Captivate app users with 5 mobile customer engagement tips

All you have to do is look around you to know that smartphone use is prevalent in day-to-day life as well as at work.

What does that mean for businesses?

They better be prepared to provide an experience seamlessly across all the mobile devices where their customers are engaging. 

There is an opportunity for you here.

Business leaders can get ahead of the competition by focusing on mobile-first engagement strategies that create the on-the-go experiences consumers crave — and the retention you need.

Keep reading to get your hands on all the information and tools to get you going.

What is mobile customer engagement?

Mobile customer engagement describes interactions between businesses and their customers on mobile channels.

Most of the focus of mobile engagement is on in-app channels such as messaging and chatbots. However, mobile engagement also happens wherever consumers communicate with brands via mobile devices — which can extend to SMS text message marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, and even mobile paid search advertising.

Mobile customer engagement is a core element of a larger concept.

So what is customer engagement?

Customer engagement is an overarching term that refers to your interactions with customers across your entire ecosystem of channels — from mobile to desktop to in-person.

Whether they’re making a purchase, asking a question, or just consuming marketing or support content, any time consumers connect with your brand is part of customer engagement.

As you can tell, customer engagement is vast. To keep up with it, businesses usually focus on a few moving parts at a time, improving those before moving on to the next chunk.

Right now, it’s time for you to focus on that mobile-specific aspect.

Let’s talk about why.

Why mobile customer engagement matters

McKinsey found that positive customer experiences have a huge impact:

• 10 - 15% growth in sales conversions

• 20% boost in customer satisfaction

• 20 - 30% improvement in employee engagement

Where are those experiences taking place?

You guessed it — on mobile!

The majority of web usage today is happening on mobile devices. 

This data makes it easy to see why it's so valuable to focus on mobile-specific customer engagement at this time of explosive acceptance and usage.

Here’s how to cement your place as a leader in mobile customer engagement.

5 mobile engagement strategies to improve your in-app experience

In this section, we’ll zoom in on how to engage customers via your mobile app, specifically. 

Streamline user experiences

A white paper from market intelligence firm IDC found that 87% of brands score their customer experience as seven or better on a scale from one to ten.

Alarmingly, only 41% of consumers said that, overall, companies ranked seven or higher on the same scale.

There’s a clear gap between the experience consumers want and what brands are serving.

If you can close that gap in your organization, you should be able to pull well ahead of the competition.

Regarding your engagement strategy, that means creating a smooth flow across all channels where you engage with customers — including your mobile app.

Apps are where a robust omnichannel strategy often fails. This is understandable because it’s expensive and time-consuming to build in all the interactive features that customers use on other channels — messaging capabilities that help app users find the information they need, resolve issues, or complete transactions.

This makes a feature-rich, easily-integrable, and pre-built chat support platform like Sendbird critical to mobile customer engagement.

With Sendbird, your developers can use our well-documented SDKs, APIs, webhooks, and UI kits to build robust text chat, voice and video chat, customer support management, an in-app inbox, and more in your app.

Streamline and improve user experiences by integrating Sendbird into your current flow or create a new modern support dashboard using Sendbird Desk.

Invest in socially-engaged community

We know by now that it’s much more affordable to generate revenue from existing app customers than trying to sell your products or services to a brand-new audience.

Community is the secret sauce behind building a group of customers with brand loyalty who use and recommend your app.

This is why building a socially-engaged community is critical to mobile customer engagement.

Where do you start?

By building the tools into your app that enable communities to unite and thrive.

If you don’t have the resources to start from scratch here, Sendbird is uniquely equipped to help you create the conversational experiences around which social communities are formed with:

• Always-on in-app messaging

• Group chat with all the bells and whistles — including multimedia support

• Push notifications to keep community members abreast of the newest content

• User profiles

• Both automated and hands-on user and content moderation

• Announcement functionality

With Sendbird’s customizable chat API and easy-to-use SDKs and UI kits, you can launch this fresh, scalable, and secure mobile app engagement feature in no time.

Learn how social community can work in your app when you check out a Sendbird community demo or sign up for a free trial.

Personalize interactions and promotional offers

You probably hear about personalization all the time.

What makes this such a robust strategy when it comes to mobile customer engagement is how it powers revenue.

Personalization can drive 5 - 25% of revenue, depending on your business sector and sophistication with this strategy.

The more often you can implement customer data to provide personalized mobile marketing and support interactions in your app, the more revenue you can create.

In other words, personalization pays.

How can you make it happen?

It’s all about integration.

The tools you use to engage customers — think in-app messaging platforms — need to work flawlessly with the ones where you build personalized customer profiles — think customer relationship management (CRM) platforms.

When information can flow between the two, your staff and automated programs will always have the just-right context when sending off marketing campaigns, engaging with support tickets, and so on.

Surprise and delight

“Surprise and delight” has become the common term for a marketing practice that deals in unexpected and delightful experiences like gifts, discounts, or even events.

If you’ve ever heard of companies surprising their first 100 app users with awesome branded swag or delivering flowers to a customer who just experienced a milestone in their life — that’s the idea behind surprise and delight. 

Surprise and delight campaigns have all the power of scaled personalization but deliver the experience on a one-to-one or one-to-few level instead.

Because people are so likely to share these random acts of kindness with their networks, these moments can still have a major impact on raising your brand awareness, acquiring customers for next to nothing, and creating mobile engagement that leads to iron-clad retention.

Surprise and delight your app users by empowering your customer support, marketing, and other teams to interact with them daily to act on special moments in their lives.

These moments may surface via chat conversations or support tickets. Or, if you want to astound an exceptionally loyal customer — you can always take to their social media to figure out what kind of surprise would be uniquely delightful for them.

Develop a solid iteration and improvement plan

What works in the mobile world changes quickly.

The mobile customer engagement strategies crushing it this year may not perform as well next year. Who knows, maybe a new mobile device or hot new channel will hit the scene by then!

While you can’t predict the future, you can be prepared for it by developing a plan about iterating on and improving your approach to mobile engagement.

This plan will be wholly unique to your own team and culture, but here’s what we recommend thinking about as you construct it:

• Well-communicated and measurable goals

• Tools and a plan that tracks metrics according to those goals

• A cadence for checking performance metrics

• A cadence for taking the pulse of mobile trends to identify new opportunities

• A plan of attack for implementing and testing new strategies that improve lacking metrics