Companies spend over $75 billion annually on advertisements designed to increase app downloads on smartphones. This is not surprising given that over 3.5 billion people worldwide use smartphones and over 200 billion apps are downloaded each year. In addition to advertising, companies use promotions or other incentives to motivate consumers to install their apps and enable their features.

Changing how smartphone users interact with apps can have considerable effects on companies’ bottom lines. A prime example is that requires apps to ask permission before tracking or sharing user activity across other apps. This change caused the percentage of users who allow tracking to plummet and resulted in lost income for app developers that rely on data tracking, like Facebook, which lost over $12 billion after this policy change.

App adoption can influence a range of outcomes. For example, the launch of a news app can increase visits to the corresponding news website, and adoption of a physical activity app can cause greater levels of physical activity. Features like in-app purchases and premium upgrades can provide direct revenue for firms while also making money from acquiring email addresses, location tracking, or other user data. In some cases, enabling app features is also necessary for an app to function properly. For example, digital contact tracing apps often entail three key features (e.g., exposure notification, exposure logging, and Bluetooth), and these apps don’t function properly when users don’t enable any one of these features.

Nudging the Consumer

How can managers encourage more consumers to fully adopt an app and its key features? In a , we examine how app design changes influence adoption of app features and explore how managers can facilitate this adoption. Across seven experiments, our research team shows that several inexpensive techniques can make users more likely to enable important app features and complete app onboarding.

We test these “nudges” in multiple contexts, including experiments that focus on digital contact tracing apps (developed and widely deployed during the COVID-19 pandemic) with a smartphone interface mimicking actual presentations. Because managers and app developers often want to make the funnel smoother from downloading an app to fully enabling the app, we examine three techniques that could help accomplish this goal and explain the mechanisms underlying their influence on digital consumer behavior.

• Integrating multiple feature decisions into a single choice rather than separating them increases adoption. This finding is consistent with the notion that presenting separate decisions leads people to focus on the attendant risks, thereby diminishing the likelihood of installing the app.

• Changing colors to match those commonly found in current digital interfaces appears to increase adoption. For example, since blue is commonly used for “continue” buttons, users are more likely to select blue than grey buttons during installation.

• Wording options as if they will be enacted (saying “continue” as opposed to “continue without enabling”) makes people more likely to accept the feature during installation.

Small Changes, Large Effects

Our discussions with app developers, user experience teams, and other industry experts indicate that failure to enable app features is a major problem. Numerous apps have critical features such as location tracking and other privacy features that users must enable by making several choices. Other consumer behaviors, such as accepting cookies on websites, initiating subscriptions, or signing up for vaccinations, also involve many steps and choices that could be integrated to increase uptake. The effects of these small changes can influence many types of decisions, with implications for consumer privacy and customer relationship management as well as regulation.

We examine these effects across different app types, including COVID-19 exposure notification apps, health and fitness apps, and employment search contexts. We use these contexts for three main reasons:

• They represent situations where the interests of the firm and consumer are largely aligned, in that both parties would benefit from the app’s installation.

• The exposure notification software is timely and relevant to multiple stakeholders during the COVID-19 pandemic.

• These are contexts in which installation would benefit not only the firm or consumer but society as a whole.

Our research comes at a time when practices that shape digital consumer behavior are gathering more interest. For example, the Federal Trade Commission has issued new guidance that subscription sign-ups must be transparent and easy to cancel to address complaints of “sludge” – cases where designs are intended to exploit consumers. Government agencies in the United States and Europe are documenting cases where digital practices encourage behavior that may harm consumers or make it much more difficult to make one choice than another (e.g., enabling versus disabling cookies). Our research documents the effectiveness of adopting different choices to guide digital consumer behavior and clarifies the underlying psychological mechanisms.

. 

From: Crystal Reeck, Nathaniel A. Posner, Kellen Mrkva, and Eric J. Johnson, “,” Journal of Marketing.

Go to the Journal of Marketing

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Adding to the challenge, there’s a major trust problem across some of the most popular channels, especially social media. Despite being a popular source of news and information, up to . Add to that the rampant amount of counterfeit advertising fraud, and it’s easy to see how this creates a trust problem for brands.

Not to mention, there’s a tremendous amount of competition for consumer attention. There’s a lot of noise out there and it becomes overwhelming for a lot of us. So much so that Apple’s new iOS 15 now includes several feature designed to cut down on distractions by so that we can finally get a break and maybe even get something else done besides stare at our phones.

At the same time, consumers have no patience for irrelevant clutter. They want personalized content and messages that feel like they’re created just for them, on their own terms and timeline. In order to cut through the clutter and give consumers what they want, marketers need some way to deliver that just-right, just-for-me experience.

Browser-based push notifications have emerged as one of the most effective channels for meeting digital audiences’ expectations with trustworthy, personalized content they actually want to receive. for its ability to deliver quick, snackable content that drives organic traffic back to their site. In fact, they already do or would subscribe to publishers’ push notifications to keep up to date on the content that matters most to them.

What makes push notifications so attractive? First, they’re timely, with instant delivery that plays right into our human nature to want to be “first to know.” Second, they can be personalized and curated. By tracking audience engagement with the push notifications they send, publishers can fine-tune their content recommendations to deliver only the most relevant content to each subscriber. Finally, for publishers, push drives organic traffic directly to their site, where they can monetize that traffic to drive revenue from brand partners like you.

