MarketingSherpa Blog

It’s always fascinating to dig into research on the world of marketing. While recently looking over the MarketingSherpa 2012 Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report, I found this chart:

Fast loading mobile pages should certainly be a priority, but one finding in this chart disappointed me. Look way down, close to the bottom, and see where only 11% of surveyed B2B marketers reported planning on using dynamically personalized mobile content to improve relevance and engagement.

I think this is a great oversight on the part of marketers active in the mobile marketing channel.

When someone interacts with your mobile website — or your regular website — on a mobile device, that engagement is almost certainly going to be a more intimate experience than someone viewing on a laptop or ultrabook, and certainly more so than on a desktop.

And, that person is very possibly interacting with your content in a more personal space than a dedicated work area or desk.

For B2B marketers, that means you are potentially reaching that person away from a traditional business setting.

Additionally, consumer marketers must consider the possibility that the mobile customer might even be actively shopping and engaging in showrooming, where they are in a brick-and-mortar store and looking at price or feature comparisons.

Data crunching and predictive analytics

With all the digital tools available for tracking prospect and customer behavior — and going even deeper, predictive analytics on your datasets that can provide insight into potential future interests, likes and behaviors on individuals in your database – there is every reason to pursue a dynamic content strategy. For example, you could:

• Provide prospects nurtured lead content that fits their current location within the complex sale buying cycle
• Give that B2C consumer a second look at an abandoned shopping cart, or offer an incentive to purchase items previously searched for on the website

I’m willing to bet most marketers would say, “Of course I want to provide relevant content to every prospect or customer.” Therefore, if providing relevant content is a mobile marketing goal, then dynamic content based on past behavior or predictive analytics will be about as relevant as you can get without just asking the visitor what they want to see.

Hopefully, marketers are currently experimenting with dynamic mobile content and will have a case study, or two (note: subtle hint for all the mobile marketers out there), that we can report on in 2013.

An email dynamic content case study

In the meantime, we do have a case study on dynamic content in an email newsletter in which we can see how the tactic affected the results of the campaign — “Email Marketing: HP uses dynamic email content to drive 300% open rate and 600% clickthrough increase.”

HP had a technology newsletter that went out to more than 8 million subscribers. The marketing team took a 2% segment of its U.S. subscribers, based on online behaviors, to receive dynamic content in their newsletters. The dynamic content did not replace all of the newsletter content, but did place content relevant to the recipient’s recent online behavior in prominent positions in the email newsletter.

The newsletters with dynamic content provided pretty dramatic results:

• 300% higher open rate
• 600% higher clickthrough rate
• Generated as high as 18% of overall traffic

Of course, email campaigns and mobile marketing interactions are not an apples-to-apples comparison, but I think the HP case study shows the value in dynamic content.

I personally think the mobile device is an ideal location for marketers to provide dynamic content. For next year’s mobile benchmark report, I’d love to see the “dynamically personalize mobile content” answer move way up the chart responding to the question, “Which do you use to improve the relevance and engagement of mobile content?”

Related Resources:

Email Marketing: Dynamic images get 5 opens per reader on a single email

Dynamic Email Marketing: How Savings.com boosted CTR 88% with offers chosen by data, not instinct

Use Dynamic Content and Testing to Optimize Newsletters: 4 Strategies to Create Customer Dialogs

Landing Page Mistakes: E-commerce sites treating new and returning visitors the same

Mobile Marketing: 27% of marketers don’t know their customers’ mobile adoption rate

Mobile Marketing: Get your audience’s attention – wait till they’re bored

About David Kirkpatrick

David is a reporter for MarketingSherpa and has over twenty years of experience in business journalism, marketing and corporate communications. His published work includes newspaper, magazine and online journalism; website content; full-length ghosted nonfiction; marketing content; and short fiction. He served as producer for the business research horizontal at the original Office.com, regularly reporting on the world of marketing; covered a beat for D/FW TechBiz, a member of the American City Business Journals family; and he provided daily reporting for multiple LocalBusiness.com cities. David’s other media and corporate clients include: USA Today, Oxford Intelligence, GMAC, AOL, Business Development Outlook and C-Level Media, among many others.

David's Posts | Send a Letter to the Editor

Categories: Mobile Tags: content marketing, content relevancy, dynamic content, mobile marketing, mobile research