Consumer communication via mobile is an incredibly important channel to integrate into your omni-channel efforts in your quest to maximize user engagement. In an always-connected digital world, mobile outreach is a direct link to the eyes and fingertips of your users.
We carefully assessed how top subscription retailers are using this channel in our User Engagement Top 100 report, and uncovered some pretty interesting findings to start integrating into your own strategy.
Over the last three weeks, we’ve shared our findings from the subscription retail space concerning email practices and this week we’re closing out this series with a dive into mobile. If you missed any previous drill-downs, you can find them below:
- Introductory “welcome series”
- Ongoing blast campaigns
- Post-cancellation re-engagement series
- Mobile outreach
Our key findings concerning mobile are featured below:
About one out of every four retailers (26%) offered a mobile app for customer use. We expected to see these retailers prioritize mobile a bit more than our findings indicated considering 56% of all consumer traffic to top U.S. websites comes from mobile devices.
When looking at the types of companies who were using mobile as a communication channel, we saw that Beauty & Grooming brands were the highest adopters at 35%, followed closely by Fashion at 31%. Food & Drink came in at 23% while only 11% of Lifestyle brands leveraged the smartphone as a channel.
Mobile messaging is unique in its diversity of variants: SMS, Push, Rich Push and In-App. Each of these warrant different levels of engagement from your customers that can bring added value to the broader communication experience.
From the chart, you’ll see that many companies preferred to stick to only one mode of mobile communication. Adore Me did an excellent job of leveraging both text and push messaging. The apparel company showed its multi-channel marketing prowess with its SMS that encouraged users to download the app to track shipping.
Explore the full report to see what else we learned.
If you’re already using mobile or considering building it into your omni-channel experience, keep these tips in mind:
Recommendations for Maximizing Mobile
- Coordinate all channels — Consumers are increasingly interested in shopping on their mobile devices, so make sure you offer a dedicated application and capture phone number information to easily communicate via SMS and push notifications.
- Avoid any mixups — A mobile message should be either transactional or promotional in nature, but not both. Keep your calls to action focused, so your customers can easily distinguish between a shipping confirmation and the latest BOGO deal.
- Make opt-in (and out) easy — Keep consumers rapt with attention by requesting push permission immediately after downloading the app to encourage increased signups. As for text messaging, provide an instruction like “STOP” for users who are no longer interested in SMS communications.
Diversifying how you communicate with customers is an important factor when considering user engagement and inciting their behaviors. Mobile is powerful piece of the greater omni-channel messaging experience and utilizing this channel effectively will help your brand stay top of mind with your customers.
Whether you’re new to adopting an omni-channel strategy or looking for new ways to increase your relevance, be sure and download our Growth Marketer’s Playbook to explore how each of the consumer communication channels can enrich your customer experience.
