Teradata Mobile director of customer success Einat Dror shares the finding of the company's recent study into the top shopping apps in the UK, and what we can learn from them.
Did you know that 96 per cent of the UK’s top retailers have mobile apps? Did you also know that only 21 per cent of these apps sent push messages during a four-week period? Seems shocking, right?
Our study monitored apps offered by the UK’s top 50 online retailers. Push notifications, individualization and special offers were observed over a four-week period. According to Criteo's Q1 2015 State of Mobile Commerce Report, mobile shopping is becoming increasingly popular among consumers with 46 per cent of all ecommerce transactions now coming from mobile. Retailers in the UK have clearly picked up on this trend and are recognising the important role of mobile apps – but the million dollar question is, are retailers getting everything they can from apps?
Let’s take a look at five lessons on how to increase your customer engagement that we learned from the study.
1. Communicate with your customers
Communication is the key to keep your customers engaged. How do you do that? When it comes to mobile, Push messages is the key.
During the course of the study, only 21 per cent of the apps sent out push messages. It is puzzling to me why you wouldn’t use push notifications. You might be afraid that by sending push messages you will make your users uninstall your app, and indeed sending push apps is an art and needs to be executed correctly. How?
Send relevant information, vary your messages, send messages when your customer is most alert, and personalize your messages. The point here is to engage your customers, not annoy them. Keep in mind that customers are viewing these messages on the go. If you don’t peak their interest immediately, you lose out.
[caption id="attachment_93771" align="aligncenter" width="976"] An example of how not to send push messages – vary the content[/caption]
2. Give them control
Give the user control of their push notifications by using a push preference center. To make sure your customers use the push preference center, make sure that it opens upon the initial activation even before the operating system message pops up. Allow your customers to be in control of their push notifications, enables them to control what and how often they want to receive notifications. This will increase your push opt-in rates since users are more likely to opt into push messages once they know they will receive only the content they’ve signed up for.
In the research, we observed that 56 per cent of the apps indeed use a push preference center. While this is encouraging, when adding this to the data we mentioned before, that only 21 per cent of them actually sent any push during the course of the study, this is confusing. As a user, if I sign up to specific push messages, I expect to receive those messages, and not getting them is a missed opportunity for the company to engage me.
Teradata content marketing manager Yael Kochman says that offering the user to choose which messages he or she wants to receive, while ultimately not sending them these messages, can be a very disappointing experience for the customer. See the full interview with her: