend activities. They they love going to the shopping mall to buy a lot of stuffs. So how we can connect the offline experience and the online experience? So it is the key. So, like, as I mentioned, we can make use of the the mobile apps and other website to connect the install experience and also the online experience. So, for example, like, we can have the loyalty scheme that they can use in online or in the store. And, also, for the mobile app, maybe you can also, invest some wallet functions so that they can tap on your POS system in order to check how many pounds that they have. And and and, also, they can, you know, put some recommendations, like AI recommendations in the mobile app to work about some some really relevant products, to the end customer so that the end customer can feel more personalized. And, yeah, more and, you know, and we can also, you know, maintain a very good relationship between Deepgram and and your your customers.