New year, new you! To ring in the new year, many will come up with resolutions—some will promise to go to the gym more, to travel more, take a class, or master a skill. But brands must set their own New Year’s resolutions. And in the new decade, brands should be looking to improve some of their digital frontiers.
For example, marketers are well aware that mobile has become a fast growing portion of their revenue streams. Mobile commerce has become a major part of the e-commerce environment since the advent and progression of smartphone technology. Business Insider estimates that in 2020, mobile commerce will make up almost half of the estimated $600 billion of online shopping revenue.
It’s time for marketers to fully embrace the customer experience as part of their strategy. But what should this look like?
Find Your Voice
The first step into defining your customer engagement strategy is to cement your brand voice. Your customers interact with your brand across multiple channels, from social to email and in-store to mobile.
Your brand pops up on their social relentless, through organic or paid sponsorships. Your messages show up on their phones. Your emails deliver to their inboxes. Each of your messages sound must be from the same voice. The way they interact with you must be cohesive across all these channels.
What works for your brand may slightly differ per channel but cannot be completely unrelated. A common trend on social media is brands being sassy and witty and resulting in them going viral. This might not make sense in mobile marketing. But if your brand does decide to be sassy on Twitter, your mobile app comms have to at least be casual. Brands with a sassy Twitter account can’t switch to completely dry and straight forward on mobile without confusing some of their market.
Increasing Your ROI on Mobile
As mobile becomes more popular as a means for shopping, marketers are looking to increase the return on their mobile investments in the form of increased revenue generated. This is no easy feat but one that will keep your brand relevant in the digital age.
Consider new ways to utilize your mobile platforms to drive revenue. Some industries may be more obvious than others. Retail apps can aim to drive revenue by a number of means, somer more straight-forward—communicating promotions to mobile shoppers, abandoned cart reminders, to more unique—geolocation alerts of local deals.
Other industries may require some creative marketing to drive revenue. Take banking. The finance industry has been overhauled by a digital transformation. People are banking on their phones now instead of in-person office branches. Investing in mobile customer service chatbots, mobile tech like check deposits or mobile payment, will improve customer experience, resulting in happier customers. Although it may not result in direct ROI, emphasizing your investments into what your customers value, like mobile banking, will improve ROI over the long term.
Personalization
One key way to help increase your ROI on customer engagement efforts is to make your efforts more efficient. Quality is much better than quantity. Your customers are receiving dozens of communications per day in the form of email messages, push notifications, in app messages, and more. This is on top of ads across television, social, print, you name it.
Consumers are more bombarded with brand communications than ever before. It leads to quite a bit of brand fatigue. With so many options of interactions and only choosing a select few per day, or even less frequently, it’s imperative for brands to create content that their customers want to see.
That’s why personalization is so key.
Personalized content will lead to more and higher quality interactions with your content. By following our Four Stages of Personalization, your brand can become experts in getting to know your market and how to cater to their interests and needs.
The first stage of personalization will take into account either profile or behavioral data. The second stage combines those pieces together. As brands excel and move past each stage, they’ll add more personalization factors such as A/B testing, dynamic content, and more.
As the message gets personalized to each user, the more likely they’ll initiate an app session and hopefully spend more money.
Introducing Artificial Intelligence
The final aspect of your 2020 mobile strategy is incorporating artificial intelligence. AI can aid your customer engagement by making your business operations faster, more efficient, and smarter. Let machines take the grunt work out of your teams’ to-do list and leave the strategy to them.
Data is one of the most crucial additions to the marketing world in recent memory. But collecting, interpreting, and acting upon it are challenging, well…impossible, for people to do on their own.
By introducing artificial intelligence, it will move your methods faster and smarter. Your brand can analyze the millions of messages you send every day, who is responding to them, when, and where they are. Analyze how they interact across the experience throughout the day, their abandoned carts, their account management. The amount of data is unimaginable.
AI will help teams find the full force of the data that they have within their arsenal. And it won’t be limited to your marketing communications, but can be applied to multiple sides of your business, such as chatbots within your in-app customer service portal or product management and development.
Revamping your customer engagement strategy for a full digital transformation in 2020 will give your brand the head start it deserves in the new decade. Remain relevant and fully adored by your customers as your digital transformation takes full effect.
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