Farmers’ Almanac is a great example of an “old school” publisher using this “new” push notifications channel to drive revenue. By sending out personalized push messages, this 200-year-old publisher was able to breathe new life into its evergreen content by distributing one article via push per day, based on subscribers’ interests. They’ve also added one monetized push per day.

“Because we’re able to send content that caters to a readers’ particular interests, instead of generic batch-and-blast content, our click-thru rates and traffic on our website have both increased,” said Frank Pagano, digital marketing manager at Farmers’ Almanac. “Plus, we can track what each user engages with, and what they don’t, to continuously refine our content recommendations and timing. It’s become one of our most stable revenue streams, boosting revenue from our email and push programs alone by 110% a month, and we’ve had very, very few complaints from among our 500,000 push subscribers.”

For brand marketers, the audience appeal of push provides a powerful opportunity to engage new audiences. By partnering with a publisher that offers sponsored push notification programs, marketers can reach a highly-engaged audience. Because there’s a —audiences trust and click on advertising they see in publications they trust—marketers can take advantage of this captive audience to drive higher engagement.

For publishers with push personalization systems in place, your content can be customized for subscribers based on their known interests. Because sponsored push campaigns are CPC-based, they’re also extremely economical—unlike web ads where you pay for views regardless of engagement, with push, you only pay when a subscriber takes action.

Brands can also leverage the power of push for themselves, as well. With collateral and lifestyle content such a critical part of audience engagement these days, many brands have also become publishers in their own right, through blogs, vlogs and social content, for example. Marketers can push their own branded content to subscribers over a channel that captures their attention and creates an urgent, can’t-miss feel that drives engagement. And by leveraging known audience behaviors, purchase history and interests, you can also personalize those notifications to ensure subscribers get only the most relevant content.

With their quick, snackable content delivery, push notifications have become one of the most powerful channels for direct, 1:1 audience engagement, cutting out the middleman to amplify trust and data insights. By partnering with publishers to push sponsored content, or pushing their own content out to existing subscribers and customers, brand marketers can overcome information overload to drive increased audience engagement.

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“Getting a new user to download the app isn’t the finish line—it’s the starting line.” While downloading the app is obviously a required initial step, app engagement is what determines your app’s success with users.

With ever-increasing app choices, (184 billion by 2024, to be exact) it’s vital to understand ways to improve app engagement and stickiness to avoid getting your app replaced on home screens.

Here are five of the best ways to keep users consistently engaged with your app.

The Steps for Better App Engagement

1. Reduce Friction in App Onboarding

Let’s start from the beginning. When developing your app, consider the user’s entire experience. What’s the first thing they’ll need to do when they open the app? Most likely, create an account. If there is a complicated onboarding process for users, there’s a higher chance they’ll abandon your app without a single use, diminishing app engagement.

Smashing Magazine uses OKCupid as an example. When trying to login to their app, the author, Suzanne Scacca, was unable to use the “log in with Facebook” feature after multiple attempts (14 clicks).

Retention is the path to increased app engagement. Getting users to download the app without optimizing the account creation experience cuts that retention short almost immediately. Brands should strive to retain users versus aiming to constantly get new ones. Simplifying onboarding is the first step in customer retention, but ensuring your app is useful to the user will increase retention as well.

2. Increase App Utility

Once the friction has been removed from the onboarding process, another ingredient for improving app engagement is simplifying the user’s life. Going back to the tool belt analogy, if there’s a tool that’s not helping to solve a problem or provide the user value, they’re going to remove it from their tool belt so it doesn’t weigh them down.

In an interview with Forbes regarding app use during the pandemic, AJ Wang, Head of Acquisitions and Performance Marketing for GCash, a fintech app, said marketers need to become “lifestyle enablers.”

An app should improve the customer’s life in some way. Whether it’s a stress-relieving game or making depositing checks a breeze, for consistent app engagement there needs to be a utility aspect to the app.

3. Optimize Push Notifications

Now that the user was able to easily sign up and your app is helping simplify their life, how do you continue to engage with the user to remind them of your app’s benefits? Enter: push notifications. Personalized push notifications with the right messaging at the right time can improve app engagement. In fact, push notifications have a click-through rate 7x that of email.

If your app is a tool for the user, push notifications should remind the user that they have that tool when they need it. One way to do this is by sending push notifications based on a user’s location.

With geo-targeting, the user gets a personalized experience and is more likely to engage with the app if the message is helpful to them at that moment.

As helpful as the notifications may be, the user experience, once customers are taken to your app, needs to be consistent to retain and engage users.

4. Create a Consistent In-App Experience

The user is logged in, finds your app useful and gets personalized push notifications. As the user navigates your app, however, it’s important to create a consistent experience within the app itself.

A consistent in-app experience means that as a customer uses your app, they shouldn’t be confused by the user interface and app functionality. In fact, as part of the onboarding experience, many apps include a quick training on how to use the app, to improve the customer’s experience and increase app engagement.

UsabilityGeek highlights the importance of mental models when thinking about an app’s user interface. They noted, “Developing an understanding of a user’s mental model, that is, what a user will need to use during certain situations, be it mobile or desktop, will ensure a positive user experience through consistency.”

