Frankel Interactive

Mobile Apps and How They Make Your Digital Marketing Different

Adam Frankel — 2016-11-29

What makes mobile apps a smart choice for business? Well, it’s all about the pocket end-to-end user experience that makes it easier for businesses to engage and retain their customer interest.

While your competitors might try improving the website experience, strengthen technology infrastructure and try complimenting their service with cutting edge technologies, you can do many of these with just one mobile application.

And Mobile App Marketing Goes Beyond

Some interesting facts to consider about mobile apps include:

50 percent of all ecommerce transactions happen through mobile devices
85 percent of customers prefer using a mobile application instead of a mobile website
Mobile apps will be a key enabler in driving brand recognition
More and more business investors are including hybrid mobile app in their marketing campaign. One such example is that of the RFID or the beacon integrated app.
Wearable devices have become an important part of peoples’ lives and so are the apps integrated in them.

Digital Marketing is No Longer About Being Just Responsive

In other words, your mobile app marketing should be anything but conventional. All these above facts help us to determine one thing about the future of digital market. Everything is going to be mobile and it’s time for businesses to gear up for this. You might be wondering whether or not this would be a good option going for. I would say, very soon you will find yourself eventually going down this path and here’s why.

Reasons Why Mobile Apps Are Important For Your Business

#1 - All Time Visibility

According to market statistics, Americans spend more than two hours a day on their mobile devices.

While it’s true that there are few apps out there that enjoy full-time visibility. If your app is relevant and provides a useful function to engage with your company, it will probably be used beyond the initial download.

#2 – Direct Marketing Channel

There are two things that make having a mobile app a worthwhile marketing asset. First, it gives you the chance to be with your target audience at all times

Second, providing business marketers a direct means of interaction with the customers.

With the push notification feature, marketers can now be one-step closer to ringing the door bell of a customer. Not only can they inform customers about any new arrivals, but also send them reminders about any product or service whenever it’s appropriate.

#3 – Innovative Approaches

Whether you are running a spa service or selling flowers, your existing customers will reach out to you at some point. By including a mobile app in your marketing and communication mix can make it that much easier for them.

By accessing your app, customers can find out product or service time availability without having to call.making things more convenient for them and less troublesome for you.

#4 - Customer Loyalty Value

The power of a mobile app can be a great means of building customer value, and there are many ways you can do it. For example – providing customers an opportunity to review their rewards/points via mobile app or helping customers locate a nearby retail store where they are likely to find a product they are looking for.

There are many ways to buildup a long-term customer loyalty value. And building that loyalty value will help you to find more return customers.

#5 – Respond Better

Mobile apps have made it easier for businesses to respond to their customer problems faster and more effectively.

They can keep track of rising customer demand and also access customer information.

Standing out in the crowd is one of the biggest challenges faced by marketers today. Investing in a mobile marketing tool like an app can help you overcome this problem in many ways. While this may be true there are many out there who might be confused about what features to include in their mobile app development.

Here are some tips that you would like to go through therefore –

Customize Your App Design

Some of the things that a user looks for when they download an app are – personalization, seamless navigation and hassle-free experience.

Make sure that your mobile app includes all the key customization features in order to align with the customer needs and preferences. Design your mobile app to make it engaging, interactive and to build a strong brand relationship with customers.

Simple Navigational System

A couple of vital things that you need to keep in mind are – the content and the screen size.

Make sure that the content and the design do not end up cramming up the entire mobile space. When you are designing a mobile app, make sure that you design it to ensure seamless navigation and impressive product display.

You can implement a responsive design – a solution that’s tailored to fit any screen size and resolution and helps to render an immersive experience.

Simple Registration Process

Lengthy registration processes are a big turn off when it comes to mobile apps. The rule of thumb is to make registration as simple as possible, for example – allow your customers can sign up using an email id and a mobile number.

During the time of checkout, many apps provide users with the option to save their information for future use. This is a very important feature to get people through the entire conversion funnel.

Smart Analytics

Smart analytics is an important feature that your mobile app should include, and that’s because your core objective is to generate revenue. With analytics, you can evaluate and understand your users’ behavior and their buying pattern.

There are many things that smart analytics can help you with when it comes to evaluating success. Some of these are –

The cost of conversion
The session time
The custom field access
Click-through rate
Leading customer behavior
Higher revenue streams

Conclusion

Mobile apps need to be both immersive and unique and contain features that will make shopping seamless and simpler. Make sure that you build your mobile app with features that will drive sales and give more revenue boost. Of course, an important thing to keep in mind, as with all business decisions, will the benefit of having the app out weigh the cost of building and maintaining the app. That all depends on your specific situation.

