Delight Your Customer With A Great APP Experience

Ever since the smartphones entered the Indian market the engagement with customers has been on the rise. Be it just getting information or transacting or placing an order the smart phones has today become a great device for consumers to look for enhanced shopping experience. I keep reading all over the places that there are many brands that has moved from the traditional online to the mobile platform. It is very interesting to know why this sudden change has happened and how is it advantage from the customer point of view and the brand point of view.

To my understanding I notice this more in the online grocery and the food business where the APP is used to market and sell your products or services. Even the Hail taxis are brilliantly deploying this to book a cab. So unless you offer great shopping experience and the brand has some key differentiators to offer it will not push customers coming back and keep using the APP. You need to provide that additional value to the customer in whatever form for him to transact through the APP and not uninstall the application. Engagement strategy is the key and one needs to find innovative and interesting way to be engaged with the audience. So let’s look at this from the brand and consumer point of view.

Brand Point of View Advantage:

- The brand is able to reach a large audience on a national basis as the ownership of smartphones has gone up significantly. And the smartphones are becoming more and more affordable.
- There is one to one communication which is almost personalized.
- Since the mobile phone is always in one’s hand one can engage with the consumer 24x7.
- Can present the products through the app interestingly. Updates and introduction of new products can be done with lot of ease.
- The brand can closely monitor the sales and also cull out interesting behavioral habits amongst the customers across the country.
- Can use some of the learnings to change the product mixes and bring in freshness and innovation at various intervals.
Challenges for the Brand:
- To push the customers to download the app. Need a great value proposition to ensure that the customers do not uninstall the app.
- Need to have interesting offerings continuously supported with quality content for them to engage with the audience 24X7.
- Propagating the brand will be a challenge as one needs to spend a lot on media to create awareness about the application and give compelling reason to download the app.
- Ensure that the UI experience delivers great satisfaction and allows ease of navigation.
- And it is important that the size of the app is not too huge for customer to shy from downloading it.
   
Customer Expectations:

- What’s in it for me? Need to offer great value proposition to download the application.
- Would like to have the app in a compact size as he or she must have umpteen number of apps on their phone.
- Will expect great content, good offers and deals to engage.
- App should excite them in terms of navigation and UI experience as the audience we are talking are very conscious about using their data.
- Ease of M-commerce transaction should be very friendly and secured.

Mobile is going to be the medium as we surge the world moves on. There lies a huge opportunity for retailers and brands to bridge the gap between the bricks and mortar shops as the generation next will only transact over mobile. And increasingly the home screen of all smartphone users which is idle will be leveraged by many brands with personalized content and enhanced engagement.

Ganapathy Viswanathan, Senior Vice-President, Eureka Mobile Advertising, Mumbai

Exclusives
@adgully

News in the domain of Advertising, Marketing, Media and Business of Entertainment

More in Exclusives