As marketers, attribution is foundational to making good business decisions. When mobile attribution is intertwined with mobile engagement, it becomes very easy to measure the effectiveness of push notifications and in-app messaging in concert with your ad media buys. This allows you to determine how well you are converting your customers and more importantly, cultivating customer relationships and building lifetime value.
Something that we’ve been working on is building a good model to help marketers and mobile owners think about their mobile app relationships. We all know the classic marketing funnel. It’s very effective for depicting a single buying process, but we believe it does a poor job of depicting how a user interacts with an app, since the goal isn’t a single conversion but a relationship.
To solve this we created what we call the Mobile Engagement loop.
Viewing your customer relationships as a mobile engagement loop takes advantage of the ongoing opportunity for growth and sustained engagement both inside and outside of apps through a cyclical, multi-tiered approach.
The mobile engagement loop includes four stages: onboarding, conversion, retention and re-engagement. Each stage should not only be considered individually, but as part of a whole for a comprehensive, thoughtful mobile engagement strategy that strengthen relationships with your customers.
Onboarding
Successfully onboarding users after they download your app is your first opportunity to make a good impression. Showcase the beneficial features of your app with a welcome series that helps educate and onboard users.
Provide an overview of the benefits they’ll receive by opting in to push notifications and location services. For example, the NHL grew its opt-in rate by 10 percent by adding a customized screen before the standard OS opt-in dialogue. This screen explains how enabling push notification and location services helps create the best possible experience for the user.
Proper, thoughtful onboarding increases the likelihood that a user will opt in, creating a direct communication channel between your brand and customers. Other businesses find it helpful to go a step further and offer new users an incentive toward their first purchase to drive conversion.
Conversion
Conversion actions will vary based on industry and brand objectives, but should focus on providing value to users with every interaction. For example, a user adding a product to their shopping cart, “favoriting” a news story, booking a reservation or requesting product updates could all be considered important conversion actions.
In a mobile marketing strategy, these types of conversion actions are critical because they enable brands to personalize in-app messages and push notifications to their app users. Personalized messages are four to seven times more effective than generic ones and establish a stronger connection between your brand and the user.
Retention
The retention stage is where brands want to focus on providing value so users do not remove your app from their mobile device.
Consider what utility or benefit your app provides, or how it’s simplifying your users’ lives — the key to retention is to understand and learn how your users want to use the app and then serve them content based on what is important to them.
In the retention stage, it’s especially crucial to get your communication cadence and strategy correct. Too much communication can annoy users, while not communicating enough may lead to lower app usage.
Branding Halo
The “branding halo” is the result of several successive conversion-to-retention cycles. It follows the premise that the more transactions a user completes, the deeper the app becomes entrenched within a user’s patterns, ultimately creating more brand value.
Re-engagement
Invariably, a portion of your customers may lose interest and become dormant or uninstall your app. The mobile engagement loop recognizes that users fall out of a relationship with a brand sometimes. However, this doesn’t mean that they’re gone for good.
Your brand still has an opportunity to win them back and resurrect the relationship if you have the right strategy and technology in place.
Determine what actions or communication may entice your users into coming back — do they just need a gentle reminder, or maybe an incentive to spark their interest? Do they know about the latest functionality just added to your app? This is a great opportunity to re-engage them with a win-back ad campaign. Or you could use a different channel such as e-mail or SMS if you have their contact information.
You can also ask dormant customers for feedback on why they left. Show them you care by finding out how you can improve their app experience. This can be valuable for retargeting efforts — via email or SMS — who have deleted your app.
Beyond the Funnel
Successful mobile engagement does not follow a traditional funnel approach — viewing your customer’s journey through the mobile engagement loop will ensure a systematic way to sustain and grow high-value relationships with your customers.
Want to find out more about how the AppsFlyer-Urban Airship integration works and how it can benefit advertises? Click here. For more mobile engagement best practices and insights, check out Urban Airship’s blog.
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