4 Tips to Convert Your Mobile Traffic into Loyal Customers

Adam Frankel — 2016-06-10

The normal reaction after one checks his analytics dashboard and finds an inflow of traffic to his site is a gummy smile. The smile becomes broader when he finds a large percentage of the traffic is mobile.

In a previous article, I discussed mobile marketing in detail. Mobile marketing, when done correctly, brings traffic. Next, you need to think how you can utilize the traffic. For that, you need to follow several practices.

I am detailing some of them below:

More Call To Action (CTA) buttons

You need more than one set of CTA buttons for mobile visitors.

Wondering why?

Here’s the reason:

The mobile screen being small restricts visibility. The desktop screen, on average, is 15.6-inches in length. Compared to that, the typical size of mobile screen is 5.5-6-inches, making it difficult to view many design elements. The small gap between the viewport and each end of a site exacerbates it.

Research indicates that more than 70% of consumers prefer to visit sites that are mobile friendly. A site that fails to accommodate its design elements by the screen size is not mobile-friendly. There’s a lot of talk about responsive design. The advocates of RWD (responsive web design) fail to understand the codes only instruct a site about the specs of a device, that’s all. They can’t change the specs.

The wise move would be having more than one set of CTA buttons and form fields. Having more than one of them increases the odds of visitors noticing them. The screen may be small but 50% of it showcasing lead-gen forms or CTA buttons makes it hard not to notice these elements.

Adaptive web design

Despite being the talk of the town, RWD has failed to overshadow adaptive web design (AWD). As a matter of fact, some brands have discarded RWD in favor of AWD. From a completely neutral and unbiased angle, AWD has the upper hand in the design industry.

The reasons are

#AWD offers control: RWD doesn’t offer you as much control as AWD does. An adaptive web site is designed to fit typically six screen widths:

320, 480, 760, 960, 1200 and 1600.

Because responsive layouts are variable, they reshape themselves depending on the device being used to access the site. AWD, on the other hand, uses static layouts. So apparently, RWD involves less work and comes easy on the designers. Right?

Wrong.

Because RWD is media query driven, the media type in the query needs to match the device type. Or else, the result of the query will be false. From a designer’s point of view, this is quite tricky.

#M-commerce leverage: Mobile has eclipsed the e-commerce segment and a new genre of e-commerce called mobile commerce (abbreviation M-commerce) has originated. Because AWD anticipates the device specs, it streamlines ordering and payment processing for mobile shoppers. The shoppers get device specific experience of shopping and enjoys it.

#Loading time: AWD fares better when it comes to improving the loading time. The commonest reason a site gets slow is the presence of media elements. RWD has been slammed by many for making a site slow-loading.

Unlike RWD, AWD doesn’t render a scalable version of a site that is littered with images, animated GIFs or videos. It rather allows the server to determine the optimal rendering of pages, depending on the device being used.

Now that you understand the benefits of AWD, use it to optimize your site for mobile viewing experience, so that the mobile traffic gives you business.

The semantic web

What we understand about the Internet today may undergo incisive changes in the future. The harbinger of change will be semantic semblance between inputs and outputs. And the handheld environment will be the catalyst to this change.

You may find it confusing as to what mobile has to do with semantic web.

Today, online communications is dominated by “strings” instead of “things.” Strings are a set of words or phrases that have syntactical semblance instead of semantic closeness between them. Semantic closeness is similarity in terms of meaning.

The conversational web, poised to outweigh today’s “string” driven web will prioritize meaning, context and intention above all else. Search engines will show results based on a searcher’s intentions.

The voice-driven search is a rudimentary form of semantic searching. It will extend to other areas of the web and the extension will run parallel to handheld devices replacing desktop devices.

Will handheld device users be receptive to a context-driven web experience? Apparently, they will be. Otherwise, voice-activated digital assistants wouldn’t have become that popular.

Your takeaway is framing the content in a manner as though it answers the questions of a curious mind. That will endow visibility as well as popularity on your content.

Mobile site or app?

It’s very tough for a brand to decide between a mobile site and a mobile app. Which one would suit it better? There’s no one-line answer to this question.

Choosing app makes sense if the brand operates in the gaming, entertainment or animation industry. But for product/service based brands, a mobile site is a much better option. Mobile websites have a couple of advantages which apps lack. The advantages include compatibility, upgradability, availability, lifecycle, etc.

