Unlock the Potential of Mobile Push With HCL Unica Deliver

Email and SMS messages are effective and widely used tools for customer communication channels, but they have shortcomings that aren't shared by mobile push messaging.

HCL Unica Deliver empowers organizations to engage with their customers through various communication channels, such as email, SMS, mobile push, and WhatsApp. In terms of popularity, email, and SMS stand as the primary channels in the realm of digital marketing for the vast majority of HCLSoftware’s customers, with mobile push taking up the third spot. However, both email and SMS channels pose certain challenges.

Email Channels

Email remains the most popular digital channel in today’s landscape. It has consistently shown a remarkable return on investment (ROI) for marketing organizations, making it a valuable tool for businesses of all sizes. However, despite its benefits, email marketing presents its own unique challenges for marketers. Let’s explore some of them:

Building Email Reputation

Email service providers (ESPs) such as Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo employ advanced AI filtering methods to identify spammers. To send large volumes of email campaigns, you must first establish a reputation with the ESPs. This involves increasing the number of emails you send over time to engage more recipients. ESPs prioritize delivering emails to inboxes based on positive interactions like opens and click-throughs, while negative feedback can result in emails being directed to the junk folder.

Maintaining a good sender reputation requires rigorous data quality hygiene. Sending emails to non-engaged or stale email accounts can lead to penalties from ESPs. This can significantly impact your delivery rate, especially if you send millions of messages daily. This situation is specific to email. Utilizing mobile push and in-app push messaging can provide a complementary solution that diverts some of the effort into building and maintaining your sender reputation.

HCL Unica Deliver employs AI technology to help our customers manage the dark pool situation. This problem is also unique to email, driven by the need to combat rogue senders and growing concerns regarding data privacy. Apple has a strict Mail Protection Policy (MPP) that deals with inaccurate open and click rates. Mishandling these can significantly impact your marketing efforts.

SMS Channels

Nearly 90% of SMS messages are opened within three minutes of being received. SMS offers numerous benefits, such as remarkably high open and click-through rates; however, this communication channel also has its challenges:

High Cost

Unless you work for a telecommunications organization, using SMS for business purposes can be hundreds of times more expensive compared to email and push notifications. Despite the exorbitant cost, the high engagement rates that SMS offers can be a viable option for important or revenue-generating messages.

Lack of Multimedia

A single text-only SMS message part is limited to 160 characters. HCL Unica Deliver allows the delivery of multi-part messages, however, the service users are charged for each message part of 160 characters. It is important to note that using personalization fields in your messages can result in variable lengths, which must be carefully managed to avoid double charges.

HCL Unica Deliver provides a useful character counter and lets you apply a fixed character length for personalization fields, but this is only accurate if you check the maximum length of your personalization field value.

Mobile Push Notifications

There are two primary categories of mobile push notifications: native push notifications and in-app push messages.

Native push notifications use the native messaging services of Apple or Android to deliver a push message directly to your mobile device’s lock screen. These messages are richer than SMS and can incorporate both images and text.

In-app push messages are messages that are sent directly to your mobile app and offer richer features, such as video, and can utilize the entire mobile device screen.

Both have high open rates, just like SMS. Additionally, they have high conversion rates because they can include deep links directing your customers to specific destinations and can be highly personalized. One significant advantage is that they are more cost-effective than SMS messages. You can achieve similar results with richer content while spending less money.

In the current digital environment, digital marketers have three extremely powerful channels at their disposal - email, SMS, and push notifications - each with their unique strengths and weaknesses. Organizations that effectively use these channels to their advantage will reap dividends, while those that don’t, risk overspending and increasing channel maintenance costs will impact the overall ROI of their marketing campaigns. Smart marketing organizations leverage all three channels to drive their customer conversations. HCL Unica simplifies creating and coordinating messages across these key channels. Contact us to learn more about how we can help.