How to Improve Your Mobile Customer Engagement

If you think that you have a handle on your customer engagement strategy online, then you’re in for a rude awakening. While many entrepreneurs have embraced the move online to capture their customer base, which has increasingly moved there, their customers are already one step ahead of them. Their next location of choice? Mobile.

Recent trends have only shown an increase to mobile marketing, with StatCounter reporting that 51.3% of all web traffic is coming through mobile browsers. If you look around, or even think about your own shopping behavior, you’ll be surprised that this number isn’t higher. If your business is struggling to acquire customers online, then here are a few tips for you to dip your toe into tailoring your business for a new, mobile-first customer experience.

There are few definitive concepts in business, but one thing that no business ever wants to do is overwhelm their customer. When you’re on a mobile device, you naturally have less screen real estate to work with, so you should be focused on making your mobile experience as simple as possible.

A big part of keeping your website simple is in making sure that it loads easily. A fast loading website will be much easier to use, and a slow website is one that loses you customers. In fact, even a one second delay in your page load time can lose you 7% of your customers, according to Kissmetrics

Even though many of your customers are heading in the direction of mobile, it can sometimes be hard to push current customers over to mobile right away. After all, they might not have a reason to go to your new mobile website or app right away, and that means that you need to give them that boost. Using deals and discounts that are only available on mobile will give your customers the incentive that they need to check out your mobile experience, and it can strengthen your sales funnel on mobile as well.

In addition to keeping things simple, you want to make some parts of your website ridiculously easy to interact with for people on mobile devices. For example, if you place a phone number on your website, then you should make it easy for a customer to click on the number and to initiate a phone call with you. In fact, there are platforms that allow you to integrate fast video and audio calls right on your website, which provides a far better customer experience.

As Tony Zhao, CEO of video chat company Agora.io, puts it: “Right from within the browser or app, they 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.”

Engaging with your customers through email has always had a high ROI, but with more customers checking their email on a mobile device, you need to get creative with how you choose to craft your emails. Creating email campaigns using a mobile-first design and copyright approach that ends with your mobile-friendly website or landing page will keep your marketing funnel applicable to a growing portion of your customers.

Your customers aren’t going online on their mobile phone to check out your website (just yet), but they’re doing everything from ordering a cab to keeping in touch with friends and family. A cornerstone to most of their lives is social media, whether that’s Facebook, Instagram, or one of the newer entrants like Snapchat.

Engaging with mobile users on their home turf will allow you to attract mobile users more effectively, and it will open up the dialogue for two-way communication. While one-way marketing has been the primary way that many businesses interact with their customer base for years, it’s not the lens that your customers should be using to view your business. Getting good at quick social media outreach and using rewards on social media are great ways to attract a new customer base and incentivize your current customer base to check back in with you often.

Mobile doesn’t have to be hard, and there are plenty of ways to make your mobile experience better for customers. Just like you should keep it simple with your customers who are visiting you on a mobile device, you should try to keep your implementation process simple as well. Make sure that you are using the right tools and services for the job, and you’ll be far better off. Remember, managing your business on mobile might be new for you and your business, but it isn’t a new concept overall. There are plenty of ways that you can implement these things with the help of trusted partners.

Is your business ready for mobile? Let us know what’s stopping you from going full-bore on mobile in the comments.