If done right, building a mobile marketing strategy can skyrocket your brand’s engagement and revenue. After all, smartphones fuel our daily interactions, with over 50% of website traffic originating from these devices.
The mobile advantage is clear: mobile pay-per-click (PPC) ads outperform desktop ads with a 40% higher click-through rate (CTR). That’s why top marketers are maximizing their success by combining mobile channels—like SMS, mobile wallet, and mobile apps—to create omnichannel marketing strategies.
To stay competitive, businesses must prioritize mobile marketing. By taking advantage of tools like SMS marketing, mobile apps, and mobile wallet integrations, companies can supercharge their customer engagement and revenue growth.
Calling All Channels: Mobile's Role in Driving Omnichannel Marketing
Key Challenges of Mobile Marketing in 2025
To develop a mobile marketing strategy that converts, it’s important to first identify the obstacles in your company’s path.
Today’s marketers face many, diverse challenges including:
- Privacy concerns: Data collection and tracking are now limited by stricter privacy regulations and platform changes, like Apple’s iOS updates.
- Personalization at scale: Relatedly, it’s also more challenging to deliver hyper-personalized experiences that don’t breach any privacy rules.
- Data fragmentation: Having data siloed across channels makes it tricky to get a unified view of how campaigns are performing.
- Measurement and attribution: Often, it’s still challenging to accurately measure ROI and attribute results to specific mobile marketing efforts.
- Increased competition: Since the mobile app ecosystem is so competitive, “going viral” can feel like a matter of luck and it’s difficult to gain consumers’ attention.
- Balancing automation and authenticity: Many marketers feel like they need to choose between the efficiency of AI and creating authentic connections with customers, but this doesn’t have to be a binary choice. For example, sending automated birthday offers based on user data feels both personal and timely.
While these challenges exist, they are surmountable. Let’s explore the current state of the mobile marketing industry to uncover the opportunities ahead.
The State of the Mobile Marketing Industry
In 2025, the mobile marketing industry is booming with no signs of slowing down.
More consumers than ever are browsing, shopping, and engaging with brands from their mobile devices. This influx of traffic offers big opportunities for marketers who understand how to capture buyers’ attention and keep it.
Recent U.S. predictions show mobile advertising spending will reach $228.11 billion by 2025, with 82.3% going towards in-app ads. Since mobile use dominates over half of the world’s online traffic, brands need to establish a strong presence in the app ecosystem—or risk prospective customers looking elsewhere.
Of course, just having a mobile presence isn’t enough.
Marketers must build strategies that leverage mobile capabilities while aligning with user preferences. Ppular avenues include: optimizing for mobile search, building more user-friendly apps, and using location-based targeting and personalization.
Now that we’ve touched on the current state of the industry, it’s time to explore what strategies can generate success.
9 Effective Strategies for Mobile Marketing
Brands need to get innovative to deliver mobile marketing that reaches and resonates with tech-savvy consumers. And there isn’t, as it turns out, one path from success.
Insights from industry leaders and research show companies often earn the best results by mixing and matching different approaches. Let’s take a look at some of them now:
1. Use Mobile Wallet to connect with on-the-go customers
Mobile wallets offer a low-barrier, app-free way for brands to connect with customers on their smartphones. Whether delivering digital loyalty cards, coupons, event passes, or promotional offers, mobile wallet content is stored in the device’s native wallet app, making it easy for users to access and engage.
These wallet passes are dynamic, meaning they can update in real time—reflecting changes like points earned, sale start dates, or store locations. They also support push notifications and location-based triggers, giving marketers a valuable way to deliver timely messages without the need for a dedicated app.
Used as part of an omnichannel strategy, mobile wallets help close the gap between online interactions and in-store visits while driving loyalty and repeat purchases.
2. Leverage omnichannel marketing
Omnichannel marketing helps streamline your customer experience across platforms.
Customers seek understanding and cohesion at every touchpoint. Brands can foster deeper connections and loyalty by recognizing customers across all mobile channels—such as SMS marketing, mobile apps, and mobile wallet integrations—and personalizing their interactions.
3. Personalize and scale with AI
Avoid falling into the trap of canned messages by using AI-powered personalization. Artificial intelligence can help brands market at scale by tailoring text messages to different user profiles and optimizing send times.
Through this highly targeted 1-to-1 communication, you can tempt consumers into making their next purchase in your mobile storefront.
4. Offer a mobile app
Developing a mobile app can improve your customers’ engagement rates and their lifetime value, plus increase marketing reach through in-app digital advertising.
To increase adoption, engagement, and retention, brands are also encouraged to offer accessible onboarding and personalize their users’ in-app experiences.
“Your app users have a three times higher lifetime value versus non-app users.”
5. Make mobile experiences interactive
Think about how satisfying it is to tap a button instead of typing out a response.
Adding interactive elements—like quick-reply buttons or tappable responses—can help create those frictionless moments that customers love, while giving you instant feedback on what’s working in your campaign. It’s a win-win that makes everything feel more conversational.
6. Use location-based marketing
Imagine reaching someone at exactly the best possible moment and place with location-based marketing.
A clothing retailer, for example, could use geofencing to engage shoppers who are near one of their stores—sending them a limited-time offer or showcasing new arrivals in their size. Delivering the right message at the right time like this can turn passive browsers into active shoppers.
7. Try an Augmented Reality (AR) integration
Remember trying on sunglasses through your smartphone for the first time? Augmented reality (AR) delivers those impactful moments that stick with people.
Whether it’s virtually placing furniture in your living room or bringing product packaging to life, these AR-generated experiences create memorable connections that traditional advertising can’t match.
