Mobile marketing software: 11 top tools and their key features

Key capabilities to look for in mobile marketing software

When choosing a mobile marketing solution (or stack), you want to look for:

• Compatibility with mobile websites and mobile apps, so you can track and engage users as they move between platforms.
• Detailed segmentation, so you can narrow down mobile users based on their location, demographics, device, operating system, app version, customer lifecycle stage, and more.
• Mobile-first templates for different use cases (cart abandonment, lead generation, social proof, etc.), so you don’t have to start your mobile campaigns from scratch.
• Personalization capabilities, so you can send users highly-relevant mobile messages and product recommendations, which is crucial for improving product discovery, engagement, and revenue.
• Native support for popular mobile channels like SMS and WhatsApp, so you can easily reach users on these mobile-first touchpoints. On that note, getting one mobile marketing platform that supports all your channels can drastically simplify your workflow and marketing stack.
• Web and app push notifications, so you can run engagement campaigns for mobile users through their browsers or via your mobile app.
• Marketing automation, so you can create campaigns across different touchpoints.
• Analytics features, so you can analyze the performance of your app, website, and marketing campaigns.

Some of the solutions below (like Insider) have all or most of these capabilities bundled into one platform. Others (like Branch) are more limited but specialized in a specific area like mobile app analytics.

Mobile marketing platforms for engaging mobile users

These tools are designed to help you target, engage, and convert mobile users. That’s why they:

• Let you segment mobile users based on their locations, devices, operating systems, app versions, and other criteria.
• Support mobile-first channels and engagement features, like SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications.

Can personalize and automate cross-channel marketing campaigns.

#1 Insider

Insider brings together the most extensive set of personalization capabilities for websites and mobile apps, as well as channels like SMS, WhatsApp, web and app push, and more.

Our platform has been ranked as the best and easiest-to-use mobile marketing software by G2:

Marketing teams at brands like Samsung, Burger King, CNN, and 1200+ others use Insider to:

• Aggregate customer data and build 360-degree customer profiles. Our Actionable Customer Data Platform (CDP) can bring together data from any online or offline source—including mobile apps, websites, customer relationship management systems (CRMs), APIs, and so on. This is the foundation for driving engagement and revenue through personalized mobile marketing.
• Create detailed visitor and customer segments. Insider’s segmentation helps you build mobile user segments based on all kinds of traits and behaviors—including locations, mobile devices, mobile app versions, and more. On top of that, our AI-powered predictive audiences let you target users based on their likelihood to purchase or churn, their discount affinity, and projected lifetime value.
• Engage customers at the right times, with the right message. Insider’s broad channel support allows you to reach customers via mobile-first channels like SMS, WhatsApp, and app push. Plus, our platform automatically optimizes the customer experience based on real-time behavior, preferences, location, time of day, and likelihood of engagement.

In the next sections, we’ll show how you can also use Insider to engage and convert both mobile web and mobile app users.

Start with a simple setup and mobile-first templates

We know that one of the biggest challenges of mobile marketing is getting started. Between the setup, onboarding, data transfers, and general learning curve, it can easily take months before you see any value from a mobile marketing platform.

That’s why we’ve made it as easy as possible to get Insider up and running.

Here’s how:

First, our account management team helps you set up the platform and analyze your current analytics data. They also give you ideas for creating new mobile marketing campaigns immediately after our kick-off meeting.

Our account management team has helped many of our customers implement tactics that produced immediate results:

“As mobile screens are smaller, our customers were not interested in navigating to our mobile website. So we wanted to enhance this experience for our customers, and also drive more conversions through mobile. The account management team at Insider recommended we take advantage of their Category Optimizer tool to help users easily find categories they’re more interested in. The tool reshuffles the category menu based on the browsing history of users. By implementing this, we were able to speed up product discovery for our mobile users, which further resulted in an uplift in conversion rates.”

Second, if you have a mobile app, our platform contains step-by-step instructions for integrating our software development kit (SDK).

This can be done in less than an hour even without coding knowledge (although it’s always good to have a developer oversee the process). After this simple setup, you can take advantage of our specialized mobile app engagement features, which we’ll discuss in a bit.

Finally, we have a massive library of mobile-first templates for tons of use cases. These templates are designed specifically to boost conversions, revenue, and engagement. 

