Banana Splash lets anyone dive into mobile personalized marketing

Everyone seems to be talking about personalized marketing, and yet we know that very few people are doing it.

(How do we know? We have the data, of course.)

That’s partly because the tools that provide personalized marketing messages, ads, forms, and campaigns are difficult to use and costly to implement.

Today, Banana Splash has announced the launch of its mobile web marketing solution that promises to deliver personalized, real-time marketing to help businesses of all sizes turn mobile visitors into customers. Before today’s launch, the company’s beta portfolio included the likes of The Next Web, L’Occitane, Honda, Spark Networks, and JDate.

“One thing that has to be clear is that ‘mobile’ isn’t the next big thing — it already is,” Talia Wolf, CMO at Banana Splash, told me. “The average site is already seeing over 65 percent of mobile traffic, and it is only going to grow. While business continues to think, build, and optimize for desktop, their mobile visitors (the majority of their traffic) are arriving on their site and leaving.”

I’ve seen Banana Splash in action, and it couldn’t be easier to use.

After typing in the URL of your website, you add your name, email, and select your industry — that final piece of information helps it personalize your communications.

You choose a “splash” — whether it be a pop-up message, coupon, app download, email signup, or anything other call to action. You select a design, edit the text, and decide how it will display. You can then choose which geographies to show the ad, and when to show it. You can select the times of day, what web pages the splash should appear on, and other simple targeting options.

And that’s it. The system generates a line of JavaScript code, and the rest is standard fare for anyone that runs a website.

“Banana Splash was built in a way that anyone can launch hundreds of automated personalized messages within minutes and requires no design or development resources,” Wolf said. “To implement Banana Splash on your site, you simply copy and paste the code into your site’s header (you can also use GTM), and you’re ready to go. This process takes less than 2 minutes.”

You could say that Banana Splash, in this sense, is the Canva of personalized marketing. Once the code has been installed, Banana Splash gets to work.

Built and created by a team in Tel Aviv with years of experience in online marketing and conversion optimization, it analyzes every mobile web visitors’ session in real time and predicts future behavior. Using that data, it dynamically triggers the right call to action at the right time.

Once the campaign is running, you can see reports that show visitors, engagements, and click-through rates. And it integrates with solutions such as Hubspot, MailChimp, and other popular email/marketing automation systems, as well as identifying itself in your Google Analytics reports.

It does, however, only work for mobile web at the moment.

“At this point, there aren’t any plans for native apps,” Wolf said. “However, many customers use our ‘download the app’ feature to increase downloads of their app. This action ensures the most relevant people download the app and, as a result, they are far more engaged.”

So what about the future?

“The current roadmap for Banana Splash includes further automation, predictive analytics, and machine learning capabilities,” Wolf said. The mission here is to provide advanced functionality within a platform that anyone can use, and that is a leaf the entire marketing technology world can take out of Banana Splash’s book.

The problem Banana Splash solves is very real. As explained in my report on conversion optimization tools, it is much harder and more expensive to double your traffic than it is to double the conversion rate of your existing visitors, but many businesses are still missing out on the latter.

“Unfortunately, the majority of businesses still focus on driving traffic to their website while neglecting the most important part; converting them once they arrive,” Wolf said. “Optimization tools play a minor part in the marketer’s budget. In addition to this, most optimization tools require many resources (such as time or budget) and knowledge to use them.”

Importantly, Banana Splash allows you to A/B split test your splashes to help determine which are performing the best, so you can iterate and improve on those that don’t convert well, something Wolf believes all marketers should be focused on, especially in a mobile-first world.

“Companies who do not adapt fast and start optimizing the mobile web journey will not stand the test of time,” Wolf said. “Mobile visitors expect to find, do, and buy everything they need on their mobile phone quickly and easily. If they can’t find it on your site, they’re off to the competitor.”

Banana Splash launches today with pricing plans that vary according to the amount of mobile traffic and segmentation options. The most basic plan for small companies starts at $79, with tiered and custom options to cater for larger organizations.