In-app consistency is an integral part of the customer experience. But, when a customer leaves your app, how do you guide them back? Consistency should be applied to the entire customer journey, for a seamless experience.

5. Develop a Seamless Cross-Channel Experience

Once the in-app experience is consistent, brands need to look at their customer experience as a whole, including their app. In Liftoff’s 2020 Mobile Report, Skye Featherstone, Product Marketing Manager at Snapchat, said, “Apps are the connective fiber of your business, providing seamless, personalized experiences across both physical and digital contexts.”

Because apps have the ability to bridge the physical and the digital, like in our geo-targeting example, the experience for users needs to be seamless and undoubtedly on-brand.

Let’s say your customer is in your mobile app but later clicks a link to your mobile site. If the mobile site and mobile app look different, just from a basic branding perspective, it may create confusion for the user. You want the user to develop a familiarity with your brand and, through doing that, you’ll likely increase app engagement in addition to engagement on other channels.

Another example of a seamless experience could be if a user is shopping on your desktop site and abandons their cart. You could send the customer a push notification with messaging about the products in their cart or products related to what’s in their cart. Then, when clicked, the notification could take them to their cart in your mobile app, which has the items they added via the desktop.

Building a seamless experience for the customer will ultimately improve app engagement because the app is a piece of the puzzle. The user can bounce back-and-forth between the physical locations, desktop and your app and feel as though it’s one singular, personalized experience.

Improve Engagement by Improving the Customer Experience

The key to improving app engagement is understanding the customer experience, both within your app and as a whole. From first download to becoming regularly used, the focus for your app needs to be on what the customer is experiencing and what value they can get from your app at each moment in the customer journey.

At the end of the day, we’ve all used an app. Even though we’re marketers, we’re people too, so think about your experience with your favorite apps and put yourself in the customers’ shoes. What makes you go back time and again to your favorite apps?

Looking to kick your mobile marketing up a notch? Learn more about .

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The world’s top leisure brands, such as CrossFit, PokĂ©mon Go and Tinder, have built empires by creating sticky journeys that keep customers as addicted as possible. Athletes don’t just work out at CrossFit, they’re obsessed with it. Gamers don’t just play PokĂ©mon Go for a little while, they’re hooked for hours on end. Singles on Tinder don’t just hunt for new partners, they’re addicted to the hunt itself. And from Netflix to Spotify to TikTok, a new generation of media companies has completely transformed the television, radio and video industry. Audiences are no longer willing to sit through formulaic shows such as NBC’s “Law & Order.” They want “Game of Thrones”-like drama—compelling, polarizing, hard-to-pull-away-from serials that shock, delight and frequently enrage their viewers. 

The secret to the success of these breakthrough leisure brands is creating an insanely “sticky” journey that defies all the usual hyperrational rules of marketing. It’s not about creating consistently good customer experiences, but about creating intentionally chaotic, maddening and unpredictable ones. It’s also not about making services convenient, easy or satisfying, but instead about making them challenging, suspenseful and thrilling. The resulting customer journeys are exhilarating. We call these journeys sticky to emphasize that customers can’t seem to pull away. At the heart of these sticky journeys is an “involvement spiral”—a roller coaster ride of intensely good and bad experiences that keep customers riveted. 

How Do These Leisure Brands Create Such Sticky Journeys?

The first step is providing customers with “rapid entry.” That means giving customers free, quick and easy access to the service as soon as they express interest, whether in person or online. These brands don’t bore customers with a lot of information or ask too many questions. And they don’t pressure customers to sign up for a monthly subscription—at least not at the beginning. Tinder does this first step particularly well. Unlike traditional matchmaking websites that begin with extensive compatibility questionnaires, the Tinder app asks customers for no more than their age, gender and distance preferences. Customers can also import their photos from Facebook, so they can dive into the Tinder dating pool immediately.

The second step is providing customers with “endless variation” along the user experience journey. Whether we’re talking about dating, gaming, working out or something else, the only way to keep customers excited is by creating unpredictable experiences. Companies create such endless variation using a trio of techniques: 

• Opening the service system to a massive number of service elements (e.g., the hundreds of possible exercises at CrossFit, virtual creatures in PokĂ©mon Go or user profiles on Tinder). 
• Making frequent additions, subtractions and changes to those elements. 
• Offering unique configurations of those elements at each service encounter. 

For instance, CrossFit changes workouts daily and makes them extraordinarily challenging. Drawing on various sports, fitness regimens and military drills, no two workouts are ever the same. Once customers are swept up in the endlessly varied customer journey, they are more eager to sign up for monthly memberships. 

The third step is sparking new customer journeys as soon as the current ones begin to run out of steam. Leisure brands recognize that all journeys come to an end. Even the most exciting adventures can become familiar, exhausting or boring after a while. Eventually, brands must offer their customers new journeys. For example, Nintendo, the parent company behind the “Animal Crossing” game franchise, has launched an entirely new generation of the game every few years. CrossFit coaches invite advanced athletes to Barbell Clubs and CrossFit competitions. And recently, Tinder launched offshoots such as Swipe Night, an event that matches users based on their responses to an interactive movie. 

Wondering how to get un-hooked? Some customers can keep their recreational addictions in check, but many others cannot. Maintaining daily self-discipline is just too difficult. For compulsive users, there’s only one answer: Cancel your subscription, delete the app and call a friend. 

