7 ways to improve mobile engagement

From radio to desktop, marketing has now gone mobile. So how do we keep customers engaged through this new medium? 

Mobile engagement is a strategy where users interact with brands through messaging channels on mobile devices. This can be carried out by either in-app messaging or through bulk messaging channels.

It aims to deliver brand experience, communicate, support and build meaningful relationships with customers through an almost “hands-on” approach. 

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Why is mobile marketing so effective?

We’ve seen a shift in the way we advertise and market products. Marketing once followed a one-size-fits-all approach, where targeted messaging followed a one-to-many ratio. One message was meant to strike a chord with 1000s of people. 

As time went on, marketing messages became more nippy, more targeted towards a certain demographic. Audiences grew larger, but these audiences were broken down into groups, and each group received a variation of a message that targeted their direct pain point. 

This more personalized approach for marketing felt more meaningful to customers. As these audiences became more “narrow,” it started to lessen the gap between the audience and the brand. It allows customers to become more candid and to reach out. Targeted messaging pulled customers in, and brands were able to amplify this strategy by using technology to deliver these messages.

Online visibility was enough to acquire customers, but in an age where customer loyalty is at all-time low, it certainly isn’t enough. Now organizations need to think about ways to retain customers. 

While a billboard, or a desktop provide a very one-to-many approach to marketing, nothing is more personal than a message that’s being delivered to the palm of your hand. But is this enough? Or is this approach too superficial? Here are a few ways to improve mobile engagement.

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7 ways to improve mobile engagement

The way you approach mobile engagement depends entirely on the user. You have to think about who is using your app and what they intend to use it for. 

First, develop a basic buyer persona to recognize who your current customers are- how old they are, where they live, what their current pain points are, their gender, why they’re using your products, what are they using it for. 

This information will provide a gauge for what kind of mobile app they’d be interested in and how you should design it. Or whether you need an additional app at all. 

Certain audiences are reluctant to download an additional app for niche objectives, so maybe you need to consider using a messaging channel, like WhatsApp..

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Not all engagement strategies are the same, so it’s time to build a comprehensive mobile strategy. First, define what goal you want to achieve when urging users to download your app, or when urging them to engage with your account on WhatsApp or Facebook.

Think about the customer journey and get all hands in to contribute to the app. We’ve found that most times, customers reach out for immediate support, so get your customer support team involved. Customer support inquiries can range from being technical, legal, financial, or more, so get these teams involved as well. 

The next step is to think about how the users will interact with the app. Consider implementing in-app messaging with push notifications. Or consider what kind of message you’re putting out- is it a personalized offer, a simple notification, or a conversation with a live agent?

The final step is thinking about what will entice users to engage with you in the first place, which is why it’s important to get marketing teams involved as well. 

Ultimately, the teams that get involved will impact your mobile engagement solutions. So get in touch, and get the leaders of the respective teams to weigh in their opinions. This will lead to the conception of a customer-centric app that customers will love to interact with.

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When it comes to decision-making, no one makes a decision right away. There’s a pause for a couple of seconds for customers to gather their thoughts- their eyes will wander and if they land on something they find unattractive, they’ll turn away. Which is why aesthetics play an important role when it comes to designing mobile applications. 

Ensure that your application is practical, but also attractive. Pay attention to the User Interface Design- how the buttons look, how information is delivered to the customer, the visuals, etc. It’s good practice to align application design with graphic design trends to retain a modern feel for the application.

It’s important to consider how your mobile application aligns itself with your webpage. If the former is modern and the latter is outdated, it could cause dissonance for the users who’ve visited both. It could also suggest that you’re showing partiality to one medium over the other, and customers don’t want to experience favouritism. Do what you can to make all your customers feel special and cared for.

However, if you’ve chosen not to create an entirely new application, focus on user experience design- how your customers interact with your app. Think about the conversational flows, and how information is presented to the user as well. Both responsive web design and adaptive web design can be used to make websites mobile-friendly as well as adjust screen size.The establishment of a decent graphic design website that improves the aesthetics even when viewed through mobile devices is what makes a website responsive.

Whether you’re creating a new application, or deploying on a messaging channel, focusing on User Experience is a must. Plan for all possible outcomes, ensure that navigation is as clean and as seamless as possible, and make sure that it’s in-line with your web application design as well.

Here's another reference article on mobile application trends in 2023!

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Do you remember receiving multiple text messages throughout the day about the same promo of getting 20% if you make a purchase in-store? Do you remember how annoyed that made you feel?

In Step 2, we talked about implementing push notifications to ensure your users engage with your brand. However, if you’re using this feature to send out the same promotion over and over again, that’s going to lead to your user deleting your application or your phone number, and never interacting with your brand again. Entice your customers to engage with your brand through the power of personalization. 

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Congratulations! You’ve crafted a beautiful experience for your customers. But now you have to give them a reason to engage with your brand. A lot of customers aren’t open to the idea of closing a sale via mobile. But a way to ease them into the idea is through mobile incentives. Add integrations to your app or to your messaging platforms to support mobile-purchases, and send out exclusive offers to mobile visitors to give them a reason to use your app. 

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Whether you opt for creating a mobile engagement strategy through messaging platforms, or you opt for an external mobile application- providing regular updates shows users that you’re making continuous efforts on the backend side of things to make the most optimal experience for your users. 

Making a mobile application from scratch and regularly updating it may not be the most feasible for most startups, but that doesn’t mean you can be negligent when providing an in-app messaging experience. This leads us to our next point-

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Keep tabs on your analytics dashboard. Pay attention to metrics like session length, daily active users, retention rate (percentage of customers are coming back to your app), your most popular days, etc. Understand how and why your customers are interacting with you to continue improving your engagement strategy.

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And that’s it! 

These are all the steps you need to follow to craft and improve your mobile engagement strategy. 

Whether you decide to deploy on your own app, or through messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Engati has a solution for you. 

Register with Engati and watch your engagement scores soar.