Mobile devices have taken over the world, and there’s no denying that. There are about 6.64 Billion active smartphone users worldwide, which is roughly 83% of the global population.

Over the years, mobile devices have undergone drastic changes in design and functionality, making them faster and more secure than ever.

With a large chunk of the global population using mobile devices, you can’t possibly ignore selling your products and services through this channel. With mobile commerce, you get the opportunity to sell your offerings to anyone, anywhere, and at any time. Who would want to miss out on that?

This immense power shift from desktop to mobile devices paved the way for Mobile Commerce.

What is Mobile Commerce?

Mobile Commerce (mCommerce) is the buying and selling of products and services through mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. With the development of digital payments facilitating safe transactions on wireless platforms, businesses have shifted their focus to targeting mobile users.

For starters, you can optimize your eCommerce store for mobile devices. It should be able to deliver content on a smaller screen size without downgrading on user experience. Most eCommerce businesses that don’t optimize their website for mobile devices very rarely succeed.

PWAs work wonders for optimizing your store for mobile devices. They are websites that look and function like native apps, eliminating businesses’ need to develop dedicated apps. Users can get the feel of an app without having to download it from the app store and store it locally on their devices. You can develop PWAs, mobile applications, or both to start optimizing your store for mobile devices.

mCommerce vs eCommerce

One could argue that mCommerce is just a modality of eCommerce, and they won’t be wrong. After all, eCommerce and mCommerce share a lot of similarities. Apart from all the similarities, what makes mCommerce different from eCommerce is greater mobility and reachability.

mCommerce allows users to shop from anywhere without the need to confine themselves to a fixed spot. Users can shop while having a meal, traveling on a bus, or attending a boring meeting at the office.

But are the Marketing strategies different for both? Should you put in extra effort for mCommerce?

This article will guide you through the best mobile commerce strategies to get you going in the online retail space. Let’s get started. 

10 Mobile Commerce Strategies To Promote Your Business

1. Use the Power of Social Media

Social media has evolved from being just a platform to share pictures and connect with your friends and family to one of the most effective advertising channels in the world. 

Social media is a gold mine when it comes to building your brand’s digital presence. It is one of the most practical channels to communicate your brand’s message to your customers, especially if you run an online store.

The first step in leveraging social media marketing is to select the right social media platform. Identify what social media platforms your target audience prefers and select accordingly. This way, you can engage with audiences who are genuinely interested in your products and services.

When selecting social media platforms for eCommerce, marketers need to be a “Master of one” rather than a “Jack of all trades.” You may be wondering, isn’t it better to be present on all platforms to attract more prospects? 

Each social media platform has different functionalities and features. Some platforms are great for posting pictures and videos, while some are better for posting business-related content. 

For example, Instagram and Facebook are great choices if you want to engage with your audience by posting pictures and videos they can relate to. In contrast, LinkedIn and Twitter are better choices if you wish to appeal to a more professional audience. 

Choose the channels where your audience is most active and where you can deliver your content to maximum effect. Rather than providing irrelevant content on every other platform, we recommend engaging and building a community with your audience on 3-4 selected platforms.

Each platform has different options for different needs like advertising, selling, promoting, communicating with prospects, or improving brand engagement.

Nike has been one of the pillar eCommerce brands when it comes to social media. They are immensely active on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. They have effectively recognized platforms on which they can impact the most rather than being active on all social media channels.

The brand takes a rather unexpected approach when it comes to social media. Rather than focusing on their products, they focus on their athletes, their opinion on various social issues, and their customer stories. Nike created their brand around people instead of pushing its products to them. Instead of solely promoting their products, they focused on building engagement and involving people with their campaigns.

You can go two different ways with your social media management- you can run paid advertising campaigns or organically communicate your message to your audience. With declining organic reach on social media, brands are now more inclined toward running paid advertisements. Although we don’t recommend entirely stopping your organic content, as solely focusing on paid campaigns can be catastrophic.

Too much self-promotion might make your marketing efforts look pushy; to avoid this, you should also post organic content like industry news, upcoming launch events, etc., to diversify your content.

Paid and Organic content have different goals. Organic posts serve as a medium of interaction with your audience, encouraging your audience to engage and share your brand’s content. Paid advertisements, on the other hand, enable you to reach your marketing goals like creating brand awareness, improving conversions, generating leads, etc.

We recommend using a mix of organic content and paid advertising in your publishing schedule to maintain a healthy balance with your audience. Posting consistently on social media is critical for improving your social media game. You can use a social media management tool like Buffer to schedule your content and avoid manually posting daily.