Most customers won’t do that, and leisure brands are counting on it. 

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Mobile marketing is more important than ever. The average American consumer spent about in 2019—up 20 minutes from a year earlier. That number is sure to grow when 2020 data are available. Around the world, people sequestered in their homes due to COVID-19 are turning to news, social media, video, chat, texting and games on mobile devices to pass the time, steepening an already fast-growing consumer trend.

As marketers scramble to redirect strategies in the wake of COVID-19, they are undoubtedly placing more emphasis on mobile marketing. Results from the (which was administered in January before COVID-19 became a pandemic) show that marketers are spending 13.5% of their marketing budgets on mobile—a whopping 321% increase over the 3.2% reported in February 2015. This number is expected to grow 73% to 23.3% in the next five years, but will likely reach that number faster due to current world events. Even before COVID-19, 2020 was set to be mobile’s biggest year, with .

Mobile’s big spenders include, not surprisingly, retail and wholesale retail companies (which dedicate 21.5% of their marketing budgets to mobile) and consumer services companies (who spend 20.2%). Both industries will allocate more than 34% of marketing budgets in five years to mobile. In the education, energy and healthcare industries, mobile spend will more than double across the next five years. Finally, companies with more than 10% of their sales over the internet spend 21.8% on mobile marketing today, but will spend 36.3% in five years.

What Enterprise Companies Spend Their Mobile Marketing Budgets On

What are companies spending those mobile dollars on? Social ads account for the greatest portion of spending, notching more than one quarter (25.6%) of mobile spend, followed by user experience (18.5%), display ads (15.8%), video ads (12%) and app development (9%). Spend on social ads shows no sign of slowing down, as marketers expect their overall to increase 62% in the next five years. User experience represents the second largest spend category. This is consistent with that customer experience spending has increased from 8.9% of marketing budgets three years ago to 15.2% at present.

However, these numbers hide a high level of diversity in mobile spending, as companies with 10% or more of their sales from the internet tend to outspend other industry companies on user experience, app development and video ads, but not display and social ads. Consulting allocates the most to social ads, at 35.6%, while the technology sector is a top spender on user experience at 26.5%. B2B companies focused on mobile spending to improve the user experience (20.6% compared to B2C companies at 14.2%) and B2C companies focused on display ads (20.8% compared to B2B companies at 13.5%). The table that follows reveals other differences:

Mobile Performance Challenges

Marketers are continuing to pour dollars into mobile, to reach customers on the device of their choice, increase engagement and drive faster purchase decision making, among other aims. In the February 2020 CMO Survey, CMOs rated mobile’s impacts as a 3.2/7 (on a scale of one to seven, with one meaning not at all and seven meaning very highly) when asked to rate mobile marketing’s contributions to company performance, an increase of 33% since the question was first asked in 2016. The greatest impacts are observed for companies with more than $10 billion in revenue (4.2/7), likely because they are pouring in more resources to unlock mobile’s potential, and for companies with more than 10% of sales over the internet (4.1/7), which likely have developed stronger capabilities converting mobile impressions to mobile sales.

Despite these consistent gains in mobile’s performance, there is considerable opportunity to improve further. What are the biggest barriers faced by marketers? Here is what we learned in the February 2020 CMO Survey and what steps marketers might take to increase mobile marketing effectiveness.

Challenge No. 1: Tracking Customers Across the Mobile Journey

What is the underlying problem?

First, customers take many different paths on their way to purchase. Marketers constantly analyze data to fine-tune their approach, but are challenged with an ever-growing set of new pathways and new influences. Accurately capturing the most common paths (both online and offline) and categorizing customers accordingly is a moving target. Second, capturing the correct data is a challenge. Marketers can start by acquiring the right customer data from channel partners or from different internal departments that “own” a critical piece of customer or sales data. Even for those lucky enough to get all the data they require, legacy technologies and outdated systems can make integration and analysis very challenging. While centralized CRM systems help, rarely do they sufficiently integrate critical offline data. Third, mapping the customer journey requires significant investment and buy-in across the organization. Convincing sales and account management of the importance of CRM data management or getting the finance department to invest in integrating real-time financial data takes leadership and resources.

To tackle this challenge:

First, work to determine the most frequent paths to purchase and build out personas to capture different approaches. This analysis can include observation, experiments, surveys and the use of big data tools. Marketers should also have a solid understanding of moments of truth, pain points and delights across the offline and online customer journey to understand how different segments are influenced differently along the way. Second, assess the service blueprint and understand how your organization is structured to track customers along these journeys. Which internal and external partners own the data across these common paths? How well equipped are current IT solutions and databases to capture this data? Third, advocate for cross-functional collaboration and encourage leaders to challenge a culture of siloed data “ownership.” Finally, prove ROI to business partners. To garner cross-functional buy-in, marketing needs to show partners how customer journey mapping will benefit them. One example of this is the use of “lead scoring” to assign a numeric value to customers based on their position in the customer journey. This information is particularly valuable to sales in order to know when customers are in the “buying zone,” but often can’t be generated without the accurate capture of CRM data initially provided by sales.

Challenge No. 2: Insufficient In-House Expertise to Manage Mobile Marketing

What’s the problem?