Downloading an app is a time-consuming affair. Users delete apps shortly after installing them. The average lifespan of an app is 30 days. I already mentioned the difficulty of marketing around apps in one of my previous articles, so these are not new information.

However, ruling out app marketing doesn’t strike me as a good idea. Apps should be developed, but the largest chunk of promotional efforts should go towards the mobile site.

By the year 2020, more than 70% of mobile content will be video. The avalanche of multimedia-dominated data is coming and 2020 is not very far away. To catch up, make sure your mobile site has enough video and animated content on it.

Conclusion

When we think of the sales funnel, we have desktop traffic in mind. As the mobile web is growing at a tremendous pace, the mobile traffic will be our sole concern very soon. The four tips, shared here can help you stay on top of the game then.

Image Courtesy: pixabay.com

Success with Mobile Marketing by Following These Three Concepts

Adam Frankel — 2016-04-12

Penetrating into the mobile user-base is necessary for online marketing success. If you doubt this, even for a moment, then I suggest you check the latest surveys, reports and stat figures. They all point to the same thing - the mobile user-base has left desktop user-base way behind.

Traffic is the first thing that a digital marketer will analyze. Next, he/she devises a strategy to turn visitors into customers. The mobile web is monstrous in size due to the traffic it gets, and it offers opportunities to convert untargeted visitors to leads, and leads into sales.

It’s 2016

2015 has been dubbed as the year of mobile marketing. It's still to early to tell what 2016 will be known for, but digital marketers will positively make mobile marketing a priority this year. To start with, the mobile web is different from the desktop web in every sense. That demands the marketers to employ different strategies.

We feel the effective strategies are:

Using Android Adwords app

Google has released a new app. It’s called AdWords. By using the app, you can pretty much do everything, needed to run an ad campaign. Marketers, especially PPC marketers have always been restricted to desktop devices for running ad campaigns. AdWords app gives them freedom from it.

As a marketer, you can access the campaign stats, interact with an expert, so he gives you new ideas. In 2015, Google improved the app by integrating it with the TrueView YouTube campaign. Users can now adjust budgets and bids of video campaign from the AdWords platform.

Though Google has an AdWords equivalent for the mobile crowd called AdMob, Android AdWords app is very useful for any marketer, who wants to make his campaign’s presence felt in the handheld domain. If you are not using this app already, start using it now.

App marketing

Take time and devise your app marketing strategies. The crux of mobile marketing is you don’t have too many choices if you put app marketing aside, and getting success with app marketing is as difficult as you may think it is.

For those of you who don’t know, the top twenty-five to fifty apps get almost all of the mobile traffic and the remaining traffic goes to rest millions of apps. Call it unfair but that’s the reality out there and you have to deal with it. To make it even worse, business apps (unless its e-commerce) fare poorly compared to standard apps.

You can still overcome the challenges if you could ensure the app can hook users. The app should justify marketing around it. If it’s just another GTA clone, then hardly anyone will download it. Make the app a problem-solver, and not just any problem, a problem that bugs people and from which your service offers them a solution. It doesn’t guarantee success but increases its odds.

Careful with mobile redirects

Be very careful with mobile redirects, as Google earlier announced that cases of deceptive redirects will be taken very seriously. In November 2015, a Google spokesperson revealed from a Q&A platform that Google is currently developing a method to pinpoint the offenders and penalize them.

How do you ensure an app or a mobile site is not on Google’s radar for penalty? First you need to understand what irks Google. Google hates suspicious links as much on the mobile web as on the desktop web. If your site has affiliate links, remove them. They are not useful anyway because people rarely click on hyperlinks on mobile sites.

Voice and language

They both matter big time on the mobile web. Voice searching is on its way to replace traditional text searching. This is because screen tapping and autocorrect make it more difficult to search compared to typing on a keyboard.

Voice searching is way more convenient, if not more entertaining as the personal digital assistants such as Siri, Cortana, etc. talk to us. When we use the digital assistants, we don’t really feel that we are searching something. We rather feel as if we are interacting with a fellow human being.

As of now, voice searching is used mostly for direction but very soon, it may become the mainstream soon and hence, make it a priority to add the voice search function to your app or site. As for language, most users prefer the app experience in native language. Give them what they want by releasing several language-based versions of the app and they’ll value the app-experience.

Stay updated

The mobile web is relentlessly changing. It’s not rare to see the same company releasing two apps back to back within just a year. Users didn’t like some aspects of the first app but appreciated other aspects. Seeing this, the brand repackaged the app removing the faulty areas. Such prompt actions can only be taken by a brand when it stays updated.

Image Courtesy: pixabay.com