For example, here are two templates that let you create a fun, gamified experience for users, without making any code changes to your site or app:

• The Scratch Coupon template lets users scratch off a virtual coupon (like you’d typically do with a coin) to get a reward, like a discount code. This makes for a much more engaging experience than simply sending coupon codes via email, for example.
• The Wheel of Fortune template allows users to spin a wheel to win one prize among many preset options. Note: Mac Cosmetics used this template to add over 53,000 subscribers to their lead database in two days.

There are also templates for adding social proof, tackling cart abandonment, and much more. You can set up and customize all of them through a simple drag-and-drop editor—no coding required.

Create high-targeted mobile user segments

Mobile marketing relies heavily on segmentation. You need to be able to target mobile users based on a variety of characteristics, such as:

• Their timezone, location, and time of day.
• Their device type (smartphone, tablet, etc.)
• Their device OS (e.g., Android, iOS) and version.
• The mobile app version they’re using.

Fortunately, Insider offers all these segmentation options and more.

You can start with our standard segmentation and target users based on their devices, operating systems, purchase histories, on-site or in-app behaviors, the events they’ve triggered, or any other attributes.

You can also directly target users who abandoned their carts, interacted with your brand on a channel, installed your mobile app, or choose from a variety of other predefined audiences shown below.

Finally, our AI-powered predictive algorithms let you narrow down your target audience further based on users’:

• Likelihood to purchase or churn.
• Potential lifetime value (LTV)
• Discount affinity, and more.

These versatile segmentation options make it easy to create highly-specific mobile audiences and engage them at their preferred touchpoints.

For example, say you want to prevent important customers from uninstalling your mobile app by running an engagement campaign for them.

You can easily target these customers by:

• Using our predictive audiences to narrow down VIP customers with a high likelihood of uninstalling.
• Setting up the standard segmentation based on your definition of a regular customer. In the example below, we’ve shown how to target users of a specific app version who have logged in twice in the last seven days.

Make mobile product discovery a breeze 

Mobile product discovery has been a huge challenge over the years. The smaller mobile phone screens and shorter attention spans make it much harder for brands to catch users’ attention and prioritize which products to display.

Insider helps you avoid this problem with a unique combination of personalization and engagement functionalities.

As we said, our marketing CDP aggregates valuable data about your customers, including their names, emails, purchases, channel reachability, last abandoned products, and more.

Note: If you’re not familiar with CDPs and their importance for driving conversions, revenue, and retention, check out our article on the top 7 CDPs in 2023.

Based on this data, Insider can tailor every element of your mobile site and mobile app to each customer’s behaviors and preferences. This ensures you’re making the most out of smaller mobile screens by only showing relevant products and content to users.

For example, Insider can:

• Shuffle how categories are presented in your navigation with our Category Optimizer. Samsung used this feature to achieve a 10% conversion rate uplift when running their marketing launch campaign for the Galaxy Note 9.

• Change which products and messages are shown in your mobile website’s banners. Yves Rocher used this capability to boost website conversion rates by 5%.

• Show dynamic product recommendations with our AI-powered Smart Recommender. AVON used this feature to increase average order value (AOV) by 11% AOV and clickthrough rates (CTR) by 13%

We also have a unique feature for catching mobile visitors’ attention and driving product discovery called InStory.

InStory lets you add Instagram-like stories to your mobile site or mobile app. The stories consist of a simple, eye-catching product image and headline. When users click them, they expand to full screen, as shown below.

Teams who implement InStory in their marketing strategy experience two massive benefits:

• They have a much easier time catching mobile users’ attention, especially since people are so used to this format from social media platforms.
• They put mobile product discovery on autopilot. Our AI-powered algorithms dynamically update what stories are shown to each user. That way, you don’t have to constantly tweak settings or worry about showing the right products to your mobile audience.

Engage users via SMS, WhatsApp, TikTok, and push notifications

Besides website and app personalization, brands often struggle to reach mobile customers where they’re at. 

To overcome this obstacle, Insider supports many mobile-first channels, including:

• SMS and email. Our platform lets you manage your contacts, grow your lead database, and send personalized email and SMS messages. Brands use these capabilities for abandoned cart reminders, transactional emails, price drop alerts, cross-sell SMS campaigns, and much more. Suggested reading: You can learn more in our article on the best email and SMS marketing tools for both channels.

