Bain & Company found that only 1 in 9 companies grow profitably and consistently. These companies spend twice as much on customer advocacy, i.e. maintaining customers’ loyalty and engagement.
In the world of digital marketing, this means two things. First, you need to focus on customer loyalty. Second, with more than 50% of all traffic coming from mobile devices, mobile loyalty is of paramount importance.
Case in point:
66% of the companies who saw a decrease in customer loyalty over the past year didn’t have an app. If you don’t have an app, you will lose clients to businesses that do. The same is true for having a poor app. 60% of mobile customers never come back after their first visit. This means you need an app, and not just any app.
You need an app that drives mobile loyalty.
Fortunately, you’re in the right place. We’ve made hundreds of apps for our clients, and in this post, we’ll share everything we learned about mobile loyalty.
These tips are the “secret sauce”; the stuff that separates high-performing apps from the rest. Get ready to get some quality insights, and let’s dive right into tip number one:
Use Push Notifications to Increase Mobile Loyalty
An e-commerce app isn’t just a digital storefront. It’s also a broadcasting station that allows you to show users Push messages on their lock and home screens.
This is very useful because it’s a lot like e-mail marketing – one of the most profitable forms of marketing in existence – with two major differences.
First, push messages are a lot shorter. That’s the downside. Second (and this is the good part) Push messages are a lot more visible than e-mails. They go directly to screens, not e-mails, which makes them better for sparking instant sales with attractive offers.
Even better, you can use personalized push messages to target users who:
Haven’t bought for a while
Are interested in specific types of content
Left items in their shopping cart (you can even retarget with promos like 1800FLOWERS in the example below)
Users love this kind of personal touch, favoring brands who can personalize their messages this way. For more quality tips on push message personalization, check out this article – but for now, let’s move on to the second tip on our list.
Have a Mobile Loyalty Program in Your App
Loyalty programs work in real life – but are they effective within apps?
Statistics say “yes”. 57% of consumers want to engage with mobile loyalty programs, and 60% of mobile coupon users would happily switch brands to use a coupon.
One way to take advantage of this is by coding a digital coupon program into your app. This can cost up to 5 figures, but for large brands, the results are more than worth it. For example, Starbucks’ loyalty program is a core part of their business – so it only makes sense they have one of the best digital loyalty functions in digital:
A simpler way to offer a mobile loyalty program is to create a “coupon code” field at checkout – and send coupon codes through to app users, your e-mail list and prior customers.
This doesn’t cost anything, lets you run basic mobile loyalty promos, and – if you’re using JMango360 to make and manage your app – takes seconds to execute.
Create Habit-Forming Promos to Increase Mobile Loyalty
Remember when, a few years ago, loads of venues would offer discounts and bonuses for Instagram tags and FourSquare check-ins?
This trend has now passed – but not because the idea behind it was bad. Getting physical customers to open an app in-store is a smart way to form consumer habits.
The logic is, if people get used to opening an app every time they’re at a physical business, they’ll be more likely to use it again – just like with any habit.
So what we recommend is, create more promos that make people go to your brand app. This can be a physical store action, like opening the app to get a discount.
It can be a purely digital promo; for example, sending an e-mail that rewards users for clicking through to the app.
Or you could go a completely different way and put more content, features and other value-adds to the app. For example, Gap lets people “try clothes on” through their app before buying them. This is, of course, a very exclusive and expensive feature to implement, but you get the idea – right?
Last but not least, let’s talk about a tactic that’s especially relevant in 2018:
Omnichannel Retargeting
In today’s e-commerce, users almost never start and end the customer journey in the same place.
For example, a consumer may see an Instagram ad; then go to your website, where they read some content; then forget about your brand until they get retargeted with a Facebook ad; then go to your physical store to complete the purchase.
As all of this is happening, you risk losing sight of your leads and past customers. Look at it this way: every time you’re not around to remind consumers of your brand, you’re giving the competition an opportunity.
To stop this from happening, you’ve got to be in the mindstate of being everywhere – or at least in as many places as you can be.
On social media, this means using services like Hootsuite to plan and execute campaigns over multiple networks.
With your PPC efforts, this means using retargeting to encourage completion of abandoned purchases, bring back past customers, etc.
Start Boosting your Mobile Loyalty and Repeat Sales Today!
Now let’s recap. The 4 tactics that improve customer loyalty are:
Using Push notifications to bring people back to the app
Mobile loyalty programs
Habit-forming promos
Omnichannel retargeting
But of course, the #1 way to keep mobile users are loyal is with a world-class app. If you don’t have one, it doesn’t matter how great your mobile marketing is; people just won’t want to shop with you. The same applies to bad user experiences.
Now as you know, apps used to be expensive. They also used to be inconvenient for e-commerce retailers, because they’d always come with a back-end that you need to manage separately from your web store.
This is no longer the case. JMango360 – Magento’s Innovation of the Year award winner – makes it easy to turn your store into a mobile app in seconds. Even better, there’s no extra back-end; JMango360 apps are plug-and-play, meaning they use your existing back-end to place orders and don’t need to be managed separately.
To learn more, and see how easy we make it to create world-class apps, book a free demo by clicking this link or the button below. See you at the demo!
Launch your ecommerce app with JMango360 and get support
At JMango360 your mobile success is our responsibility. In just 4 weeks time, we’ll design and launch a PWA or native app that reflects your brand and puts your customers first. But adding an app as extra revenue channel is not a ‘launch and they will find me’ project. That’s why we continue where others stop. Our app marketing support team will make your app results their priority. With best practices, templates, full support of experts and monthly app marketing calls you’ll be maximizing your app results in no time!
Plan a strategy call to discuss your goals and needs.
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