8. Optimize voice-based search
As more people talk to their smartphones instead of typing, the rules of engagement are changing.
Understanding how we naturally speak—versus how we text—means rethinking your content approach. The brands that get this right will stay front and center as voice becomes increasingly dominant.
It’s also important to factor in how virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa understand and perform searches based on these voice queries.
9. Champion vertical video content
Capture mobile users’ attention by creating vertical videos as part of your digital ad campaigns.
Why not horizontal? Using a vertical video format mirrors how people naturally hold their cellphones. But make sure the video fills the screen to create a more immersive viewing experience.
Short-form videos are the go-to in 2025 for delivering punchy messages while catering to the brief attention spans of mobile users. By embracing this medium, marketers can craft concise and visually appealing content that suits on-the-go audiences.
Two Success Stories in Mobile Marketing
What do great mobile marketing strategies look like in action? Find out in two real-world case studies from City Beach and Replacements.
By partnering with SAP Emarsys and adopting the right best practices, both companies accelerated their growth and revenue, thanks to mobile marketing.
City Beach's Loyalty Program and Mobile Wallet Integration
City Beach, an Australian fashion retailer, transformed their customer engagement by launching a mobile-friendly loyalty program integrated with mobile wallet technology.
By joining, shoppers are rewarded with ten points per dollar spent and a $10 voucher for every thousand points earned—and the program’s success is evident by its sky-high adoption rate.
“We set the benchmark of about a 20% increase in getting existing customers across onto the loyalty program. We're at 40% of our total database. Almost half of our active opted-in database is part of the loyalty program. That was really cool to see.”
It’s clear that truly understanding your customers’ wants and providing a convenient answer to them can lead to real results.
Rather than investing in a dedicated app, City Beach also took a more cost-effective approach by opting instead for a mobile wallet integration, powered by Emarsys. This practical solution lets customers store digital vouchers and loyalty cards directly in their smartphones.
Mobile wallet for us is super low touchYou don't want to just have an app for the sake of having an app. There's a reason for an app. When the loyalty program says mobile wallet, it's a segway into us you know having the app as well.
By taking this mobile marketing route, City Beach was able to drive buyer satisfaction, retention, and purchase frequency—without taking on the costs of developing a custom app.
Replacements’ SMS Marketing Success
When Replacements, an American retailer of tableware and collectibles, wanted to reconnect with lapsed customers. They embraced SMS marketing with extraordinary results.
How extraordinary? Their SMS subscribers soared from 14,000 to nearly 95,000—just because their team was bold enough to try new strategies and not fall into the marketing trap of making too many assumptions.
When Replacements, an American retailer of tableware and collectibles, wanted to reconnect with lapsed customers. They embraced SMS marketing with extraordinary results.
How extraordinary? Their SMS subscribers soared from 14,000 to nearly 95,000—just because their team was bold enough to try new strategies and not fall into the marketing trap of making too many assumptions.
“We were a little doubtful that our demographic would embrace SMS. From that initial pop up on the website, to an email banner landing page, we did not think our demographic would want to sign in, sign up in general, nor go through the full opt-in process. I have to say that our customers proved us wrong and have adapted well to this new channel.”
Working closely with Attentive, an AI-powered platform for SMS marketing, Replacements created an SMS strategy that maximized their ROI through A/B testing, personalized campaigns, and optimized send times.
"We tested a lot to find the sweet spot of healthy list growth without cutting into profit margin. And we learned that an offer certainly outperformed no offer, but there was really a sweet spot to find, which was key for understanding this demographic [...] AI really opens the door for so much opportunity to create 1 to 1 personalized texts.”
This AI-driven approach to personalization paid off dramatically in re-engaging Replacements’ lapsed customers and growing their subscriber base.
What’s the Future of Mobile Marketing?
As mobile technology evolves, marketers must continue to find new ways to drive personalization, engagement, and revenue.
Want a peek at the future? Here are a few emerging technologies and trends to keep an eye on:
- AI-powered personalization: By analyzing troves of customer data, AI algorithms can predict user behavior, preferences, and needs with increasing accuracy. Thanks to these insights, marketers can present mobile users with highly targeted ads and offers. Just look at how Replacements’ AI-driven SMS strategy is empowering them to deliver one-to-one personalized interactions.
- Voice search and local keywords: With the rise of voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, optimizing content for voice queries can keep brands visible and relevant. Using local keywords and geotargeting can also help attract nearby customers, as more cellphone users are relying on their devices for search and discovery.
- Mobile commerce (m-commerce) and location-based services (LBS): More buyers are shopping and checking out via their smartphones—and they expect to be provided with an easy and secure experience. LBS technology takes m-commerce a step further by delivering timely and relevant promotions based on a mobile user’s real-time location.
In the U.S. alone, smartphone users spend a daily average of 3 hours and 45 minutes staring at their screens. To stay ahead, brands are encouraged to champion mobile marketing strategies for sustaining engagement, buyer loyalty, and revenue growth.
Create a Mobile Marketing Strategy that Converts with SAP Emarsys
Ready to transform your mobile marketing strategy? Book a demo with the SAP Emarsys team to see our AI-driven customer engagement platform in action.
Find out how using omnichannel engagement to your benefit can help you reach the right mobile customers, at the right time, and track how your campaigns are being received in real time.
About the author
A seasoned expert in SaaS, digital communication, and mobile marketing, Bridey brings a strategic focus on customer success and operational excellence to drive measurable results. With a strong background in client-centric solutions and mobile communications, she excels at enhancing engagement, optimizing processes, and building lasting customer relationships in today’s mobile-first landscape.
