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Using Mobile Ads To Drive Customers To The Cash Register

VP 4INFO imageThe path to purchase has changed with the times. Many marketers still associate mobile ads with mobile commerce, but that’s yesterday’s thinking. Today’s reality is that mobile ads lead to in-store cash registers, and there are numbers to prove it.

Your customers are on a mobile device 150 times a day. Most shop online before they hit the stores, and their smart phone is virtually always in hand. Mobile advertising delivers an average 7.5% sales lift — and more than 90% of those sales are happening in stores.

The ability to touch a customer anywhere, anytime with mobile ads presents an opportunity to connect the digital world to your brick-and-mortar store. That means getting customers through the doors, but mobile marketing doesn’t stop there. Done right, it can influence brand decisions and lead your prospect all the way to the cash register.

It can even redirect customers from a competitor’s store to yours, with well-timed ads that reach them while they’re out shopping.

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Careful targeting and precise measurement turn mobile marketing into a powerful tool that paves a clear path to sales growth (yes, 7.5%) and market share gains. The average return on ads spend (ROAS) is 382% and can soar as high as 800% or more. The potential is tremendous for marketers who are able to send the right message to the right target at precisely the right moment.

To do this well, and with the ability to measure your results, you need to know exactly who receives your mobile ad. It isn’t easy to do, but it is possible. And it’s essential to measuring your mobile campaign’s success, because it clearly shows you where, along the path, you touched your customer and drove them to purchase.

A Peek At The Path

To understand the path to purchase, it’s helpful to consider three basic factors:

  1. Where is your customer? If she’s home on the couch, you’ll use mobile advertising in a different way than if she’s out running errands. It’s all about context. I’ll explain more later.
  2. What is your customer actually doing at this moment? Good data analytics can tell you whether she’s at home or on the road at any given time or day of the week.
  3. What device(s) is she using at this moment? Again, it’s about context. Engagement levels differ from smart phone to laptop, for example.

Having identified the three components that factors your attention, let’s look at how it all comes together to create an effective mobile ad campaign.

The first step, of course, is to identify customers within a store’s trading area. These are the ripest prospects, and retailers are defining their store trading area with increasing sophistication. Rather than simply targeting people within five miles of the store, retailers are using drive times and other factors to create more purposeful boundaries in what is known as “geofencing.”

Savvy retailers also do audience targeting, often through CRM data. You want to understand what your customers buy, and when. Ideally, you want to supplement a broad audience targeted campaign with additional geofencing-specific messaging to create highly targeted messages in something we call Bullseye HyperLocal.

As an example, a major soda brand might target heavy soda buyers when they’re in the vicinity of a convenience store. They’ll serve these buyers a mobile ad promoting a 68-ounce drink special. The idea here is to convert the consumer to a buyer on a more immediate basis.

In another example, a pet food retailer might run a campaign using basic audience targeting to send general messages, but when the dog owner drives within a mile of the store, the retailer swaps out the creative to serve up a more promotional mobile ad. Again, the intent is to shorten the path to purchase by providing both an at-home/anywhere experience, along with a perfectly timed location-based impression.

It takes careful analytics and — as mentioned earlier — context is important. If you know your customer is out driving, you don’t want to send a video. Instead, serve a branding or promotional ad and send them to a store locator page so they can find you easily. If, on the other hand, you know your customer is couch shopping, that higher engagement rate may call for more robust creative, such as a video. And that brings me to my next point:

Remember The Fun Factor

People are engaged with mobile devices for gaming, shopping, e-mailing friends and more. They expect content to be fun. Make your mobile ads entertaining and relevant. Also make sure they’re engaging and useful. Store locator information, for example, eases the road to the cash register. Catch attention with fun creative, and then clear obstacles with useful information and a memorable message or offer. That means more than all the clicks you can count.

For example, a car manufacturer did an in-home/out-of-home campaign. Ads served in the home included video content and a fun call to action to “build your own model” online. The out-of-home campaign offered promotional interest rates and a link with directions to the nearest dealer.

Another example involves a state lottery.  When the jackpot exceeded a certain amount, this triggered ads featuring the jackpot amount to be delivered within a geofence of lottery retailers.  The key was to provide a map to the nearest lottery retailer, to take advantage of a consumer’s impulse to act now.  The jackpot amount gave the mobile ad a newsworthy air and the action was useful — go to one of these retailers to buy your ticket.

Then it’s time for measurement. When you use mobile advertising to coax consumers along the path to purchase, you want to measure what matters most: sales lift. Accurate measurement requires tying your sales directly to the mobile users who received your ad.

You need the ability to compare your sales results by looking at two groups from within the same customer segment — the only difference being whether they were exposed to your mobile ad. That will tell you with certainty how your campaign performed.

The mobile marketplace continues changing, and it gives you countless opportunities to touch your customer along their path to purchase. What used to be a blind shot in the dark is now a carefully planned and fully measurable mobile ad campaign. With today’s technology, we can see at which point or points along the path to purchase we touched the customer. We can see what’s boosting sales, and we have access to data that helps ensure we’re sending a tailored message to the right customers at the right time.

Most important of all, we can measure our success at the cash register so marketers can clearly see their ROAS. And a 7.5% sales lift is enough to give just about anybody the confidence to invest more of their media budget in mobile.


Tim Jenkins is the CEO of 4INFO and a seasoned Silicon Valley veteran with more than 25 years in executive roles at tech companies including Apple and Stratacom (acquired by Cisco). At Apple, Jenkins was responsible for developing the education business division in Europe. Employing a unique channel and product strategy he helped this division grow to over $500 million in annual revenue. While at Stratacom he was a key player in the company’s global expansion, entering 11 new major geographies in Europe and Asia as Stratacom grew to more than $250 million in revenue. Jenkins also was the CEO of Simpata, an SaaS based HR and benefits platform licensed to major medical carriers.

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