Email Marketing For Mobile Apps: A comprehensive guide

Email marketing has become a cornerstone in the world of app marketing, and for good reason. It offers a direct line of communication with your target audience, allowing you to personalize your message and drive engagement in a way that many other marketing methods simply can't match. By leveraging the power of email, you can reach users right in their inbox, where they are more likely to pay attention and take action. Plus, with the ability to include various types of media like images, videos, and links, email marketing allows you to create dynamic and engaging content that resonates with your audience.

In this article, we delve into the intricacies of email marketing for mobile apps, exploring how it differs from traditional website marketing and why it continues to be a valuable tool in the digital marketing landscape. By focusing on user acquisition, retention, and engagement, email marketing can help you build a loyal customer base and drive downloads and conversions for your app. So, if you're looking to take your app marketing to the next level, email marketing is definitely a strategy worth exploring.

Different strokes

Marketing a mobile app can be a tricky proposition unless your product is unique and, with so much competition out there, many apps unfortunately fall by the wayside. For this reason, it’s vital that you lock down your marketing long before launching your app - and that you understand the ways in which marketing a mobile app is different to marketing your website.

A unique proposition

What sets apart marketing your mobile app from marketing your website?

Goals:

• Marketing goals for a website are all about generating leads, growing revenue and increasing brand awareness.

• Marketing goals for a mobile app are all about user acquisition and retention and user engagement.

Audience:

• Audience targeting for a website tends to have a fairly wide and varied reach.

• Audience targeting for a mobile app is more “exclusive” and focuses on high quality leads - i.e. quality over quantity.

Strategy:

• Your website marketing strategy will often focus on the creation and sharing of content to engage the audience.

• Your mobile app marketing strategy will be a little more complex and will involve store optimization, influencer marketing and email marketing.

Why email marketing?

We all know that, in 2024, there are lots of different marketing methods out there; some of which are super-advanced so, isn’t email a bit antiquated? Nope. Studies show that a significant number of consumers continue to trust messaging received by email over many other types of marketing. Additionally, email is still one of the most versatile marketing tools available to us, allowing senders to include different types of media including images, video and links

While a lot of digital marketing methods are a little bit “blink and it's gone,” email has the advantage of staying power. When receiving an email, the user can choose to open it straight away or leave it for later and, more importantly, can keep hold of it for future reference. This is one of the most compelling reasons that many modern businesses still swear by email as a valid and effective marketing tool - even in 2024!

Ecommerce Email Marketing Automations

For Ecommerce businesses, using email marketing automations can significantly boost revenue. Automated email sequences, such as welcome emails, browse abandonment reminders, cart recovery messages, and post-purchase follow-ups, keep customers engaged. These strategies enhance the shopping experience, encourage repeat purchases, and provide timely reminders that drive conversions. Implementing these automated flows turns casual browsers into loyal customers, maximizing the return on your email marketing investment.

A comprehensive guide to email marketing for mobile apps

So we’ve explained why email is the right marketing choice for your mobile app but, how’s it done? In this section, we’re sharing our comprehensive guide to email marketing for mobile apps to help you get ahead of the competition.

Score a bullseye with your targeting

The first step toward a successful email marketing campaign is to identify your target audience as, without this, your messaging may well end up falling on deaf ears. You can do this by conducting market research to figure out who should be receiving your messaging. Once you’ve done this, it's a good idea to create a profile of your ideal customer as this is who you will be keeping front and center throughout all of your marketing efforts.

Setting targets

An incredibly important part of your pre-launch campaign involves setting your targets. Essentially, this is all about figuring out what you hope to achieve from your first, second and third round of emails - for example; do you want to optimize downloads, super-size engagement or simply create visibility?

As a rule of thumb, your first pre-launch email should focus on creating a hype around your mobile app, and the best way to do this is through a teaser campaign designed to pique the interest of your recipients.

A good example of this would be Havenly’s teaser advert.

As you can see, Havenly has chosen to create curiosity by giving nothing away in its first email. This serves a couple of purposes (a) piquing interest and (b) creating recognition once your second email hits people’s inboxes.

Building your mailing list

Once you’ve worked out what type of emails you’re going to be sending, it's time to figure out who you’re going to be sending them to. For this you will, of course, need data but how to get it? There are a few ways in which you can easily (and legally) collate data for your mailing lists and these include:

• Social media - Create teaser campaigns for your social media platforms which create enough interest that your audience will be compelled to go ahead and hand over their data so that they can hear more about your app.

• Competitions and giveaways - Create competitions and giveaways where users get a chance to win a prize in exchange for sharing their data with you.

• Newsletter - Create a newsletter and invite your website and social media audiences to sign up.

You should always avoid paying for pre-made datalists as these are often unreliable, inaccurate and, in some cases, illegal.

Optimize for supersized results

In 2024, almost half of all Smartphone users state email as their chosen method of marketing - and a pretty hefty number of them are reading those emails on their phones. For this reason, it’s vital that you ensure that you optimize your marketing for mobile to make sure that it has the right sort of grab for the small screen that so many people live their lives on.

The personal touch

We shouldn’t need to tell you that when it comes to marketing, personalization reigns supreme. This should always always be a priority across all of your marketing efforts to make sure you’re getting the most out of your strategy and your budget.

Call to action

Apart from your initial teaser campaign email, you should always be sure to include a clear and concise call to action in your emails. The reason for this is simple - if you don’t tell them what you want them to do next, they’re extremely unlikely to do it! Whether you want them to visit an app store or sign up to your newsletter, don’t try to be ambiguous if you want to achieve the desired result.

Testing, testing

Whenever you create an email marketing campaign, it's important to properly test your results. Why? This lets you know what’s working - and more importantly, what’s not. By testing your campaigns you can then tweak your content to make it as effective as it can possibly be.

Hitting it out of the park and into the inbox

When it comes to marketing your mobile app, email really can be your trump card. As well as getting your message across and guiding your customer toward your app store, email is a great way of building up a rapport with your potential customers and keeping them engaged in an uber-personalized way.