Mobile doesn’t really change marketing all that much. Before you dismiss that idea, hear me out. Mobile is just a device. Getting access to someone via mobile was a challenge in previous years. This is not the case now, with 42 percent of all email being opened on a mobile device and the large majority of social media being controlled from a mobile device. If you market internationally, consider that more people have cell phones than have electricity or access to clean drinking water.
If you look at the world this way, it’s easy to see why mobile will soon be the number-one device your content is being read on, rather than being a different channel that you have to master. The original idea for mobile marketing was to have an app because it gave you the ability to reach someone 24/7, with relevant messages to drive engagement. This is a great idea and works for many companies, but for many others, an app strategy is not a good idea.
It’s very hard to work your way onto a person’s phone and keep that person engaging with your app if you’re not pushing content to it constantly, but it is much easier to just send an email that gets read on the smartphone. So instead of creating an app, you should try to figure out how to get content into people’s hands 24/7 in the most relevant way possible. Marketing automation allows you to turn people’s Inbox into your “app” that can push the correct content at the correct time and have it reach people wherever they are in the world.