Results from the found that companies continue to approach the development of new marketing capabilities by building them on their own—57.9% of firms report they build new marketing capabilities by training current or hiring new employees with needed skills. However, this may be limiting performance as companies waste time and resources training in-house when a partnership would allow them to get to market faster and leverage external expertise to avoid predictable challenges. Second, the mobile landscape is rapidly evolving. As new channels and modes of entertainment gain relevance, expertise can easily become obsolete.

To tackle this challenge:

Find and integrate the right partners. The February 2020 CMO Survey found that CMOs are leaning heavily on external agencies for social media, with almost a quarter (24.1%) of activities performed by outside agencies. The process learnings that companies used to select social agencies should be leveraged to find mobile partners. Better yet, look for partners who can do both mobile and social. This increases integration and improves efficiency.

Challenge No. 3: Unclear Objectives for Mobile Marketing Strategy

What’s the problem?

Given mobile’s evolving character, developing and executing a mobile marketing strategy can feel like a never-ending game of catch-up, causing marketing departments to develop and implement strategies before they are clear on objectives.

To tackle this challenge:

Don’t try to boil the ocean. Instead, pick an area of focus. Results from the February 2018 suggest that mobile has the most positive effects on customer engagement and delivery of brand message and weaker effects on customer acquisition and retention. Making the connection between mobile and purchase will ultimately need to occur, but that is largely reliant on your ability to map the customer journey.

Challenge No. 4: A Weak Link Between Mobile and Broader Marketing Strategy

What’s the problem?

Similar to social, mobile often resides in departments outside of marketing—for example, in IT—or it is spread out across agencies. Budgets may be independently developed and allocated. All of these can disrupt making the mobile strategy a seamless part of the firm’s marketing strategy. Unclear objectives (see No. 3) worsen this if it’s unclear what mobile is trying to accomplish.

To tackle this challenge:

Convince leaders to co-locate mobile within marketing. In particular, ensure mobile managers work closely with the strategy side of marketing and develop mobile budgets as part of marketing’s overall budgeting process. Don’t get distracted: 81.7% of marketers replied that they do not “think the opportunity to pursue digital marketing opportunities has drawn your company’s attention away from marketing strategy fundamentals” back in the August 2018 CMO Survey—we hope the same holds these days. Keep focused on your activities.

We predict that 2020 will be the year of both mobile and social marketing as captive consumers suddenly have hours more available for online browsing and shopping. Certainly, it will be challenging for many consumer-facing, presence-based industries to make a profitable connection.

For CMOs in many industries, this is the year to get it right: to build relationships with consumers during a challenging time, demonstrate mobile’s contribution to revenue and fully integrate mobile (and social) into the marketing strategy and playbook. Focusing on key marketing fundamentals will help them achieve these goals.

. The CMO Survey is sponsored by Deloitte LLC and Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. Holly Larson contributed to this post.

Photo by Negative Space via .

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Today, with millions of apps available, making sure that yours stands out from the crowd is a tall order. What distinguishes your app from others is how well you can keep your customers engaged and optimize their overall experience.

Customer experience (CX) has gone down to become the next big thing in app development. A predicted that customer experience will be more important than the price of the product, as well as product itself in the near future.

This simply implies that your mobile application should have each and every element in the right proportion to keep up with the customer’s expectations and stay on the top of the game.

In this piece, we will look at five features app developers need to incorporate within their mobile app in order to upswing customer experience and boost engagement.

Accessibility

Accessibility is the practice of making your app usable for as many people as possible. For most mobile app users today, nothing quite matches the frustration of accidentally tapping ‘Cancel’ when wanting to tap ‘Save’ or vice versa. Keep the buttons close to each other on your mobile app, and you’ve easily scored one huge mess!

When , first ensure that you understand key accessibility components pertinent to your target audience. For instance, most people use their thumb to tap on a mobile screen. Those who opt for two-handed usage use one or another finger for tapping. Therefore, try to contemplate the accessibility zones that these two styles create, their overlaps and make sure the action options and call-to-action buttons are placed within these overlap areas. The overall accessibility of an app is judged by how it improves the ease of use for all people, regardless of ability level.

In 2018, iTaxi, a platform (similar to FreeNow, Lyft, Uber or Bolt) that connects users and licensed cab drivers, optimized its mobile app for the visually impaired and blind. The company aimed at making the app more accessible for these users.

“The most crucial element in designing for accessibility is an understanding of the end-user’s perspective. We had to learn how the blind or visually impaired use our mobile application, and we were quite surprised by how fast they managed it with assistive technologies,” said Katarzyna MaƂecka, UX designer and researcher, in a 2018 interview with . “We had assumed that the more descriptive the application was, the easier it would be to use by those less able to see. We thought that these people use the app studiously, carefully going from one element to another. How wrong we were! A blind person can hail a taxi almost instantaneously, provided that the app—meaning us, the designers, developers, managers— doesn’t stop them from doing so.”

Interactivity

Better interactions capture the user’s attention, engage them and give you a strong thread to develop while guiding the customer toward your business’s end goal. Mobile app developers are increasingly aligning with the idea of developing web interfaces on the basis of anticipated user behaviors and thought-out actions.

Businesses that comprehend interaction contexts, user profiles and buyer personas deliver memorable customer experiences.

Now is a great time to determine if you have the answers to these crucial questions:

• Who are the target customers for whom the mobile interaction is being designed?
• Are these customers experienced mobile users or just beginners?
• What activates this mobile interaction for the customer?
• What information is needed for them to complete their goal of using the mobile interaction mechanism?

