For any business that has a presence online, it’s not enough to be focused on your visitor count or customer acquisition, you need to be conscious of the engagement level of visitors to your website, users on your app, and on creating a user experience that keeps your customers happy. For most of your customers, that will mean designing an experience with consideration toward the type of device they are using, which is increasingly a smartphone.
Even on browsers, over half of the traffic to websites today comes through mobile devices, according to StatCounter. Understanding mobile engagement is therefore essential, but it isn’t something that most people are able to grasp intuitively.
If you’re concerned about your mobile engagement, and here are a few tips to help boost mobile engagement and keep your customers happy, regardless of the device they are using.
Create Mobile-Only Deals and Discounts
Having a great mobile experience is one thing, but your customers might need a push to begin interacting with your business using a mobile device. This means that you need to give them some reason to use a mobile device when visiting your website or interacting with your app. An excellent way to do this is by creating special deals and discounts that are only available on a mobile device. By advertising mobile-only savings, you can give your customers the incentive they need to try out a new way of working with your business.
Include Mobile-Friendly Features
You should always strive to prove to customers that you are focused on their experience, no matter where they are accessing your website. The best way to do that on mobile is to include features that only make sense on mobile devices. One of the best that you can add is click to call, which lets customers call your business by simply pressing the phone number (or another link) on your website. While it isn’t life-changing, adding these small features adds up to a great customer experience.
Including mobile-friendly calling can be done directly in an app or on a mobile website as well, and you can also take this opportunity to add HD video chat as well. Take this with a grain of salt however, as poor connection quality can hurt customer engagement easily. Tony Zhao, CEO of video chat company Agora.io, notes that “Right from within the browser or app, customers can talk with a business and get their questions answered fast, providing your customers a quick and snappy experience, rather than long obnoxious waiting periods.”
Keep Your Experience As Simple As Possible
The KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) may as well have been created as a metric for mobile customer engagement. When you’re dealing with customers on mobile devices, you need to be careful to control the amount of content that they see at one time, and the loading speed of your website is particularly important. When you keep your mobile experience simple, you’ll naturally reduce the loading speed of your website or app, and this will keep your customers happier. After all, who likes waiting for a website or mobile application to load?
Develop Mobile-First Email Marketing
When you make the push into driving customers to mobile applications or websites, you should make that push across all fronts, and that is particularly true of email marketing. Your email marketing is an incredibly effective method of getting in front of customers, and more of your customers are looking at their email (along with everything else) on their mobile devices. If you make your emails mobile-friendly, then your customers will quickly get the hint, and will appreciate it.
Leverage Mobile-Focused Social Media
Along with email marketing, social media is the other important front that you need to consider when looking to increase customer engagement on mobile. Social media applications are a common sight on smartphone home screens today, and while the social media applications have obviously been optimized for mobile, you need to tailor your message to customers with mobile devices as well. This means keeping your message short and to the point, and making sure that any links you use are mobile-optimized and have fast loading times.
Are you concerned about engagement yet? You should be, and you should be focused on both desktop and mobile user engagement as well. What have you done to increase mobile customer engagement? Let us know in the comments.
