Three Core Pillars of Mobile App Experience Driving Loyalty
Steve Tan, VP & General Manager, EMEA/APAC at Airship discusses strategies to drive long-term customer loyalty, and maximise the business impact of mobile apps.
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Customers prioritise apps that simplify their lives and save time, ranking these benefits higher than saving money or earning rewards. Streamlining tasks, improving user experience and guiding customers to complete high-value actions are critical for sustained engagement.
Today, it’s more important than ever before that brands deliver experiences that align with their customer’s unique expectations. However, this can be challenging. Marketers rely heavily on developers for mobile enhancements, which can hinder business agility in delivering exceptional customer experiences, says Steve Tan, VP & General Manager, EMEA/APAC at Airship.
Steve is an experienced Customer Success executive with a proven track record in the SaaS, mobile, and martech industries. He excels in business development, specialising in enterprise software, mobile communications, go-to-market strategies, strategic partnerships, and mobile applications. Steve is known for his ability to drive business growth and deliver impactful customer experiences.
At Airship, Steve plays a key role in helping brands perfect their mobile experiences. With Airship powering trillions of mobile app interactions for thousands of global brands, Steve is committed to elevating customer experiences and shaping winning brand strategies.
With the launch of the new office in Singapore, Airship is excited to extend the value it can deliver to customers throughout the region both directly as well as through partnerships.
Talking to Martechvibe, Steve discusses the challenges that brands face with unified customer experiences, app stickiness, the importance of retention and more.
Excerpts from the interview:
What makes an app experience sticky?
Mobile apps have never been more important in the customer journey than they are today, so creating a “sticky” app experience should be a top priority. Through our work with leaders at the forefront of mobile experience innovation, we’ve identified three core pillars of customer app experience that drive sustained use and long-term loyalty:
- Value: Customers want brands to recognise their needs and quickly deliver value, such as fast service, special access, personalised interactions, unique products and affordability. Brands should prioritise personalised and tailored experiences to meet these expectations, and doing so requires data willingly and continually provided by customers.
- Convenience: Customers want a fast and easy route to accomplish their goals. Simplifying their lives and saving them time are the top reasons they continue to use brands’ apps, far above saving money and earning rewards. Brands should orchestrate moments that matter in guiding customers to complete high-value actions throughout the customer lifecycle.
- Consistency: In our cross-channel world, customers want seamless experiences wherever they choose to interact with brands. Winning brands will focus on optimising the end-to-end customer experience, personalising both messages and resulting app experiences to better connect with customers consistently – from acquiring and onboarding new users to understanding their evolving needs over time and how to best reward them.
How should brands measure the impact of user experience on overall app success?
Apps are a critical brand-owned destination. While app downloads are important, they only matter if people convert and do so repeatedly, driving positive ROI on increasingly costly paid acquisition efforts. Measuring activation, engagement and retention reveals whether the app experience resonates with customers and which lifecycle stages require optimisation to gain more value from ad spend and greater efficiencies from ongoing marketing efforts.
The holiday retail season is a good example of why retention is imperative. Airship research found that key holiday shopping days generate a flood of new app installs for retailers, but activation,engagement and retention rates of peak holiday installers is actually lower than customers acquired ahead of the holidays. That’s critically important for retailers to understand as acquisition is more expensive and the value creation opportunity is significantly larger than any other time of the year.
Brands need to optimise first and second impressions of new app customers as the majority decide in one or two uses whether they’ll keep an app. Retailers should also look beyond first transactions to sustain engagement and build loyalty – where real value accumulates – maximising the business impact of apps. Those that quickly capture customer attention and gain insight to better serve their needs can more quickly advance customers through the lifecycle to maximise returns.
How do you tailor your solutions to meet the unique needs of different industries?
Mobile experience leaders need flexible, reliable, hyper-personalised solutions to meet the unique needs of their customers. While media companies want to quickly deploy push notifications to break big news first (and reap the rewards), airlines seek seamless day-of-travel experiences with real-time updates across marketing channels and mobile wallet boarding passes. As more customers experience marketing fatigue and ignore traditional marketing, brands must engage customers and gather data in their moments of attention — directly within their experiences. That means removing dependencies to empower both technical and non-technical teams to more rapidly create, deploy, test and optimise every audience segment, journey, feature, experience and message. A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t cut it.
Airship works on the front lines of mobile experience innovation with brands spanning retail, finance, travel, media, telecom, and more. Our Customer Advisory Board features representatives from across these industries to help us zero in on what matters most for each of them. With a focus on understanding and optimising the full mobile app lifecycle, our Client Services team collaborates with customers daily and listens to their unique needs, so that we can prioritise building solutions into our product and service offerings. Airship’s robust partner ecosystem and open approach to collecting, using and enriching data across customers’ martech stacks, future-proofs technology investments and fuels customer experience innovation everywhere.
What are some common challenges that brands face with their experience?
There are several key mobile experience challenges brands face today:
- Cross-Team Collaboration: Mobile app teams often have to collaborate inside a pressure cooker, with growing demands for responsiveness. Marketers and developers have different languages, world views, expectations, priorities and goals, and all of it impacts a business’s agility in delivering exceptional customer experience. Case in point: virtually all marketers are dependent on developers to improve user experiences despite three-quarters of them thinking about in-app enhancements weekly.
- Silos: Smartphones have fueled a customer experience revolution, raising expectations to get exactly what they want or need immediately, wherever they are — and with minimal effort. Now that every channel is a mobile channel, delivering the right content at the right time is more critical than ever. Siloed teams, data and channels lead to broken customer experiences and marketing fatigue due to overcommunication and irrelevancy. Unifying how customers experience your brand everywhere should be a top priority.
- Personalisation: Greater privacy controls and data regulations mean customer understanding is limited and personalisation is hindered without proactive first- and zero-party data strategies to gain necessary insights. In a global survey of 11,000 global consumers, willingness to share all 15 types of information with brands for personalised interactions and special incentives grew year over year. People want brands to take a much more customer-centric approach, and are willing to share information for the right value exchange.
What future tech trends do you see shaping the mobile app experience?
Data deprecation has forced marketers to retool how they understand their target audience. Additionally, trusted platforms — from search engines to social networks — are tightening their grip on audiences and referral traffic has plummeted. As customer expectations for immediate, unified brand experiences continue to grow, brands must double down on owned channels. Brands should extend focus on their customers and prioritise owned avenues to grow into the future.
I expect AI will also play a bigger role across the entire mobile ecosystem, from content development to analytics and recommendations, and everything in between. Mobile leaders will lean more heavily into AI to create integrated and personalised experiences as the mobile customer journey becomes more complex. An experimentation mindset, buoyed by endless content variations, will help AI adopters understand what’s working (or not) and continuously optimise applications for better results.
