People spend 17% more time with mobile devices than they do with desktop, and mobile is the driving force of internet adoption worldwide. Regardless of your industry, your customers are likely to be mobile customers, and your overall marketing strategy should be inclusive of a mobile marketing strategy.

So how can your business get started? If you’re in the early stages of your company’s mobile marketing evolution, the first step is to dig deep with your data to understand your customers.

To do so, you’ll want to learn how to collect important information about them, about their lifecycles with your company, and how to create campaigns that are helpful and relevant to your audience at each stage of their customer journey. Let’s break it down.

Mobile marketing 101: Know your customer

Customer data and collection

Data is only meaningful if you understand what you’re collecting and how to use it. The critical information to gather falls into three main categories:

• Demographics and personal information: For starters, you’ll want to keep track of your customers’ ages, genders, locations, names, and device types. How will you gather this intel? You can collect this when a customer first creates an account, or source attribution data from click-to-install advertising campaigns (such as ones targeting certain age groups or locations).

• Interests: Depending on your company, you may ask your customers questions via a preference center or other feedback loop to gather intel about which content topics they care about or which products or services they’re interested in.

• Behaviors: Behavioral data means engagement metrics for your apps, websites, and email lists (sessions, logins, opens, clicks, conversions, etc.).

To collect this information at scale and glean actionable insights, mobile marketers use marketing customer relationship management tools (CRMs). With CRMs, marketers can track behaviors, discover customer interests, and see how customers are interacting with campaigns, which in turn helps marketers assess the overall performance of campaigns and track KPIs.

Customer lifecycle stages

The traditional four-step marketing funnel (awareness > interest > desire > action) doesn’t tell the full story anymore.

What’s in place in the mobile age? Nonlinear stages that customers can cycle in and out of (while potentially never making it to all four).

1. Loyal: These are your super users, who continuously deliver high engagement, are brand champions for your product or service, and usually have a long customer lifespan.
2. Active: These mobile customers routinely use your site or app.
3. Lapsing: Watch out for these audience members as they are becoming less active and less likely to convert, spend money, or take engagement to the next level.
4. Inactive: This group no longer uses your app, visits your site, or reads your email. Some within the group may never come back; others may return given the right outreach.

Creating campaigns for each stage of the customer journey

While you may have overall marketing objectives, long gone are the days of one-size-fits-all blast messaging to all users. To develop lasting, long-term relationships that keep customers loyal, tailor your campaigns to audiences based on their lifecycle stage.