In the past, customer predominantly engagement occurred through in-person and phone interactions. However, the current trend shows a significant shift towards mobile channels for customer-business interactions. Customers now place orders on smartphones, connect with customer support via live chat, and more.
Irrespective of the channel utilized, fostering a positive experience plays a pivotal role in nurturing customer loyalty and sustaining brand awareness. Ultimately, this drives revenue for your business. It doesn’t matter what mobile devices are used; the users’ mobile experience should be excellent. Those who can provide it will receive quite tangible material benefits.
#1 Improve your user onboarding process
The onboarding process in your mobile app refers to the user adaptation. In simpler terms, it creates the first impression on users. Hence, it is crucial to ensure user comfort during the adaptation process, reducing the abandonment rate and promoting mobile user engagement. If your app has a complex user interface, users may not invest time in figuring out its functionality.
#2 Offer an omnichannel experience
Providing a seamless and consistent experience across all channels is the essence of an omnichannel experience. Customers can effortlessly transition between channels without any disruption, ensuring a cohesive experience. Offering multiple engagement channels allows companies to meet customers wherever they are, fostering stronger relationships and increasing loyalty.
Furthermore, an omnichannel approach has the potential to boost sales and revenue. By simplifying customer engagement, companies can enhance satisfaction and encourage repeat business. One of the channels that are often neglected is fax. Online fax allows you to attract customers, especially from the business sector, which continues to actively use this technology through the fax app. Research indicates that companies with robust omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain 89% of their customers, compared to 33% for companies with weaker strategies.
#3 Enhance UX design
Consumers will quickly abandon slow or challenging-to-use mobile apps or websites, opting for alternatives. Ensure your mobile experience is fast and intuitive. Enhance user-friendliness by:
- Keeping image sizes small for speedy loading and optimal display.
- Utilizing white space to minimize clutter and improve page readability.
- Simplifying navigation bars and headers for ease of use, avoiding excessive subfolders and hard-to-read/click links.
- Streamlining web design, removing unnecessary pop ups, plugins, and navigation headers.
- Regularly using your app and mobile website to identify areas of improvement, simulating customer actions like making purchases or engaging with agents.
#4 Personalize interaction
Personalization is widely accepted and valued by 98% of companies and 83% of consumers. However, true personalization extends beyond using customers’ names and entails understanding their entire journey with your business. Achieving this level of personalization involves integrating mobile customer engagement platforms with the appropriate tools.
For instance, a nonprofit organization can integrate its messaging platform with customer relationship management (CRM) software, such as Salesforce, to engage donors using personalized communications based on factors like recent donations. Moreover, businesses can leverage a customer data platform (CDP), like Twilio Segment, to provide employees with real-time.
#5 Use loyalty programs and gamification
To encourage continuous engagement with your app, integrate it with your loyalty program. Take inspiration from the success of Starbucks’ app, which allows customers to effortlessly collect and track rewards with each mobile purchase. Forrester has even hailed the Starbucks app as “possibly the most successful mobile ordering app of all time.” Starbucks mobile orders accounted for 26 percent of company-operated transactions in Q2 2021.
Users must complete various lessons to progress and have the option to compete against friends or other users in different leagues. Thanks to its gamification strategy, Duolingo generated $161 million in revenue in 2020 and boasts over 42 million active monthly users.
#6 Deploy chatbots
By including chatbots on your website, you can offer customers an omnichannel experience. Chatbots provide fast and tailored responses to inquiries and remain available 24/7 to assist. Integrating chatbots with your CRM system synchronizes customer data across all channels. Consequently, when customers engage with a chatbot, their information is automatically updated in the system, simplifying agents’ ability to deliver personalized service in the future.
#7 Use push notifications
Brands have found push notifications to be a highly effective tool for engaging with customers and boosting customer loyalty. By directly sending targeted and personalized messages to a user’s device, brands can provide timely and relevant information.
However, it is crucial to use push notifications strategically and avoid overwhelming customers with excessive notifications. Bombarding customers with irrelevant or low-value notifications can lead to opt-outs and negatively impact the overall customer experience. Therefore, carefully targeting customers and offering them the option to customize their notification preferences is crucial.
Conclusion
All of the listed strategies work, it has been tested by hundreds of companies. However, it is important to integrate them correctly into your business and stick to the golden mean. Too frequent notifications or overloading an app with unnecessary features can have the opposite effect. But don’t hesitate to warn users about anything important or introduce new useful functionality.