E-commerce businesses must leverage the power of social media. Try and build a community instead of pursuing sales and promotions. To sum it up: don’t solely focus on conversions; take engagement into account as well.

2. Use SMS Marketing

What better way to promote your services than using an exclusively available feature on mobile devices? Yes, we are talking about SMS.

According to studies, SMS Marketing is 8 times more effective than Email Marketing. 

It’s practical and cheap. But how do you get started? 

You can easily execute an SMS marketing campaign with an SMS Marketing Platform. These platforms help you gather insights from different sources and send messages to your prospects on a large scale. 

Some important points to focus on while crafting your SMS Marketing Strategy:

• Include URLs in your messages: Including URLs in your messages can increase your click-through rates. Higher click-through rates increase the chances of people viewing your promotions, products, and services. Make sure you use shortened URLs in your messages to make the URL easier to share. 
• Manage customer-related queries through SMS: Customer service is critical to any business. Hiring and managing a customer support team is expensive; instead of spending the big bucks on hiring a team, you can use SMS Customer Channels to do the job for you. It lets you send automated responses to your customer queries and helps you maintain healthy customer relationships. 
• Don’t send messages to people who haven’t opted in: It’s better to ask for permission from users before sending them messages about promotions, discounted deals, or new product launches. Sending messages to people who aren’t interested will result in wasted efforts as it won’t improve your open rates.

Apart from using SMS, you can also leverage other popular messaging platforms like WhatsApp. WhatsApp is the largest messaging platform in the world, with over 2 billion active monthly users. The platform has an open rate of 98%, making it an excellent choice for promoting your business. 

Businesses use WhatsApp as a channel for customer support. Besides being an exceptional support tool, it is a great promotional tool. Build a contact list by leveraging contacts available on your online store and sending personalized messages, discounted deals, promotional codes, and new product launches.

To start things off, you can get the WhatsApp Business app and create your business profile. You can include your catalog, labels, and automated responses to communicate with your customers effectively.  

Try not to restrict yourself to just promotional messaging; keep in mind to inform and amuse your audience. You can mix multimedia materials, such as emojis, GIFS, photographs, or videos, with your messages to keep your audience interested.

3. Send Push Notifications

Ever get those notifications from your favorite app enticing you to buy a new product? Most of the time, we end up clicking on one of these notifications. Businesses use notifications to communicate with their existing customers effectively. But why is it so successful? And how can you use this to your advantage? Let’s get into it.  

According to reports, push notifications have an opening rate of 90% and can boost app engagement rates by 88%. Push notifications can be sent to mobile devices at any time. Users don’t have to use the app to get push notifications. Push notifications not only serve as a tool for promoting new products or services; they are exceptionally successful in retargeting inactive users. You can send push notifications to remind or entice shoppers who have added products to their cart but haven’t completed the purchase. 

By sending persuasive notifications, you can notify your shoppers about discounted deals, new arrivals, and trending collections. Another way to use push notifications is by understanding your customer’s emotions. 

For example, you can send a message like: We haven’t seen you in 30 days. (Not that we are counting).

These messages make your brand seem more concerned about your customers and spark curiosity within them to check your store.

Another creative way to use push notifications is to reduce cart abandonments. You can send enticing messages to your shoppers who have items in their cart but haven’t completed the purchase. A well-thought of push notification sent due to cart abandonment can generate a 42% purchase rate. 

Although, beware! Push notifications can often act as a double-edged sword if used inappropriately. Avoid sending users too many notifications as it can get irritating, and they might block or uninstall your app altogether. 

You can manage your push notifications under a single platform. Here are some best push notification tools and services that you might consider. 

4. Embrace Podcasts as an Advertising Platform

Most businesses focus on visual media to promote their brand, which opens up an avenue that is quite underrated- the audio form of advertising. The popularity of podcasts has been steadily increasing over the years and has slowly transformed into an exceptional promoting tool. 

Just a small warning, podcast ads aren’t for everyone. It only works for specific audience demographics. For example, if you aren’t targeting young people, you might want to avoid it, as they are mostly known to be more interested in podcasts.

If you feel that podcasts are the right platform for your promotional strategy, you need to find podcasts related to your industry, reach out to them, discuss the associated fees, and explain your brand’s message to them. 

Your message placement is also important to consider while promoting through a podcast. If you have a short message, it’s better to include it at the beginning or the ending of the podcast. If your message is longer than 5-6 lines and requires elaboration, consider placing it in the middle of the podcast. 

