Every mobile app strategy must begin with determining whether you need to focus on short-term customer acquisition or a longer-term customer-retention
It is a known fact that millions of apps are available on app stores, and users are active on at least twenty apps on their smartphones at any given point of time. With every brand introducing its app into the market, the scope of user mindshare has become considerably limited. Well, unless it’s a social media app!
Now the big question is how to develop a mobile app strategy that sends actionable messages to users. This makes us ask, “Where does the core utility of a business app lie?” Is it to increase sales (pure marketing approach) or is it to boost brand engagement and recall (customer centric approach)? It is hard to find a balance between these two motives.
Here are some points to help you with ascertaining core approach for the app:
Engagement focussed approach
Services based apps are are focussed on customer retention and loyalty-driven activities. So, for them, the mobile app works as a recall tool, which keeps customers engaged with the brand. In businesses where loyalty is a hard currency to earn, mobile apps can be used as leverage to keep customers emotionally invested in the brands. This can be done by giving value to the app users in four ways:
- By offering customised deals on products and services,
- By being accessible to users through chat or call,
- By rewarding customers (with discounts, loyalty points, and freebies) on birthdays, referrals, reviews, and testimonials,
- Integrating social media interactions within the app.
In cases of product-oriented mobile apps, it is important to consider the average ticket size. If products offered are expensive (like high-end electronics), it might be a good idea to concentrate majorly on user engagement. Once the user has purchased a product, he will not be buying it again for a certain length of time. But the goodwill and loyalty generated can be capitalised at a later stage through referrals, endorsements and peripheral services (like maintenance or insurance).
Marketing focussed approach
For product-oriented apps, the ideal approach would be to focus on increasing the scope of e-commerce by constantly notifying app users about relevant and latest products. Here, the marketing strategy requires the communication to be so frequent and offer-based that the user might eventually switch off notifications, or worse uninstall the app itself.
But the upside is that the active transacting customers can bring up the sales to offset that loss. For fast-moving low range consumer products (like apparel) the businesses should focus on pushing the client with offers and coupons to stay on top of the competition, especially when the product category caters to a low loyalty audience.
Re-engagement focussed approach
Another thing to consider is that if the ratio of dormant customers to active customers is high, then it is time to invest into elaborate loyalty led strategies to re-engage app users into interactions. Now the app will work more as an engaging platform than a marketing medium. For reviving user connections and sales, push notifications play a vital role. They need to be streamlined, customised and spaced out strategically. Introducing reward points, feedback bonuses, special discounts etc., are good examples of optimising the engagement quality further.
Also read: Take advantage of FOMO and use shortage as a strategy if you want to get a crazy amount of users
The verdict
Every mobile app strategy must begin with determining whether an app is a part of the short-term (immediate) customer acquisition & trial strategy of the business, or if it is being developed as per the long-term focus of customer retention. This depends on the stage of the product cycle the business is in, nature of business and scale of investment. Ideally, an app promotional strategy should be a combination of both customer engagement activities and marketing tactics.
The only way to derive at the best ratio for such an implementation is by constantly testing and improvising on messaging, offerings, and interactivity of the app to gauge customer response, which in turn will provide insights about gaining an optimum balance between user involvement with the brand and revenue in sales.
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