If you’re a mobile retailer, turning casual users into fans and financial success is your biggest challenge. Join marketing powerhouses from mega-retailer GameStop and top shopping app RetailMeNot as they dig in to how marketing automation strengthens user engagement, boosts conversions, and pumps up LTV.

Access this free VB Live event on demand right here.

“The marketing world is going through a transformation,” says Jason Allen, VP of multi-channel at Game Stop. “We live in a day and age where you can measure and provide an ROI on most activities. So it feels like the days of Likes and engagement and the less tangible measurements are going by the wayside, as people are able to now measure more directly what consumers do.”

It’s no surprise, he says, that the interest in marketing automation is huge. It promises the holy grail: a way to leverage that data to understand your customers: when they’re engaging with your brand, why they’re engaging with the brand, what motivates them, and what doesn’t motivate them. And then using that data to make critical decisions about how you provide better services, increase frequency, increase retention, and improve acquisition efforts.

“And marketing automation is so attractive because it’s such a complex paradigm,” Allen says. “There are so many triggers and so many different marketing levers you can pull, especially in the mobile space. But actually leveraging the attraction and creating something meaningful and useful is significantly more complicated.”

Marketing automation allows companies to focus on what’s increasingly important: balancing their marketing strategy between acquisition and loyalty and retention, says Marissa Tarleton, CMO at RetailMeNot.

“As marketers are trying to orient more on retention and look at who to retain based on lifetime value,” she explains, “it becomes really critical to 1) have the right data setup but 2) have the right relationship management tools that allow you to really scale.”

You can do a lot of things manually, she notes — and she’s been in roles where they’ve built all of their LTM programs manually, which is painful and time-consuming. “But the benefit of some of these tools,” she’s quick to add, “is that they allow you to scale and go from zero to full speed in personalization and automation and relationship management in a way that you wouldn’t be able to do on your own.”

Yet too many marketers are stuck fifteen years in the past, caught in the paradigm where they base their business decisions on what they think their customers are doing and where they’re going.

“Says Allen, “I think quite frankly a lot of marketers struggle with the concept that their consumers know more about themselves than the marketers know about their consumers.”

You have to take off your marketing hat, put on your business hat, and acknowledge that the consumers might have the answers, he argues.

As app engagement becomes ever-more challenging, marketers are starting to realize they need to deeply invest in understanding what customer engagement and loyalty really look like.

“It’s a transition that marketers are making from the retailer being in control versus delegating that control to the customer and thinking more about what the customer needs are,” explains Tarleton, “versus the siloed approach that many retailers have taken in the past.”

“I think that’s a struggle for a lot of marketers and organizations trying to go through this transformation,” Allen agrees. “Marketers often want to tell a story in their language, as opposed to, well what’s the story the consumer wants to hear? And whether or not that’s aligned with the story you’d like to tell is a different problem.”

Learn more about how to tell the right story to the right consumer at the right time — at scale — to increase LTV and dive into some of the vital insights of the latest VB Insight report.

Don’t miss out.

Access this VB Live event on demand right here.

In this webinar, you will:

  • Learn how to harness the power of marketing automation to build a user acquisition program that works
  • Explore key strategies for efficient, highly-optimized user acquisition
  • Gain new best practices for engaging and retaining users while reducing churn
  • Learn acquisition-engagement synergy tactics such as: pre- and post-install segmentation, organic growth, retargeting and reward-based acquisition

Speakers

  • Jason Allen, VP, Multi-Channel at GameStop
  • Marissa Tarleton, CMO, RetailMeNot
  • Stewart Rogers, Director of Marketing Technology

Moderator:

  • Rachael Brownell, VentureBeat