Promoting through podcasts takes a lot of effort, but if you get it right, it’s a home run. Brands like Dollar Shave Club and Foursigmatic have successfully hacked the art of podcast advertising.

5. Collaborate with Influencers

It’s safe to say influencers and online retail go hand in hand. You don’t always have to spend millions of dollars on expensive promotional campaigns to be effective.

Over recent years, both small and big e-commerce businesses have successfully leveraged social media influencers to promote and grow their businesses. Influencer marketing is the practice of promoting your brand through well-known social media personalities.

Customers often prefer to buy products trusted and used by someone famous. This form of marketing is successful because an influencer endorsing your brand gives you two things- massive reach and the trust of customers. It ultimately does the job of validating that your products are credible and trustworthy, which is a huge factor in online commerce. 

It is vital to choose the right influencers for your campaign. While selecting an influencer for your campaign, you should consider factors like influencer fees, their target audience, and whether your brand message aligns with theirs. 

If you are a small business, consider micro-influencers. These influencers have fewer followers but are much more affordable. Choose someone who aligns with your brand’s target audience, as some micro-influencers have very specific groups of loyal followers, making their content highly targeted toward those groups.

Audible collaborated with Jesse Driftwood, a professional photographer, to promote their product. Jesse, a micro-influencer with less than 200K followers posted a picture on his Instagram handle talking about using Audible to learn business management and productivity.

Despite having fewer followers than most big-shot influencers, Audible partnered with Jesse because of his loyal fanbase. His followers would interpret his post as more of a suggestion than a promotional activity.

Carefully strategizing your campaign can increase your chances of securing brand awareness and higher sales. 

6. Use QR Codes for Promotions

QR Code (Quick Response code) allows you to access information by scanning a code with your mobile device. It facilitates the human desire to get information with a snap of the fingers. In this case, you just have to scan a code with your smartphone that will direct you to your desired information. 

Possibilities with QR Codes are endless. Apart from being used in efficiently carrying out quick financial transactions, marketers have found that it’s also very efficient in promoting their brand and its products or services, especially in mobile commerce.

You can include QR codes in your marketing materials to provide useful information to the prospect or direct them to your store. It is also practical to integrate QR codes into your SMS Marketing campaigns. This way, a prospect receives messages only when they scan your code. 

You can include QR Codes on your packaging boxes and your marketing material to promote exclusive discounts on new products. You can also attach a list of related products and QR Codes to upsell or cross-sell to customers. You can make a sale after completing one. 

7. Use Email Marketing 

Email marketing works wonders for mobile commerce. These days marketers use email marketing much more frequently as people can view emails at any time of the day just by looking at their mobile phones.

Email marketing is targeted toward customers who are already signed in with your store and can be a great way to promote discounted deals and new product launches. 

Email marketing is used by almost every e-commerce business. It allows you to generate brand awareness, promote your products and services, and build trust and credibility with your customers. 

You can run A/B tests to understand your audience better and send behavioral emails in response to different audience actions to improve the efficiency of your campaigns.

How can you use email marketing to the best effect?

You can use email marketing in the following ways:

• User Onboarding: User onboarding involves sending your customers a welcome mail which is often the best chance to create a good impression among your customers. It usually is a series of 2-3 messages that may include a welcome message from the brand, a checklist, or a guide.
• Upselling and cross-selling: Emails are a great way to upsell or cross-sell your products. You can mail your customers a list of related products or send them a list of upgrades they can purchase. Make sure your message is persuasive; you can pair it with attractive discounts to make it more enticing. 
• Lead Nurturing: You can nurture generated leads to drive them deeper into your sales funnel. It is crucial to provide all the necessary information they might need. 
• Engaging with passive or inactive users: You can send emails to customers who have lost interest in your products. Try to draw their attention by sending discounted offers, new product launches, etc. You can also send them an email asking if they are interested in receiving emails; this makes sure your customers always get the choice to opt out of receiving promotional emails. 

Email marketing is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing. It is massively popular; nearly every e-commerce business uses email marketing as one of its major marketing strategies. 

Being old doesn’t make it outdated or ineffective. In fact, ROI in the case of email marketing is as high as 36$ per 1$ spent. 

An email marketing campaign works wonders for your online store if appropriately executed. 

You can use email marketing tools to automate your emails and send personalized messages to different sets of customers with respect to their user behavior.  

8. Retarget your Prospects

Ever wondered why you keep on seeing advertisements for a particular product after you visit their website? That’s because of retargeting. 

