Mobile App Engagement: New Study Provides Roadmap
Are you engaging your customers successfully with mobile apps? If you’re like most brands, the answer is no. That’s what a recent Forrester report suggests. “In 2015,” Forrester wrote, “marketing leaders who have embraced the mobile mind shift will accelerate spending to create an insurmountable gap between themselves — the industry leaders — and the laggards who view mobile as just another channel.”
Introducing the “mobile mind shift”
What’s a mobile-shifted marketer? One who leverages mobile to transform customer experience and drive business outcomes. Mobile-shifted marketing will be the crucial trend in 2015. Meanwhile, treating mobile as “just another channel” is rapidly becoming a dinosaur mindset.
That doesn’t mean we won’t be seeing a lot of dinosaurs. “Success stories will be few in number,” Forrester predicted.
Three ways to improve mobile engagement in 2015
- Rethink everything. We’re living in what Forrester calls “the mobile moment.” Mobile is possibly the most disruptive business technology since the Internet: It’s “forced businesses to completely rethink how they win, serve, and retain customers.”
- Give them what they want. This “mobile moment” boils down to what customers expect from the brands they engage with. They want the info, services and perks they’re looking for, in context, the moment they need them. To date, 18 percent of U.S. consumers already think this way, while another 30 percent are moving that direction. That’s just in the U.S. The mobile mind-shift is happening across the world.
- Deliver experiences. U.S. and UK consumers may use 24 apps on average, but they divide 80 percent of their time among just five of those. They have app fatigue: the volume of available apps is plain overwhelming, so they’ve narrowed it down to those that are most useful. Brands that are sensitive to this will focus on delivering experiences, not just info and services, and they’ll make them as seamless as possible.
How big is this going to get?
The scale of the mobile shift is fairly remarkable. Forrester observed that companies with lots of mobile users are “being acquired for astounding valuations,” while the most successful apps for customer engagement globally are being developed into platforms which stand to rule the mobile world.
These platform companies are pouring funds into tracking customer engagement and spending, aiming to crack the code on what makes apps work for consumers. “Observing behavior across so many phones offers unique opportunities to spot trends or early demand for products — or lack thereof,” Forrester wrote.
All told, businesses that want to stay competitive will need to re-engineer their approach “to deliver valuable mobile moments” to their customers.
How to begin? Check out this list from the media, events and research company StreetFight for ideas, and pay attention to point #6, “Enhance the user experience in real time.” See this article for more info on why real-time UBI calculation is a non-negotiable.
To learn more about integrating mobile with your insurance offerings, check out our OBD vs. Smartphone UBI comparison chart.