Marketing in Milliseconds: Can Mobile Marketing Deliver on its Promise?

The Right Stuff
Turned off by mobile marketing now? Don’t be. Any CEO or CMO would be a fool not to invest in it. The question is how to go about it. YP.com, the company known best for the cinder block-sized Yellow Pages it still publishes, undertook extensive due diligence to figure that out.

Today, YP.Com is a consumer-facing web site and mobile app in the digital space, linking more than 70 million people to more than 20 million business listings each year.

To assist businesses in paring marketing costs and beefing up sales, YP.com uses Kahuna’s mobile marketing automation software. “We wanted to drive more engagements through ‘push’ marketing, mining the data that our consumers allow us to mine, and then using predictive analytics to help companies target their messages more accurately and personally,” says John Webster, YP.com senior marketing manager.

YP.com’s marketing sciences analytics team uses Kahuna to track the data it amasses on each individual signed up to use its mobile app.

“We know things,” Webster says. “For example, after someone spends money at an auto repair shop, their next search is often for food delivery because they can’t drive somewhere to pick up food. If the same person booked a table at a restaurant that evening, there’s a greater chance that they’ll need Uber or some other means of travel. Advertisers capture these insights to push personalized messages to the person.”

Julie Ginches, CMO of Kahuna, says such insights are derived from “the digital body language of a customer.” She adds, “The old way of marketing was to blast a message to many people in a particularized segment—soccer moms who like fast food. You then guessed what you think they wanted. If you’re wrong, that’s the perfect way to lose the prospect’s interest or alienate them.”

Kahuna, conversely, analyzes “individualized” data, actions you or I take this moment that, when added to other recent actions in our digital journey, trigger a seller to send a mobile marketing message precisely crafted to sell us what we seem to want or need. The strategy is paying off at YP.com. “Once we started sending personalized push messages, it increased the engagement between our app users and our advertisers by 180 percent,” Webster says.

By “engagement,” he means the handing over of money from a consumer to a listed company. Rather than someone logging onto a web site with the intent of buying something and leaving the shopping cart empty, the cash register rings.

Reading Minds
The register is also ringing at other companies deploying automated marketing technologies. UPS Battery Center, a Toronto-based manufacturer and supplier of sealed lead acid batteries for medical devices, alarm systems and industrial battery applications, wanted to learn how customers searched for products on its web site to improve their experiences and its product selection.

“We thought customers would search for a battery based on the specifications, dimensions and terminal type,” says Anton Khramov, CEO and founder of the company. “Turns out we were wrong.”

UPS Battery Center turned to Swiftype, a predictive analytics tool for corporate search engines, for the answers. Search boxes on a web site are a powerful but underutilized marketing tool, says Matt Riley, Swiftype’s cofounder and CEO. “Whatever the consumer types in that box becomes an incident navigation menu,” he explains. “Each click from that moment forward tells you what this person is specifically looking for.”