MarTech Interview with Jay Hinman, VP of Marketing at Vibes

As a B2B tech marketer, what can you do to drive your mobile marketing ROI? Jay Hinman, VP of Marketing at Vibes has some tips to share:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Jay, take us through Vibes AI-powered Nexus Engine and how it benefits end users?

Thank you – it’s exciting to talk about, since I’m a marketer who’s rarely bowled over by new tools and functionality, yet was completely sold from the moment our product team and engineers showed me this next advance of the Vibes platform.

In a nutshell, Vibes can now intelligently automate and optimize a brand’s mobile marketing outcomes. The new Nexus engine provides marketers with comprehensive analytics about their mobile programs in the “control center” that they immediately land on upon login, as well as automated, pop-up next-best-action recommendations that uniquely optimizes each individual brand’s desired customer engagement and revenue results.

Think about how powerful it is to have 20+ years of mobile messaging history and intelligence sitting behind you, and then having the platform help guide you through your best SMS send times and dates, or the best content to send that’ll lead to the highest traffic to your store or location.

We’d love to hear from you about how mobile engagement as a channel or priority is picking pace among marketers today?  

What’s been fun to watch is how it’s dawned on so many marketers just how powerful it is to engage consumers where they actually are, which is usually on their smartphones. Over 97% of text messages are opened and read.

This contrasts extremely favorably with email marketing – with its average open rate of 17% and dropping – and even mobile app marketing, which has really high engagement but which is really tough to get on users’ smartphones except for the most fanatical of your customers. Once you get someone to opt it to SMS or MMS messages, they’re extremely valuable and revenue-generating. We’ve seen with our customers that a Vibes-powered SMS subscriber is 7 times more valuable than a standard email subscriber.

Our customers, many of whom just started out sending SMS, are now building in comprehensive programs that use SMS and MMS to drive users to mobile wallets that store all sorts of coupons, loyalty cards, tickets and gift cards. These are housed and organized as passes, right on mobile devices where they’re easily found and used. This is something that’s really picking up pace over the past 6-10 months.

When it comes to mobile engagement best practices: what are the top five must-dos you’d share with marketers?

• Embrace MMS, or multimedia messaging. Using visuals are much more effective than text alone. Deliver a multimedia experience by sending animated GIFs, pictures or videos to your users’ smartphones.
• Look for tools that remove guesswork and eliminate busywork. Your marketing team has enough to do already; find solutions that make their lives easier, not harder.
• Explore engagement channels that you can update really quickly. Mobile Wallet passes can be updated with new information at any time, as often as the brand desires. They’re great for updating loyalty members about new benefits, or extending the duration of a promotion, or even just changing an image on the wallet pass for a holiday or another event.
• If you’re already focused on SMS, add mobile wallet. Adding a Mobile Wallet to your SMS campaigns can increase revenue per message by more than 19x. In fact, marketers are 37x more likely to get someone to buy with the combination of mobile wallet + SMS, vs. just sending standard SMS.
• Understand the route that your messages are taking to consumers. If your provider doesn’t have direct connections with carriers, you’re enduring needless “hops” along the way that can slow down delivery and introduce unpredictability into what should be a very simple transaction.

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What are some of the common flaws you see in modern mobile marketing campaigns? Can you highlight more on key brands globally who sport enriching mobile marketing campaigns: what can others learn from those journeys?

The biggest flaw I consistently see is one-size-fits-all, unsegmented marketing. It’s really important to not “batch and blast” an SMS marketing campaign to all of your users, but rather to use your mobile marketing platform to find the differences in demographics, geography and behaviors amongst your customer base so you can put messaging in front of them that really speaks to their unique situations and interests.

One of the better mobile marketing campaigns I’ve seen in recent years – and which bears out what I just mentioned – is what The Container Store have done with their college back-to-school program. Instead of sending out generalized mass messages, they really tailor messages to be relevant to a college audience. They put together a strategy that sends relevant offers to the right people at the right time through SMS and MMS. SMS also makes it easy for customers to download The Container Store app and sign up to join their loyalty program. They then use Mobile Wallet marketing to further incentivize these college shoppers with money-saving discounts on back-to-school collegiate purchases. They’ve had a ton of success with it and have expanded it further in 2023.

If you had to share five thoughts about the state of martech in the next decade, what would it be?

Don’t be in such a rush to use generative AI to replace your content marketing team. There are subtleties and marketing nuances that only a human brain can grasp and transmit in telling a great story about a brand or a pain point. It should be an art, combined with science, rather than just pure science.

Use great AI and historical data to power decision-making. AI is most useful when it’s been trained on proprietary data sets that encompass a wide variety of inputs, outputs and corner cases. Our Nexus engine brings 20 years of messaging history & insights together to supercharge mobile campaigns; I think that’s really valuable and should be something that marketers look for when making martech decisions.

Permission-based marketing needs to become an even bigger deal. Seventy-one percent of consumers worldwide expect retailers to deliver on personalization. The desire for personalization increases the need for permission. With permission, brands can drive even more engagement and increase revenue: Vibes’ data shows that birthday-triggered messages have a 16.4% click-thru rate (CTR).

Stand-alone tools are fading. Marketers need to find tools with open APIs and easy integrations to the tools and systems they’re already using.

Analytics and insights shouldn’t be something you need to go find in your martech tools; they need to come find you.

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