Some businesses still have a relatively basic approach when it comes to their online and mobile strategy and simply take their bricks and mortar experience and put that online.
Business owners often view mobile platforms like apps or mobile sites as a marketing tactic or as an online version of their shopfront.
The result is often a mobile site that includes contact information, business locations, opening times and the ability to transact online. This is not enough to generate loyalty and for consumers to seek you out from what can be a very crowded global marketplace. However, mature digital businesses understand that they can leverage mobile devices to create experiences that have numerous benefits, including driving incremental revenue growth, data capture (profile and behavioural) and to build loyalty.
The customer experience
To reap the benefits of mobile platforms, businesses need to ask themselves the question, ‘what defines a mobile experience for our brand and our customers?’
Additionally, perhaps it’s not right to look at the mobile experience in isolation. What if you were to create a whole ecosystem of connected experiences that improve the overall experience? The mobile experience could then play a role in a much broader engagement with a customer, improving processes, efficiency and loyalty.
These experiences could also give businesses access to data that can help re-define the way they consider their bricks and mortar set up and streamline the experience further, potentially increasing revenue and profitability along the way.
Here are three ways businesses can improve their mobile experience platforms.
1. Customer centricity and loyalty
A key component to achieving successful mobile experiences is to leverage the data that is already available to businesses, like loyalty program data for example or demographic information, behavioural data from website analytics or general sales data.
Leveraging this data to deliver personalised mobile experiences, including relevant surprise and delight offers, is an easy way to generate loyalty. Ultimately, businesses need their thinking to be much more customer centric and leveraging data allows this to happen.
2. Mobile applications
Mobile apps are quite an interesting area for businesses. Mobile apps give organisations the ability to leverage a mobile device in ways a mobile site can’t. The app can access hardware, such as the camera, the GPS, the accelerometer and NFC (near field communication) capability.
For example, Amazon has opened stores in the US that leverage some of this capability to allow customers to walk into a store, select items from a shelf and walk straight out. No tills, no cash, no interaction with people. That’s the power of apps.
3. Push notifications
Another opportunity for businesses is to use the push notification capabilities of a phone. It might be a case where a customer is detected when they enter a store through a geo-fence or via a beacon and a personalised special offer is sent to their phone based on what you know about that customer.
Improving the mobile experience for your customers is integral to moving forward in our technological advancing age. Get creative and think differently from your competitors to generate memorable mobile experiences that create loyalty and keep you relevant.
Joel Norton, CEO of Kalido a new breed of customer experience consulting and delivery firm which uses data to drive growth and customer value through marketing automation, web and mobile experiences, and content creation. Kalido continues to grow and attract high profile clients and is the leading Salesforce Marketing Cloud Partner in the Asia Pacific region. Kalido is part of the ASX listed IVE Group, Australia’s most diversified marketing communications business with annual revenues in excess of $600 million and over 1,500 employees.