Answers to these questions will help you design the customer journey for your mobile apps. This “journey” will then act as the input for the wireframe of the mobile application, after which comes the design.

Interactive elements in your mobile app can also play a vital role in keeping your customers engaged, especially when targeting younger generations. Exceptional customer experiences can be delivered on mobile apps by leveraging principles of good communication. For Instance, MailChimp’s mobile app uses images of hand gestures to signify completion of desirable actions on the user side.

Deep Linking

Deep links have become a vital part of the mobile marketer’s toolkit. Mobile users have high expectations. It isn’t enough for mobile apps to be reliable, fast and secure anymore—users demand a more personalized experience. That is precisely what deep links help you deliver.

Instead of merely launching an app and leaving users at the home screen, takes users to a specific screen within your app. Think product profiles, pages, new content or shopping carts. Deep links can take users to in-app content directly from:

• Web links
• Ads
• Push notifications
• SMS texts
• Emails
• Social media posts
• App to app
• Search result listing (using app indexing)

Now, rendering seamless user experiences across a mobile ecosystem that has been cracked open can be very challenging, with marketers often not knowing where to pause.

A few years ago, the team at Adobe Spark faced a similar challenge as it sought to drive more downloads of its mobile app. Difficulty linking across channels and devices made it challenging for customers to find the specific information they were looking for within their mobile app.

“The new customer would download the app, only to be perplexed when they were dropped onto the app’s home screen and expected to find and pull in their own design manually,” says Thibault Imbert, former head of growth for Adobe Spark. “Obviously, this wasn’t just a bad experience, but terrible for conversion because the customer was lost. Many of us considered it a broken experience.” 

Using Branch, a mobile deep-linking platform, the Adobe Spark team was able to use the same links across channels, while simultaneously tracking insight for all its marketing activities—which was just what Imbert’s team needed.

Deep linking enables app developers and marketers to polish the way users interact with their app. With deep links, mobile marketers can design personalized campaigns. It’s the perfect tool for marketers to drive engagement and retain users within the mobile app by bringing them to specific conversion points within it, tailored by their stated interests and past behavior.

Segmented Targeting

Segmenting app users results in higher conversion rates, engagement and, eventually, revenue. Today, 55% of marketers are to deliver on their customer experience management goals.

Segmenting allows you to send targeted in-app messages, which increases:

• Personalization of your messages
• Likelihood your customers will buy from you
• How well customers feel you understand them

Marne Litfin, product content strategist of Audience Builder (a digital segmentation tool), presented an excellent example of how segmentation can be leveraged within a mobile app to improve its customer experience and boost engagement.

In a with Adjust, Litfin said, “Let’s say that you have a flagship app where users can review local businesses and restaurants, and you want to push them into a food delivery service app. It’s a perfect fit—users can review and read about places they’d like to eat, then go directly into the new app and order from those same restaurants with a seamless user experience.

“By pairing up your flagship app to a segmentation tool, you can get a list of device IDs known to it. This will then create individualized segments, with which you could build a segment of known users who are very active in this case. Your segment could contain only users with long session times, or users who have recently triggered a search or left a review. You can have your network target those users with ads for your new app. You can even skip the network altogether and create a push notification campaign that sends pushes containing deep links, for example, 10 minutes after a user has searched for a restaurant, encouraging them to download the new app and place an order.”

Constant Innovation

An average U.S. adult spends approximately . The huge surge in adoption and popularity of mobile apps is not just owed to the unmatched convenience they offer, but also to their potential to unleash innovation that transforms the way people look at mobile phones.

The secret to the success of a mobile app isn’t just good user flow, that it might have solved a problem or made users’ lives easier. It’s about innovation! It’s that the creators are always thinking about how they can add to the customer’s experience and enhance their lives. And in the fast-moving world of mobile applications, it’s the customer that matters.

One excellent example of constant innovation to enhance customer experience in the mobile app realm is that of Coachella’s mobile app. 

Coachella’s audience is tech-savvy, young and hard to impress, which left the popular music festival’s organizers with a real challenge when looking to amplify the festival experience and boost engagement. Yet the Coachella mobile app has become central to maximizing the enjoyment of the event that most visitors instantly fall in love once they try it.

That’s because the app allows users to personalize everything. They can use it to navigate the sprawling venue and discover activities; find food and beverage vendors and amenities; look at a real-time virtual lost and found; and purchase merchandise online. And, they can do all of it while listening to their personally curated playlist.

This year’s mobile app also included an innovative new augmented reality (AR) feature. Users gained exclusive access to AR art installations across the venue. Want a picture of you cutting up the dance floor with a disco shark? The app makes that and much more possible as part of its commitment to creating a better experience for customers.

Get to Work!

As the marketing realm becomes hyper-competitive, more businesses are finding value in mobile apps to revolutionize customer experience and boost engagement. Apps enable marketer to forge a solid mobile presence, with custom-made interfaces designed specifically to tailor the best possible experience for customers. Apps automate many routine tasks, streamline the customer’s buying process and enable new possibilities to drive engagement.

With brands now progressing toward a high-stakes game, carefully designed mobile apps have become a precious tool to gain a competitive edge. Building a mobile application requires the right mix of technology, design, usability and foresight. Marketers who can correctly identify their customers’ path to purchasing and engagement, and optimize their mobile apps accordingly, stand to come out on top.

