5 Essentials for Implementing Your Mobile Messaging Strategy

We recently shared the ins and outs of building your first mobile marketing strategy.

Of course a plan is only as good as the ability to implement it. So today we wanted to share our tips for bringing your mobile messaging strategy to life.  

Our Strategic Consulting Team has worked hundreds of clients — from five-person startups to Fortune 100 companies — and we’ve seen what works. Here are five implementation tips that will give you a much greater certainty of success!

1) Hold a Proper Kickoff

Kickoffs lend focus to new initiatives and align contributors on the strategy and process for bringing your messaging plan to life. They’re also critical for building cross-departmental consensus, which is essential to success.

During the kickoff, be sure to get the answers to questions like:  

• Do we have and support from the “doers,” the departments who might be impacted by the plan — and management?

• Do we have the bandwidth and skillset to execute the plan?

• Is everyone clear on their responsibilities?

• Have we established a clear timeline and target dates to hit?

Clarify all of these questions and whatever other issues are critical for your success at the kickoff meeting.

2) Create Clarity on Processes

Once your teams are aligned on strategy and tasks, define the process to send messages. Answer questions like:

• Who will be responsible for message content, audience segmentation, approvals and message deployment?

• Which messages will be automated as part of the customer lifecycle?

• Which messages will be based on a particular campaign, or sent to specific segments?

3) Get Into the Details

Clients tell us that one of the most valuable things our strategy team does is help them develop detailed short, medium and longer term mobile messaging tactics based on their big picture strategy. This includes:

• Discussing and document relevant use cases, user paths and goals

• Identifying the tags you’ll want to add to the back end that will allow you to personalize messaging, and

• Identifying the ongoing, high-value messaging opportunities that can keep your users engage

4) Establish Regular Reviews

Regularly optimizing your messaging campaigns differentiates the good marketers from the truly great ones.

Learn from your results. Challenge your team to meet at least quarterly. This gives you a chance to enhance campaigns, identify any blocks to rolling out your strategy, and plan for upcoming quarters.

5) Get Trained on the Mobile Messaging Technology

Great execution depends on people understanding and using mobile messaging technology effectively. Even if you choose to send messages programmatically, there’s benefit in understanding how to manually send messages and target different audience types.

By doing this, you’ll be exposed to what can easily be done “out of the box,” without additional resources or development work. If you’re using Urban Airship, we’ve made the UI of our Engage Composer as user-friendly as possible.  

I hope these tips will help make your mobile messaging strategy a reality — and a success! Get in touch anytime if you have questions, or want to set up a complimentary consultation with our team! We’re always happy to talk about your app’s unique challenges and opportunities.