Tired of looking at the same mobile marketing examples from Fortune 100 companies? Here are 11 examples from companies that you’ve never seen before.
You’re on the hunt for some mobile marketing inspiration, but all you find on Google are examples from companies like Starbucks and IKEA.
Not very helpful when your company doesn’t have a $72 million dollar ad budget.
There’s no denying that these brands often follow mobile marketing best practices. But the reality is that it’s hard to relate to industry giants. (On top of that, seeing the same screenshots and lessons gets old fast.)
So, in an effort to give you something different–and arguably even more valuable–we’re bringing you 11 mobile marketing examples from brands you likely won’t recognize.
The good news is that these different types of mobile marketing strategies all worked–which means there’s a good chance they’ll also work for you.
Gadget Review is a technology and lifestyle publication with over 50,000 product reviews and ratings of the top electronics, software, and services.
Their most recent successful mobile marketing strategy involved mobile Facebook ads that specifically targeted customers with Apple devices.
The headline for the ad read: “Tired of paying full price for Apple devices?” And the text read: “Find the best deals on refurbished iPhones, iPads, Macbooks, and more.”
This was linked to an article with affiliate links to refurbished models. There was an ROI of almost 120% for these ads.
The lesson: don’t sleep on device targeting.
The foundation of SMS marketing success is an engaged and growing subscriber list.
To achieve this, Toroe Eyewear used our free Mobile Sign-Up Widget. The widget makes it easy for website visitors to text in a keyword. (A keyword is a word, phrase, or other combination of numbers and letters that allows people to subscribe to your text messages.)
When visitors click on the widget, it opens a pop-up with more information on Toroe Eyewear’s text marketing program.
When they click the button within the pop-up, their native text app opens with the keyword and number prefilled. All they have to do is tap send.
This simple mobile marketing strategy generated $7K in revenue and increased the store’s conversion rate by 200%. The return on text marketing has been 156x the initial investment.
Bloc is a free social events app that pays people to attend venues and connects people before events.
Since its business model is centered on growing and maintaining an audience for venues to advertise, it needed to attract those in the 18-35 demographic.
90% of its success doing so came from a simple growth hack they built into their app. The premise is simple: users earn stars within the app that they can later exchange for real money.
The quickest way of earning stars though is to invite friends. The friend who also downloads Bloc gets a star as well.
This strategy increased their userbase from 10k to 150k within two months. The key takeaway: the fastest way to mobile app adoption can be through a simple referral program.
About five years ago, Google announced Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), an easy way to create fast-loading mobile web pages.
U.S. Xpress, one of the nation’s largest truckload carriers, knew that potential driver hires were largely on their phones–often in locations where mobile service is slow.
The end result is half-filled forms. To improve conversion rates and its cost-per-application the company implemented AMP application pages. The pages loaded 5X faster than the non-AMP versions and increased the number of applicants by 62%.
Since a one-second delay in page load time reduces conversions by 7%, implementing AMP pages could be an easy way to speed up your site.
With 10 locations and over 90 employees, Year Round Brown (YRB) is the largest locally owned tanning brand in South Dakota.
Because of COVID-19, they decided to move their yearly sale by a couple of weeks. The problem was that many of their customers expected the sale to be around Memorial Day.
To let customers know about the change, YRB used MMS messages–text messages with engaging multimedia content like photos, videos, and animations–to send a graphic that highlighted the main 50% off tanning offer.
Here’s an example of one of its MMS messages.
Despite dealing with the repercussions of COVID-19, the sale generated 20% more revenue than the year before.
With mobile marketing campaigns, a recurring theme is the importance of video. That’s why the social media site TikTok is gaining traction as a potentially lucrative mobile advertising platform.
SLATE & TELL, a personalized jewelry brand, used TikTok’s Smart Video Creative Tool, to create fun and engaging In-Feed Ads. (You can watch one of its ads here.)
These video ads helped Slate & Tell reach four million people on the platform, with 1,000 single session add-to-carts—nailing their goal of 2X return on ad spend within the timeline they wanted.
Physicians Formula knew it had to create a mobile-first experience when mobile devices accounted for over 60% of its traffic.
Its approach was to be incredibly intentional about the content they put above the fold, so that users would be engaged from their first glance and would want to scroll down the page to see more.
This mobile-first approach led to an increase in the conversion rate of 130%.
Text-to-Pay comes in different forms. Some companies send out exclusive offers, and you respond with the quantity you want. Others allow you to send a text message with what you want and when you want it.
Dirty Lemon represents the second, more conversational approach to text to order, although it offers a more traditional e-commerce experience for first-time buyers.
The results are impressive: Dirty Lemon’s customer base has grown to 30,000 customers in the past year, processing 50,000 text messages a month, with millions of dollars transacting through their SMS ordering process.
Mobile optimization generally refers to site infrastructure and isn’t quite the same as being mobile-friendly.
To make your content mobile-friendly, you want shorter sentences, engaging headlines, and relevant media. In other words, you want to create content that’s highly skimmable.
Filter King was able to do this by replacing its nicely-designed blog announcement email with a short, punchy plain text version. It’s email now reads like this.
“Dear [Name]
Time for your much awaited blog from Filter King!
This week we are discussing [topic]
Click Here to read [links to blog]”
The result was a 112% increase in these email’s click-through rate.
Push notifications are a major mobile marketing trend.
A study of 300 businesses—around 20% of which are retailers—found that 72% of businesses say push notifications offer a greater or equal return on investment than email.
44% even say the ROI from the marketing channel is greater than email.
eXtra Electronic would agree. A major electronics and household appliance retailer, they replaced emails to people who created accounts with mobile push notifications.
By the end of the campaign eXtra had:
One of REVOLVE’s favorite ways to connect with its community is through Instagram Stories. So it made sense for them to run paid story ads on Instagram.
Using Dash Hudson’s visual marketing software, Story Studio, they showcased new arrivals, best sellers, and dresses in their ads.
The end result was a return on ad spend (ROAS) of 9X their initial investment.
Getting a mobile marketing plan in place doesn’t have to be a challenging undertaking or require a multi-million dollar budget.
While some of the above strategies are easier to implement than others, what’s clear is that even small steps toward a more mobile-friendly digital marketing strategy can make a difference.
When you consider the continued growth of mobile web traffic and ownership, it’s entirely worth it.
Drew Wilkinson is the Head of Marketing at SimpleTexting. Drew has more than a decade of experience managing successful integrated marketing programs to build brands, raise awareness, and generate demand.
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