Illustration by Bill Murphy.

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I’m Michael McCain, CEO of Maple Leaf Foods, and these are personal reflections. I am very angry, and time isn’t making me less angry. A MLF colleague of mine lost his wife and family this week to a needless, irresponsible series of events in Iran…

— Maple Leaf Foods (@MapleLeafFoods)

The chief executive of the Canadian packaged meats company used his company’s Twitter account to strongly criticize the Trump administration for its actions that led to the downing of Flight 752 in Iran on Jan. 8. Michael McCain angrily launched a series of tweets at “the narcissist in Washington” following the crash of the Ukrainian flight, which killed the wife and son of one of his colleagues. It was an unusual move for a high-ranking executive to take control of their corporation’s social media account to voice such personal, political views. But McCain “gave great thought” to his remarks, according to Maple Leaf’s VP of communications, and asked to make the posts.

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A woman who flubbed a simple question on “Family Feud Canada” received $10,000 from the brand she incorrectly referenced. The question, which only had one answer, was “Name Popeye’s favorite food.” Rather than answering “spinach,” as the question was in reference to the cartoon character, the contestant answered “chicken.” Popeyes—the restaurant chain that’s seen plenty of PR for its highly in-demand chicken sandwich—responded to the gaffe by offering the woman $10,000 worth of Popeyes food, tweeting, “Our survey says you got that right. DM us to claim your $10,000 worth of Popeyes. #LoveThatChickenFromPopeyes.”

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After The New York Times about requesting access to user data—as required under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)—consumers were jarred by companies’ requests for additional data. For example, Berbix, a company that verifies people’s identities when they ask to unlock their data, asks consumers to upload photos of their government ID and to take a selfie. The company then requests a second selfie, but it asks the user to look “happy or joyful.”

While requestors may be flummoxed by the need to upload additional information about themselves, Berbix’s goal is to ensure the requestor isn’t faking their identity by uploading photos they find online of a person. Researchers have shown how relatively easy it is to claim another person’s identity when requesting data, which can allow for the unlocking of information from credit card numbers to passwords. “Regulators need to think more about the unintended consequences of empowering individuals to access and delete their data,” Berbix founder Steve Kirkham told the Times. “We want to prevent fraudulent requests and let the good ones go through.”

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The latest companies under fire for potentially violating data privacy laws are some of the biggest names in online dating. A new report by the Norwegian Consumer Council finds that Grindr, OkCupid and Tinder, mobile platforms meant for on-the-go romance, have been sharing user’s location information, gender, sexual orientation and dating preferences—and in the case of OkCupid, answers to sensitive, optional questions. The data is handed off to advertising partners, who can use the data as they see fit or sell it to other third-party vendors. These particular findings are troublesome in the European Union, where new privacy laws are being developed, as well as countries such as Pakistan and Qatar that outlaw same-sex practices. As of now, the report is still being circulated and no changes to policy have been reported.

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For many years, the name Hummer—a behemoth SUV made by General Motors—was considered a gas guzzler, and the line was pulled in 2010 when GM went bankrupt. Given the popularity of electric vehicles and gas-efficient cars, it seems odd that the Hummer could fit into today’s automobile landscape, but GM is reviving the brand as an electric pickup truck. Sales are expected to begin in early 2022, with a Super Bowl commercial starring LeBron James slated to air next month. Hummer will return as a member of the GM brand family rather than a standalone brand, as it was before discontinuation. The introduction of the new Hummer falls in line with a trend coming out of Detroit to offer larger electric vehicles while getting rid of many lower-margin passenger car models. As is the case with many electric cars, GM hopes niche customers will pay a premium for the new Hummer.

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The U.S. Census Bureau plans to spend $500 million on public education and outreach for the 2020 Census, including more than 1,000 ads intended to reach 99% of all U.S. households. The includes advertising, public events, partnerships and digital and traditional media. Many of the ads target immigrant and minority communities and emphasize that data collected is confidential and cannot be shared—including with other government agencies.

Read more:

Hummer photo by Spencer Davis on .

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Mobile messaging has become an invaluable communication channel for brands and consumers in recent years – but we’ve barely scratched the surface of its potential.

The next few years will see an influx of CX innovation that will usher in a new era of empathetic interactions.

Our latest eBook, The future of messaging, explains how this future is taking shape and what we can expect in the short term.

Discover how:

• RCS is about to transform mobile messaging
• Innovations in data collection and visualization can help brands optimize experiences
• AI-powered conversations lift the potential of automated interactions to new levels

The post The Future of Mobile Messaging appeared first on ÂÜÀòÉçčÙÍű.

Sometimes, viral content needs some time to simmer before it explodes on social media and in our collective stomachs.

A new recipe has gone viral and sparked curiosity, despite looking like a heartburn waiting to happen. Dubbed the “Deep Fried BBQ Chicken Stuffed Pizzadilla,” it resembles a Chicago-style deep dish pizza—pulled BBQ chicken sandwiched at least an inch thick between two tortillas, covered with pizza sauce, mozzarella cheese and pepperoni, then deep fried and served with an accompanying ranch dressing dipping sauce. A video is making the rounds on Twitter, sped up and shot vertically, depicting each step of the recipe. Viewers can already taste the Pepto-Bismol.

