Digital Connect, specialists in cloud and innovation and a subsidiary of the Digital Solutions Group (DSG), has entered an exclusive partnership with Swrve, a leader in mobile marketing engagement, to deploy their platform across Southern Africa. Through this partnership, Digital Connect will be able to empower marketers and businesses to connect with consumers and drive awareness, heightened experiences and advocacy efficiently and cost-effectively.

Swrve is a complete marketing engagement engine for mobile that supports the design and delivery of bespoke and native mobile experiences, automates campaigns that engage users, holds deep analytics capacities and can be used as an integrated extension of existing market cloud technologies.

Marco van Biljoen, CEO of Digital Connect, says: “Swrve is a platform built for the enterprise. The platform enables brands to connect with their mobile app customers through one-on-one experiences and interactions that are useful, contextual and frictionless – which will further empower brands to maximise on and even monetise their mobile and customer engagement strategies.”

“We are seeing a greater movement towards mobile-first strategies by a number of local companies who are realising not only the business benefits that mobile offers, but also that mobile is the preferred media channel, where target audiences seek out and consume information. To date, mobile has the highest penetration in terms of consumer reach – and it is the richest interface in terms of customer insight and business intelligence with many different media formats and ad units that a brand can choose to communicate with the customer. This makes mobile by far the most powerful channel for customer engagement.”

Alan Tam, senior director of product marketing at Swrve, says: “South Africa is leading smartphone adoption on the continent, and Africa is on track to be the next billion dollar smartphone market. We recognised the immense opportunity the region has to offer for brands and markets alike. With South Africa and SADC being a rich global market for mobile app adoption and usage, this partnership enables us to establish our presence – which we intend to grow across the continent.”

“In truth, mobile is no longer the future - it is the present. Our mobile devices are constant companions of our everyday journey. Approximately 70 percent^* of our digital time is spent on mobile, with 90 percent of our mobile time spent in apps. This speaks to a very intimate environment that marketers need to understand and respect to be able to deliver memorable customer experiences and sustain customer loyalty in the long-term.”

Mobile is an on-demand experience - it’s always there, always ready – and that is what consumers have been conditioned to expect. Swrve enables brands to connect with their customers in a hyper-personalised and hyper-contextual way – while also improving the metrics that they care about, including engagement, frequency of use, conversion, loyalty, time spent in the app and more.

“Each ‘mobile-moment’ is intent-rich, but consumer attention is short. Brands therefore need to deliver intelligent, meaningful experiences and interactions that correspond to that moment in the customer’s journey and make each conversation valuable – and in real-time. Our platform combines systems of intelligence with systems of interactions to anticipate a customer’s need and deliver a highly-valuable real-time experience that’s based on a 360 view of the customer,” continues Tam.

“As more consumers adopt mobile, internet access becomes more pervasive and data costs come down, we expect to see mobile becoming the bridge in the digital divide. There is already a burgeoning middle class in Africa that is thirsty for increased information and better lifestyles using technology. Using the native capabilities of a mobile devices – such as the camera, location or web services based information – to make experience that are more contextual, meaningful and memorable for the customer is becoming an increasingly powerful application for brands and marketers, in the battle to retain customer attention, advocacy and loyalty,” concludes van Biljoen.