• WhatsApp. WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app in the world, making it ideal for reaching mobile audiences. Insider is one of the few platforms that supports all of WhatsApp’s marketing capabilities, including conversational commerce—the ability to let customers discover, browse, and buy products, as well as have two-way conversations with your team, without leaving WhatsApp. Note: You can learn more in our article on the best WhatsApp marketing tools.

• TikTok. Another booming mobile-first channel, TikTok is the preferred social media platform for younger generations. Insider is among the first platforms to have a native integration for TikTok remarketing. This means you can create highly-specific audiences with Insider, send them to TikTok, and run targeted campaigns.

• Web and app push notifications. Push notifications are an underrated way to bring back mobile users to your site or app. Unlike traditional channels, there’s no extra cost involved in sending them, so they don’t cut into your profit margins. Insider lets you send web push notifications via your users’ browsers or choose from a variety of mobile app pushes, including carousels, sliders, cart reminders, geofence, and others shown below. Suggested reading: You can learn more in our article on the best web and mobile app push software.

• LINE and more.

Just like with website and mobile app content, every message Insider sends to your audience on these external channels is highly-personalized. 

Use specialized mobile app surveys, testing features, and uninstall analytics

As a mobile-first platform, Insider has specialized capabilities for companies looking to monitor and improve their mobile apps’ performance:

• Mobile app surveys. You can easily create different surveys and show them to specific mobile app user segments. Our customers use this feature to help increase their apps’ ratings in the App Store or Play Store, to gather valuable insights from users who uninstalled their app, and for many other use cases.

• Content Optimizer. This feature lets you experiment by changing different aspects of your app, like button colors, messaging, and element placement. When using Content Optimizer, you don’t have to submit a new version of your app to the app stores, as you otherwise would when changing something. This saves you a lot of time and engineering resources.

• Uninstall analytics. Insider automatically tracks how many users uninstalled your app over a given period. It also shows you their devices, the app version they were using, and other details to help you uncover why that happened and find ways to bring them back.

Overall, our suite of specialized mobile app features has helped many companies boost their apps’ engagement, conversions, and revenue.

“One of our major goals has been to foster customer loyalty and we’ve been able to achieve this by building trust in our products initially and then making use of upsell opportunities. Insider’s Mobile App platform is an easy-to-use and flexible solution that has been the perfect solution for our requirements. We were able to create campaigns on our mobile app to cross-sell products and services to all the users who were visiting our app.”

Build, automate, and analyze cross-channel marketing campaigns

Besides sending one-off messages, you can also use Insider to create personalized cross-channel marketing campaigns.

This is possible thanks to our journey builder called Architect, which lets you trigger these campaigns based on:

• Events.
• Dynamic dates.
• Attribute changes.
• Price drops and much more.  

Our AI-powered algorithms also ensure you’re making the most out of every touchpoint in your campaigns. For example, our next best channel predictions automatically decide which channels to try based on each customer’s behaviors, interests, and preferred touchpoints. In the meantime, our send time optimization feature (STO) picks the ideal time to trigger each message.

You can also A/B test different paths of your journeys against each other (e.g., email vs SMS) to see which one leads to higher engagement and more conversions.

NA-KD is one of the eCommerce brands that uses Architect to run personalized marketing campaigns. 

After consolidating their customer data with our CDP, they started delivering tailored content and product recommendations on their site and via SMS, push notifications, and email.

As a result, NA-KD increased their customer lifetime value (CLTV) by 25%, leading to a 72x return on investment in the first 12 months of using Insider.

To see Insider in action and learn how it can help you engage your mobile user base, book a live demo with our team.

#2 Braze

Braze is a customer engagement platform for websites, mobile apps, SMS, email, WhatsApp, and push notifications. It has a campaign orchestration feature for creating and automating customer journeys. It also comes with built-in advanced segmentation, A/B testing, and data aggregation capabilities.

Note: Click here to see how Braze compares to Insider or here for the 12 top Braze alternatives.

#3 Iterable

Iterable is a cross-channel marketing platform. It supports various mobile channels like app push and SMS and has features for email marketing and content personalization. Iterable’s AI Suite also helps brands automate marketing tasks (like sending text messages, emails, etc.), optimize frequency, channels, and send times, and more.

Note: Click here to see how Iterable compares to Insider.

