Month: August 2021

Customer loyalty is essential to your online brand. Market research by Hubspot reveals that if an online retailer provides excellent service, customers are 93% more likely to return for a repeat purchase. With that in mind, you should focus your marketing efforts on creating the best experience possible for anyone who visits your site, including optimal UX and high-quality customer service. 

Your business needs to be accessible to ensure a great customer experience. Research estimates that 70-80% of potential customers are lost when companies don’t have a website, partially because their online competitors snatch up most search inquiries. 

Online differentiation is becoming increasingly complex, with more small businesses investing in data-driven web design. As a business owner or marketing manager, you know that effective digital marketing strategies are fluid, requiring consistent updates and new knowledge to keep up with a fluctuating market. For that reason alone, anyone looking for long-term loyalty and repeat purchases should consider investing in mobile apps. 

Mobile apps epitomize ease of use and accessibility. Today, worldwide smartphone users surpass six billion, and that demographic continues to grow with greater access to technology. Mobile apps allow your customers to access your online store or business platform with ease and provide you with certain privileges that you wouldn’t have otherwise. 

Creating a mobile app may seem like a serious undertaking, and in many ways, it is! You’ll need to provide initial investment for proper web design, testing, and launch, as well as substantial marketing efforts to make sure that all your hard work is put to good use. What you’ll be left with is a new access point to your business that keeps customers coming back time and time again. 

Let’s dig into the reasons why mobile apps increase customer loyalty and drastically improve the user experience. 

Better Market Research 

You should be researching your competitor’s market before developing a mobile app. Determine a need for a mobile app in your industry, and figure out what you can do to fulfill and surpass that need. 

Do your competitors have mobile apps? If not, find out why. Maybe your product or service doesn’t fit the mold of a traditional smartphone app, so how can you change that? 

Through your mobile app, you can also collect insights regarding sales strategies and interests. If you’re the first to market for an app in your field, you might find that app sales are higher than expected. Maybe customer engagement through your app proves to be much better than it is on other sales platforms. 

Analyzing your audience from additional sources can only improve your understanding of their wants and needs. From there, you can develop better marketing strategies across all platforms. 

Running customer experience surveys with app users can provide valuable insight to your business. On occasion, ask your users what they want to see from your brand.

Real-Time Metrics

Running a mobile app gives you access to customized metrics that you might not get with a website alone. Everything a person does while using your app – whether looking at products, communicating, or making purchases – gets tracked and recorded. 

Here are a few of the valuable real-time statistics you can collect while running a mobile app:

• App downloads
• Active users (which measures session statistics to tell you how many people are using the app)
• Stickiness ratio (which equals daily active users divided by monthly active users)
• Average visit time
• Screen views per minute
• App retention
• App churn 
• App Store reviews
• In-App feedback

What Is App Churn?

App churn is one of the most important metrics when it comes to running a mobile app. It quantifies the percentage of users who stop using your app. These people either deleted your app altogether or haven’t reopened it in some time.

Churn can help your business identify issues with your marketing strategy and deployment, and therefore a need for change. Your app churn percentage can alert you to decreased interest, giving you time to readjust. 

Notifications

When users download your app, you can send push notifications and marketing information more effectively. In this way, app notifications are pretty similar to email marketing. Collecting a user’s email address through a purchase or subscription sign-up allows you to stay in contact long after visiting your site. Email marketing provides an extremely high rate of return for businesses, and app notifications on a mobile device can be even better. 

Today, our lives revolve around our smartphones. We use them to communicate, make purchases, get places, and even be social, so having access to a consumer’s notification center is extremely useful to your marketing success. Rather than relying solely on email, paid ads, and social media to stay connected to your audience, you can send direct notifications reminding repeat customers about sales, new products, and improved services. 

Utilize app notifications to keep existing customers updated on your business. If a negative service experience isn’t the reason a customer doesn’t return to you, it might have something to do with distractions from competitors. Why put all that work into a great product offering and user experience just to have your customer forget about you in the near future? Keep your brand at the forefront of people’s minds by slapping it on the front page of their phones. 

Personalized Marketing

The consumer information and feedback you collect from app usage are extremely specific to each user. With this information, create personalized experiences for each specific user based on the recency of their app download, screen views per minute, and time spent on the app. 

In a recent study, 80% of survey respondents revealed they were more likely to purchase brands that offered personalized marketing experiences. If you’re interested in collecting the most in-depth market research about your customers, look into app tracking capabilities. 

A new Apple update requires users to agree to app tracking before brands can collect any data outside of their app. Still, if accepted, you’ll have access to your customer’s browsing and purchase behavior across different platforms. Other smartphone users aren’t given the same choice, so you should be able to collect that user data anyway. The level of customization possible with that information is higher than you’ll get with website metrics alone. 

Special Offers

Many businesses offer special discounts and services to new users to encourage more mobile app downloads. Incentives might include a loyalty program or a first-order discount. By incentivizing app downloads, you gain access to the invaluable customer feedback we outlined above, as well as a loyal audience that’s even more likely to purchase from you again. 

A good strategy when it comes to mobile app development is to make offers your customers can’t refuse. Digital marketing experts suggest offering a discount for first-time web orders, but how can you ensure that your customer doesn’t go straight to a competitor after that first purchase? One way is to offer additional app-only discounts. Here are a few examples:

1. Get 10% off when you download our app.
2. Get 15% off your first in-app purchase.
3. Receive a 20% discount on your next service when you book through the app. 
4. Receive 2x your loyalty points when you make purchases through our app. 
5. Get 10% when you get a friend to place an order on the app. 
6. Be the first to know about sales when you download our app. 
7. Get exclusive access to the newest items on our app, before they hit stores.

Increase Your Loyal Customers with smartboost

The stronger your customer relationships are, the more likely they are to return for future purchases. Your goal in creating a mobile app should be to eliminate a consumer’s perceived need to check out the competition. Without the distraction of a Google search, your app will increase brand loyalty. 
To successfully build, launch, and run a mobile app for your brand, you’ll want to work with an excellent development and marketing team. At smartboost, we offer digital marketing and platform engineering services that are sure to increase your customer loyalty. Set up a consultation with our team today.