GUEST BLOG: How to build mobile relationships

The mobile is an ever-present in our lives and there are now more mobile phone subscriptions than actual people in Ireland.

We all know someone who falls asleep with a phone in their hand and lifts the screen to their bleary eyes on waking up. But what does this mean for Irish business and Irish marketers? Well, if the first law of marketing is to operate where consumers and prospects are, that self-evidently means mobile.

It also, to be more specific, means the mobile app. App traffic now dominates mobile internet traffic by a factor of something like 6:1, and in fact the mobile app now represents the single biggest influencer of customer loyalty in the market today.

The benefits of your brand being front and centre on the home screen of your customer (or future customer) cannot be overstated. But getting there – and staying there – takes effort.

One side of that is acquisition, getting the user to install the app in the first place. But more important again, particularly in a world where 25% of app installs are used only once, is building a real relationship on mobile.

THE PERFECT CONVERSATION

All good relationships start with listening. If you want to communicate effectively with your customers, you need to get to know them: what they want, when they want it, and what they’re interested in.

This has always been true. Every form of marketing there has ever been revolves around the idea of making any interaction as timely, relevant and simple as possible.

Mobile just gives us a hugely increased amount of data to play with – to the extent that something approaching the ‘perfect conversation’ is now possible.

All good relationships start with listening. If you want to communicate effectively with your customers, you need to get to know them …

On that basis, it is vitally important to collect as much of that data as possible. More importantly, don’t let it gather dust in the digital equivalent of a book repository. Analytics is only as good as the action it informs and supports.

At Swrve we work with leading mobile organisations around the globe to help them with precisely this process – delivering smart mobile interactions that are informed by the most detailed and granular understanding of each individual possible.

What should these interactions look like? Well, what they certainly shouldn’t look like is something from a large desktop screen shrunk down to ‘mobile size’. The truth is that mobile UI continues to evolve, but the unmistakeable trend is towards simplicity, visual rather than textual UI, clicking rather than typing and stripped back demands on the customer.

MOBILE MASTERY

Uber is an example of the type of transaction model that is now expected by the user. This is the ‘new norm’ that marketers have to deliver. The immediacy at which the order is placed and the clean design makes it a seamless interaction, one that your customers will love and one that helps them complete tasks in the moment.

But beyond this core experience (which in some fundamental ways is static and one-size-fits-all), more possibilities abound in the campaigns that can be delivered to mobile consumers, via push notifications and in-app messages or interstitials.

In each case, the goal is to deliver helpfulness rather than irritation. That means carefully anticipating customer needs and arriving at the right time, with the right message, that meets the needs of the consumer and puts your brand at the heart of their daily life.

We call that acting in the mobile moment, and it’s the secret to succeeding on mobile (as opposed to succeeding in getting your app deleted because you’re sending irrelevant push campaigns in the middle of the night).

Just remember, the first step is getting to know your customers: how they behave, what they like, what they purchase and how they make their way around the app. And then targeting them as individuals, not en masse. The next step is to talk to those individual users in a contextual way. That’s the road to mobile mastery.

In each case, the goal is to deliver helpfulness rather than irritation

Photo (main): Garry Knight