Learn more: 10 Best Iterable competitors and alternatives in 2023 (in-depth look)

#4 Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a digital marketing solution that combines products for use cases like:

• Email marketing.
• Journey building.
• Content management.
• Data aggregation (CDP).
• Real-time personalization.
• B2B marketing automation, and more.

It also comes with a mobile studio specifically for text marketing, push notifications, and chat messages.

Note: Click here to see how Salesforce Marketing Cloud compares to Insider.

Learn more: 5 Best Salesforce Marketing Cloud competitors and alternatives

#5 Adobe Marketing Cloud

Adobe Marketing Cloud is a customer engagement and omnichannel marketing automation platform that brings together a suite of tools, including:

• Marketo Engage, which helps with B2B and B2C mobile marketing automation.
• Adobe Target, which lets brands personalize at scale and run A/B tests.
• Adobe Campaign, which is useful for building user segments and running marketing campaigns.
• Adobe Experience Manager, which has features for content management, storing digital assets, building landing pages or entire sites, and more.

Note: Click here to see how Marketo Engage compares to Insider and here for a comparison to Adobe Target.

#6 OneSignal

OneSignal is a customer engagement platform for email, SMS, web and mobile push notifications, and in-app messaging. Companies can use it to create various mobile segments and target them with personalized content. OneSignal also has a built-in A/B testing feature for experimenting and optimizing user engagement campaigns.

Note: Click here to see how OneSignal compares to Insider.

#7 CleverTap

CleverTap is a mobile-first engagement and retention platform. It combines various capabilities for multichannel marketing, mobile engagement, journey orchestration, campaign and lifecycle optimization, and analytics. It also supports different channels like email, SMS, push, and WhatsApp.

Note: Click here to see how CleverTap compares to Insider.

Mobile marketing software tools for mobile app analytics and attribution

These final tools are built for analyzing the performance of mobile apps. They come with features for:

• Deep linking.
• Tracking attribution and incrementality
• Monitoring key stats and metrics like daily active users, revenue, and retention.

Some of the previous tools also have similar analytics features but they’re not as advanced or versatile. That’s why many companies use a specialized app analytics solution in combination with one of the platforms from the previous category to get the best of both worlds.

#8 AppsFlyer

AppsFlyer is a mobile marketing, analytics, and attribution platform. It helps companies measure their mobile app marketing campaigns while protecting customers’ privacy. It also supports incrementality testing for finding the value behind specific marketing activities. 

AppsFlyer can be integrated with Insider, so you can combine the power of advanced mobile app analytics with broad channel reach, marketing automation, and extensive personalization.

#9 Branch

Branch is a SaaS tool specialized in mobile linking and attribution. It helps companies measure and improve the performance of their marketing campaigns, add deep links, and centralize cost data to evaluate their return on investment (ROI). 

Like AppsFlyer, Branch also integrates with Insider, which helps teams run highly-targeted engagement campaigns and analyze their impact.

#10 Mixpanel

Mixpanel is an event-based analytics software solution. It helps brands make data-driven decisions by analyzing user behavior and key metrics like churn, retention, and revenue. It also lets companies slice and dice their data to uncover trends, live updates, and other actionable insights.

Mixpanel integrates with Insider, so you can sync Mixpanel audiences into Insider to targeted experiences and relay back engagement and behavioral data from Insider into Mixpanel to analyze the performance of your campaigns.

#11 Adjust

Adjust is a platform for measuring and improving mobile app performance. It has features for mobile app attribution, cost unification, revenue reporting, campaign automation, and more. It also has an app protection suite with tools for fraud detection, data protection, and data residency.

Like the other solutions in this category, Adjust also integrates with Insider, allowing you to share information (like attribution and in-app event data) between both platforms.

Segment, reach, and convert mobile users with Insider

Insider can help you:

• Aggregate your customer data into one place.
• Easily create detailed segments of mobile users.
• Reveal their behaviors, interests, and preferred touchpoints.
• Predict behaviors with our AI-powered intent engine, like how much different segments are projected to spend and how likely they are to buy or churn.
• Deliver personalized experiences to mobile and web users across all touchpoints—from your website and mobile app to channels like SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, email, and more. Suggested reading: 15 personalization software tools for web, email, SMS, and more.

Our easy channel integrations, experienced support team, simple setup for websites and mobile apps, and versatile template library ensure you can benefit from Insider as fast as possible.

Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals. 

FAQs