The video and recipe were originally shared on August 1 and are a creation of , a brand developed by U.K. media company . The agency has established five of its own social media-focused brands based on different lifestyle arenas: food, entertainment, crafts, fitness and women’s empowerment. Each keeps up a steady stream of content; in the case of Twisted, they post recipes and newsy features multiple times a day. Having established themselves on social media—Twisted boasts 16 million Facebook followers and 4.3 million Instagram followers—they align with brands to produce sponsored content, like when Twisted constructed mini tacos using Heinz Baked Beans.

okay but I just wanna know WHY?????

— khaltkom (@_kurlykay)

Although it’s been online for weeks, the video for the loaded Pizzadilla went viral after Twitter user @_kurlykay on August 22 with the caption, “okay but I just wanna know WHY?????” The post has been retweeted more than 4,800 times, has garnered 21,500 likes and elicited 1,800 comments—ranging from disgust to intrigue.

When reached for comment via email, Tom Jackson, the co-head of Twisted, had this to share:

“The response has been incredible to watch. We never could have predicted it. Our recipe videos are all about breaking the rules, being playful with food and entertaining our audience. This video did just that, so it’s a great thing. We’re not prescriptive and embrace the debate,” Jackson wrote in an email.

“On a Monday morning, we sit down as a team and talk about the latest trends, cool recipes we could create that our audience will love and that will get people talking. That’s the point of content at the end of the day. Through these sessions, we come up with the recipes we’re going to create that week, which is where the Pizzadilla was born. It really embodies our approach to food in that we don’t take ourselves too seriously. Life’s too short! Thanks to the popularity of our videos and the reach of Twisted, we work with clients on branded content. Something we did for a brand the other week ended up on ‘Good Morning Britain,’ which was fantastic to see. Brands come to us for innovative recipes that will get people talking about their product, that’s our fortĂ©.”

Ready to create the next viral sensation? Try cooking up an idea like the Pizzadilla.

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The dinosaurs in the “Jurassic Park” films thrash around places we humans regard as generally dinosaur-free: laboratories, city streets, theme parks, portable toilets. The potential horror of coming face-to-face with a velociraptor has carried the franchise from the 1993 original through its latest—2018’s “”—the series’ fifth.

In anticipation of the release of “Fallen Kingdom,” Universal Pictures and Facebook teamed up with digital agency to offer viewers the opportunity to share the screen with their own terrifying prehistoric beast. What resulted was an immersive experience that was promoted when viewers first witnessed the film’s trailer during the 2018 Super Bowl. The resulting campaign—directing users to a Facebook filter that inserted a raptor into photos and video—was nominated for a .

Augmented reality, or AR, is when graphics, images and other digital objects are placed into the world as visible through your mobile phone’s camera. In the case of , users logged into Facebook and enabled access to their camera, then touched the screen where they wanted a raptor to appear. This particular raptor depicted Blue, a menacing character from 2015’s “Jurassic World.” In the AR view, she is seen scanning the room and heard shrieking a deafening cry. Users could adjust her size or move her around their displayed environment.

The most recognizable example of AR’s use is arguably , a mobile game in which players locate hidden Pokemon on a map based on their geographical location, then use their phone’s camera to view and “capture” the creatures.

From day one, The Mill was hit with heavy technical limitations. In order to ensure all dino-fanatics could make use of the AR filter, they had to limit the technology to two megabytes of data—not all users had the luxury of owning the latest phones. This required implementing a few shortcuts.

“We started by developing seamlessly looping motions and movements that express what we wanted to tell, story-wise,” says Pierce Gibson, creative director at The Mill. “Our artists compressed and compiled a look we were all happy with. It all feels very seamless in terms of what you get on screen.”

Pierce says it was imperative that they work with footage from the actual films so that Blue would appear as recognizable as possible. “We wanted to do something very specifically appropriate to the story of the film coming out,” he says. “The dinosaur [we animated] isn’t just some random dinosaur. It’s a specific character with distinct characteristics, and I think fans would recognize whether or not we were hitting the mark in bringing that specific thing to life.”

Once Blue was properly implemented—and wasn’t appearing inside walls or below the floor—Gibson says the team at The Mill began user testing. “The question is, how do people want to experience the encounter with this raptor?” he says. “As we all collectively tested, we realized that it’s really fun when Blue seems docile and friendly, then there’s this ‘gotcha’ moment where she jumps out and screams at you.”

These moments—occurring sporadically once Blue is situated in the frame—contributed to what senior producer Hayley Underwood-Norton dubs, “viral-ability.” On Jurassic World’s official Facebook page, users posted photos of Blue terrorizing the towns where they live or lurking behind unsuspecting family members at home. Videos show users jumping and shouting when Blue roars. “People were putting their pets or kids [in photos] and having fake interactions with Blue. It was really neat to see,” Underwood-Norton says.

The Mill doesn’t have access to many analytics as to the success of the campaign, but it noted that the Facebook filter has been used more than 1 million times to date. Universal was impressed with The Mill’s work and contracted them to create another AR experience tied to the film’s DVD release—the agency constructed cut-outs of Blue for Walmart stores to prop next to their DVD displays. When users scanned these images, the dinosaur leapt to life on their phones.

Take a look at for “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” for a glimpse into how augmented reality can translate into explosive real-world marketing.

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