The Key to Customer Loyalty with Branded Apps

Developing mobile apps has become a vital business strategy. The brands are going the extra mile to improve the brand loyalty with the unmatched user experience. Engineering the compelling mobile experiences won’t complete the equation of building the customer loyalty. Consequently, the lower customer retention rates hurt the businesses’ bottom line and don’t let them gain an edge in the market.

There is a slew of elements that need to be catered to win the battleground of loyalty. The forward-thinking brands have established a strong connection with the customers using a well-thought strategy and considering the key factors to lift up the customers on the loyalty stack.

It pops up a question- How can the branded apps increase the user’s session and translate it into a great opportunity for brands to nurture the customer relationship and heighten the customer engagement? The branded apps have solved the mystery by building trust, credibility, and authority.

Here, we have enlisted all those factors which foster brand evangelists and bring the customer loyalty:

Ensure the app performs flawlessly

The customers have very low tolerance for the apps that crashes, freezes, or show runtime errors. The technical glitches in the app become the topmost reason to abandon the apps. According to a survey more than half of the customers when experiences the malfunctioning in the app after the first try, they won’t return to the app and disengage with the app. These pitfalls make the branded app a bad app, no matter how feature-rich or graphic-rich the app is. Also, when the customers are disengaging from the app means they are disengaging from the brand that impacts the ROI.

To streamline user experience and keep the customers engaged, it’s essential to fully test the app from every perspective before launching it in the market as the faulty app is worse than having no app at all. Make certain the text must appear with no trimming, high-resolution images should be used, content should not take more time to load and absolutely no bugs should be there.

Intuitive customer experience across the board engages the customers and gives them a reason to come back, which in turn, improves the loyalty.

Communicate in the real-time

It’s not essential to stay with the customers when they are navigating the app. The branded apps stay connected with the customers every time to encourage them to keep actively using the app. It’s the reason the branded app gets reminded of the brand to the customers outside the app through push notifications. As opposed to emails, the push notifications are super effective in capturing the customers’ attention and making them come back again and again.

The push notification is the powerful tool that updates customers about the latest launch, new product, special deals and loyalty programs. When the messages are tailored according to customer behavior and interests, it entices the customers and upsurges the chances of retention.

An important note: Employing push notification is a good strategy to maximize the customer engagement outside the app, but don’t be too intrusive as it deteriorates the brand’s image. Ensure the right frequency of the notifications is maintained by sending the right message to the right customers at the right time. Thereby, it becomes difficult for the customers to ignore the notifications sent and strengthen the trust in the brand.

Offer personalized content

The mobile apps generate voluminous data and gaining valuable insights out of the data helps in identifying and satisfying every customer’s needs. Meeting the customer’s needs based on the personal preferences and behavior in the real-time consolidates the relationship with the brand and makes the customers feel valued.

The branded apps have highly leveraged the advanced technologies to turn the mobile moments into magical touchpoints where the customers are getting suggestions for everything they like to have at every step of the way. This marketing strategy won’t even feel like marketing to the customers and they remain locked in the branded app ecosystem.

The innovative strategy lets the customers realize that they are unique to the brand, encourage the brand patronization and increase the brand interaction. Treating every customer in a personalized way with customized content through in-app activity tracking, help the brands in not just augmenting the loyalty, while also providing information to refine the marketing efforts and improve the outcomes.

Provide unparalleled support

Getting prompt support 24/7 has become a common expectation of the customers. If the app fails, it takes less than an hour for the customers to move to its competitors. Understanding the round, the clock customer support norm, the branded apps are providing 24/7 services deploying AI chatbots that immediately serve the customers what they have a need of.

The intelligent chatbots facilitating the customers from product search to purchase to the post-purchase services instantly. In addition to capturing new customers and keeping a hold on the existing customers, the in-app feedback form also aids the brands in improving the services offered through mobile channels to the customers.

With brilliant customer support, the brands are getting three things- winning the customers for the long run, gaining feedback for the app and identifying the services to be improved all just at the cost of enhancing customer support strategy.

Monitor and measure the performance continuously

After making the hefty investment in the winning marketing strategies, it’s important to test, track and monitor whether the strategy is lending a hand in winning the customers for the lifetime or not. The ongoing performance quantification helps in optimizing the marketing strategies to enhance the loyalty.

The branded apps keep tabs on the active users, the average order they place monthly, repeat purchase rate, and loyalty points redemption rate to find out the customer’s lifetime value and assess the marketing campaign success. Analyzing the indicators, the branded apps make the required tweaks to get into the rhythm of the customer’s desires which improve the customer loyalty.

The bottom line

The branded mobile apps stand high on the customer loyalty ladder just because they give reason to the customers to return to the app with flawless performance, personalized customer journey, real-time customer support, 24/7 communication and regular performance measurement. Catering these factors support the brands to transcend one-off usage and win customer loyalty.

Besides, the branded apps that work in conjunction with the brick-and-mortar stores provides universal perks to the customers and rewarding benefits to the brands. The Starbucks app is one such app that has increased the customer retention by allowing the customers to collect and store the coupons, deals and loyalty points in the mobile app that can be used by them anytime at any Starbuck outlet for food orders.

In the essence, branded apps changing the direction of the funnel have embraced the innovative technologies in the app development strategy that’s pushing the customers to the app and raising the stickiness to the new heights. It’s all in your hands when you ignore what the customers care about, you will be ignored by them, and when you consider them as most important and the brand will be considered as equally important to them.

Spend on bringing the customer loyalty to earn the loyalty!

Adarsh Nair

The world is now very much compact, we call it Global Village as a result of digitization and this impresses him! He likes to explore the nooks and corners of the incessantly modernizing world and marvel technologies. He leads the Digital Marketing Team at Prismetric. His passion for digital trends taught him the knack of reaching the huge digital mass to find business opportunities instantly. He writes articles about digital, technical and marketing tactics for business enhancements.