If you are running a web store, you might be using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on some channels. It can be through Google ads or social media ads. Retargeting involves serving ads to people who have already visited your website or have given you their contact information. 

Retargeting is effective as it helps refresh people’s memory about your brand and its product or services. You can retarget prospects by placing cookies/pixels on their device. When they visit another website, these cookies enable your ads to pop out. Retargeting is also relevant on social media platforms as well. 

You should design your retargeting ads to specific customer wants. More often than not, your prospects might be looking for a specific solution to a problem rather than searching for your brand. Make sure to integrate promotions and a precise call-to-action button for your retargeted ads. 

Google and most social media platforms have their in-built tools for retargeting. You can also use third-party tools like Adroll or Retargeter to implement your retargeting strategies.

Retargeting can serve as a gateway to achieving your overall marketing goals. It can help you generate brand awareness, drive conversions, reduce cart abandonment, and even introduce new products. 

To get the best results, combine retargeting with your email marketing, social media marketing, and web advertising strategies. 

9. Utilize Location-Based Marketing 

Location-based marketing allows you to send customized messages, notifications, or advertisements to people according to their location. Location-based marketing isn’t limited to a prospect’s location; advanced tools can help you craft your message based on shopping location, weather, and even your traveling routes.

For example, if one of your customers gets detected around a sneaker store, you can send them a push notification about discounts on your online sneaker store. 

According to reports, location-based advertisements have a 53% response rate. It’s a channel you cannot ignore. 

Marketers usually analyze this location-based data of customers to understand more about their purchasing behavior. Understanding customers’ buying behavior from different locations allows businesses to tailor their offerings, discounts, and marketing messages accordingly.

You can learn more about Location Based Marketing. 

10. Make your Customers Market your Store

Wait, word of mouth in big 2022? Does it really work against all these new creative mobile commerce strategies? Well, of course, it does. User Generated Content (UGC) is still the way to go in 2022. It’s cheap, effective, and looks natural. 

User-generated content refers to content posted by your customers on platforms like social media and review pages, mainly in the form of reviews about specific products and their associated experiences. UGC is important to build or improve your brand image among the masses.

Implementing a UGC strategy adds a human factor to your brand, making it more appealing to your prospects. Referrals from your present customers provide more credibility and a sense of trust in your products and services to people looking for a solution.

Generating UGC is quite easy. Start by asking your customers to share reviews on social media. You can incentivize them with discounts for each review posted. You can also host competitions and giveaways to generate user-generated content from the participants. The key here is to capitalize on social media’s shareability; social media thrives on shareability. 

GoPro, a brand centered around capturing moments of adventure, crafted one of the best UGC campaigns of recent times- the Million Dollar Challenge. To acknowledge their flagship product, the HERO7’s success, GoPro asked its users to submit videos of their adventures with the HERO7 on their website. The campaign is still going strong and is currently in its 4th edition. 

The idea is to make a highlight reel by selecting the best clips from these short video submissions and incentivize all the featured users with a prize pool of $1 Million. The brand built the campaign around customer experience rather than pushing its products to its prospects which worked out well as Gopro products witnessed a rise in sales during the campaign.

You can use UGC in various ways. You can integrate it with your email marketing campaigns to gain the trust of your prospects. You can also include UGC on the key pages of your website or even dedicate a separate page for UGC. 

Whatever you do, don’t miss out on the opportunity to use your customers to sell your products. It’s fun, easy, and effective.

Final Thoughts

As the world is migrating towards using more and more mobile devices, mobile commerce is looking inevitable and unavoidable for businesses. To cater to a larger audience, companies have to switch to a more mobile-friendly approach, not only with their stores but also with their marketing efforts.

Mobile Commerce requires a slightly different marketing approach compared to traditional e-commerce marketing strategies. While most strategies are similar, slight tweaks in conventional e-commerce strategies can help you grow your mobile commerce space.

Promoting an online store takes time, be patient and try to build your brand’s digital presence. The mobile commerce strategies mentioned in this guide aren’t quick solutions. These strategies require constant monitoring and iterations over time to achieve the best possible results. We encourage you to use multiple strategies and diversify your options rather than sticking to one.

Over the years, many online businesses have regretted not complying with mobile commerce, and they’re starting to adapt. Meanwhile, many businesses have also capitalized on this opportunity and managed to grow further. Companies like Sephora and Target have used the m-commerce space to improve their positions in the online retail space. Safe to say, it’s better to follow mobile commerce roadmap if you want to explore the vast eCommerce space.