Ahead of our 2019 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards, staged in partnership with our headline partner Dynata, and our partners DAX and TabMo, well be previewing the nominees in each category, giving you a glimpse at the high quality of entries weve seen this year. In today’s preview, we look at the companies providing the best mobile-first services.

MTN.com & PlusNarrative: Y’elloWeb
Y’elloWeb is the UI/UX design system and human-centred framework created for MTN Group and deployed across operating companies in Africa and the Middle East. It aligns the MTN online experience with a mobile and customer-first system that could be adopted and adapted by agencies and teams.

MTN and PlusNarrative held several user-centred workshops, in order to find what the primary needs are of the people that MTN serves, before creating Y’elloWeb. This would eventually lead to a focus on serving the user information in bite-sized pieces, resulting in a card and carousel system.

NetGear and Swrve: Real-time relevance increases upsell revenue and improves engagment
The NetGear team chose Swrve to improve the impact of their upsell messaging, increase brand awareness, and drive engagement with hyper relevant A/B testing.

With Swrve, NetGear wanted to improve the relevance of their mobile messaging by developing a real-time analytical approach to targeting and triggering to inspire more engagement, clicks, and monetisation using CTR and revenue as their key ROI. NetGear also wanted to identify a smart, customer-first way to deliver product-specific updates on mobile, and create a true multichannel presence with real-time engagement.

Swrve provided NetGear with a way to create, send, and optimise rich multichannel mobile experiences directly from ‘Journey Builder. This enabled NetGear to make use of engagement tools including push notifications, in-app messaging, design and copy A/B testing, real-time behavioural tracking, and geofence trigged messaging.

NetGear experienced a 170 per cent increase in click through rates by identifying the optimal in-app messaging for its audiences, $100,000 in new upsell revenue from A/B tested upsell campaigns, and 42 per cent increase in click through rates during A/B testing of push notifications.

Pilot Flying J & Publicis Sapient: mobile app redesign
Pilot Flying J serves the around 3.5m professional truck drivers in the US, helping them in getting fuelled, fed, rested, and showered in the most efficient way possible. Serving more than 1.6m guests every day, it also providers services for RV’ers and auto drivers.

The truck stop business turned to Publicis Sapient to enhance its one-to-one relationships with guests in every experience and interaction within a redesigned app. Publicis took this on board and looked to drive both guest value and incremental sales for Pilot Flying J in the long term, while keeping an eye on the experience and technical requirements for an initial release.

After months of research and testing, a fully redesigned experience was delivered featuring enhanced on-boarding that paves the way for future personalisation, a fully revamped loyalty system, and a message inbox enabling the company to send direct communications via the app on subjects such as important alerts, offers, and rewards.

The app, which fully launched in April 2019, also includes a dynamic dashboard that adapts to the needs of the driver, and enables drivers to switch between ‘Pro’, ‘RV’, and ‘Auto’ modes depending on the vehicle they are operating.

Since launching, Pilot Flying J has seen a 127 per cent increase in app installs and a 170 per cent increase in unique users compared to last year. Its app store average rating has increased from 2.9 to 4.8 with over 15,000 reviews and users are redeeming more offers, with more than 280,000 free drinks awarded to new users.

Sliide: Headlines, news and rewards – offering more from mobile
Since winning the award for Most Effective Consumer Smartphone App and being highly commended in the Most Effective Mobile-first service category for its service in Africa in 2016, Sliide has expanded into other markets around the world. The company has brought its service to the US, the UK, and to wider Europe.

Its proprietary technologies have been pre-installed on millions of mobile devices around the world by mobile network operators in order to engage users and decrease churn. Sliide software includes its Headlines/News feed, which constantly updates stories in 130 languages from 260 countries; its Rewards app, which gives people in-app currency for interacting with game; and its app widget, which recommends apps to users based on geography and what they’ve downloaded before.

The three products – which can all be branded as the operator wishes – were developed following consultations with operators, handset manufacturers, content products, and companies from across the mobile advertising ecosystem.

Sliide’s customers include three of the eight mobile operators in the US, four of the top handset manufacturers, thousands of retailers, Facebook and Google, and hundreds of specialist online advertising companies. More than 700,000 new phones with Sliide’s software installed are manufactured and sold every month – a figure expected to reach 1m by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, on the advertising front, there are 1bn monthly impressions, 200m monthly clicks, and is a 30 per cent all-time retention in comparison to the average apps in the lifestyle category suffering the same churn in just 90 days.

The Effective Mobile Marketing Awards Ceremony takes place in London on 14 November. To book your place at this celebration of the best in mobile marketing, click here.

And remember, there’s still time to vote in our special 10th Anniversary Awards for Most Effective Brand of the Decade; Agency of the Decade; and Disruptor of the Decade. Click here to vote now.