Six tips for perfect marketing strategy across mobile touchpoints

While customers are increasingly leaning towards on-the-go purchases using mobile apps, the number of app downloads are estimated to hit $63.5bn by the end of 2017. Naturally, a perfect marketing strategy invariably depends upon reaching customers across mobile touchpoints.

Here we will introduce six awesome tips for a perfect marketing strategy across mobile touchpoints.

1. Understanding the customer touchpoints and channels

While a good look and understanding of the customer journey seems to be a good place to start, you need to begin by knowing the various touchpoints a customer can use for interacting with your business. Core purchase channels will come at the forefront followed by others. Here we mention various touchpoints and channels:

• Core purchase channels like store, website, call centre and post orders.
  
• Marketing channels like email, postal mails, telephone, Facebook, blogs, etc.
  
• Order fulfillment channels like delivery, payment, returns, etc.
  
• Research channels like website, consumer forums, store and customer services, etc.
  
• Indirect touchpoints like indirect contacts through social sites, shared word of mouth and consumer reviews, etc.

2. Providing consistent experiences
In spite of addressing diverse channels and touchpoints, providing a consistent customer experience across the touchpoints is crucial for mobile marketers. Customers always like having a consistent experience across channels like store, website, mobile apps, emails and social media campaigns. Offering a consistent experience is only possible by integration of the user data obtained from diverse channels.

How can your communication efforts be consistent across all channels? The answer is by integrating the data that you collect from each channel. In other words, all the data obtained from a specific customer in his different touch points should be integrated in a single profile for that user.

3. Make use of automated campaigns

Automated campaigns give you the freedom from the loads of tasks to keep updated. Moreover, by using automated campaigns you can increase user retention and engagement to a great extent. Basically, automated campaigns will let you address both customer activity and inactivity.

Address activity: What is your priority in focusing on the most important user activity? How far do you want to catch users' activities? Yes, automated campaigns let you catch the user activities for an unlimited number of times. Once customers take an action, automated campaigns can follow them with appropriate marketing steps. For example,

• An automated campaign can send customers a questionnaire following a call to the call centre. This can ask them to provide a rating on the call experience.
  
• Automated campaigns can send customers a warm welcome message following a new app installation and can even give them a coupon.
  
• Similarly, following a customer's purchase in an e-store, the automated campaign can suggest several options suited to the customer's choice and price range.

Address inactivity: If automated campaigns address an inactive customer, then it is certainly good for enhancing customer engagement and retention. There are many ways to do it. For example,

• You can prompt a newly updated feature to the inactive users and ask their opinion about it.
  
• You can send a push message or email when they do not open the app for a fortnight or so.
  
• You can give a special offer to users who did not buy anything for some time.
  
• Sending inactive customers interesting updates or videos can also be effective to garner a response and reengage them.

4. Adding value to customer journey
Once you have obtained understanding of customer journeys you can further improve the customer experience in the following ways:

• Taking steps to reduce instances of negative customer experience. Ensuring availability and accessibility of correct information is crucial here.
  
• Enhancing customer retention rate by addressing concerning areas in respect of transition of customers through stages.
  
• Identifying communication GAPs addressing them in the befitting way.
  
• Making the core journey path perfect and thereupon making additional impact with development attributes.
  
• A detailed understanding of the key metrics knowing the progress and fall out of customers.
  
• Giving priority to the way actual customers relate to your digital presence and providing feedback.
  
• Knowing key customer persona that you want to address, because it is impossible to determine every customer journey path individually!
  
• Make simplicity work in addressing concerns.

5. Focus on increasing app conversion and ROI
Just as it provides opportunities, mobile offers countless avenues of distractions as well. In fact, it is a hilarious task to keep users attentive to certain tasks. Just when the customer made up his/her mind to make a purchase, a call or message comes and he/she forgets the thing he was supposed to do. To minimise these distractions and give users scope for better business conversion, you need to take a few positive steps. Here we mention some of them.

• Remind the prospect further about the abandoned purchase in case he/she left the shopping basket suddenly without checking out.
  
• If your app is content-rich, like magazines or news apps, you can always tell the customer to share a story, blog or news if he/she did not do so within minutes after reading the content. Sometimes, just a little push makes the customer share the content.
  
• Always promote your mobile presence over all other channels, since this is where the customers stay most connected.

6. Targeting customer lifetime value
The total revenue generated by an onboard customer for the entire time for which he/she has been using your app is referred to as customer lifetime value. Marketers need to prioritise customer lifetime value, because it shows the importance of customer engagement, retention and revenue generation over so called acquisition numbers.

Now as each customer has his/her own kind of potential in respect of generating revenue, the marketers cannot treat all with the same mix of marketing attributes. They need to offer a personalised marketing mix as per the entire journey path of each customer. Giving loyal customers exclusive offers, discounts and well-thought gifts can play a crucial role in retention of customers and enhance the lifetime value for high-engagement customers.