Mobile Customer Engagement: What It Is & Why It Matters

Let’s say you have a brother whose birthday is coming up, and you aren’t sure what gift to get.

You’re off work one evening and are scrolling Instagram on your phone when you come across an ad for a salt lamp that he’s been talking about getting for months. He’s already liked the post. It’s on sale.

The decision is almost too easy for you.

You click the ad, which takes you to a mobile-friendly site where you pick the item, enter your card information, and complete the transaction within a few minutes.

He loves the gift, and you love how little thought and effort it took to get it for him.

The theme of this story is convenience and timing.

If the company that sold you the lamp failed to engage with you as a mobile user adequately, either with non-mobile-friendly advertising or a site that wasn’t equipped with a mobile checkout interface, you wouldn’t have finished the purchase.

Instead, you’d have found a salt lamp from someone who knew what mobile customer engagement is and how to optimize it.

Today’s guide is all about helping you understand the importance of mobile engagement and simple tips on increasing your mobile customer engagement right now.

What is Mobile B2B Customer Engagement?

Mobile customer engagement is the companies’ effort to reach customers on mobile platforms like phones or tablets. In a B2B context, this could mean things like custom apps, push notifications, or text messages to key people inside your customer’s organization.

Mobile customer engagement can take many forms. Customer engagement aims to remove as many obstacles as possible from the purchasing decision.

Like your brother’s birthday story, opportunities must be capitalized on before losing them.

If a customer comes to you ready to spend money, you have to be prepared to take it from them no matter what form they’re handing it to you, or else they’ll find someone who will. This is the essence of mobile customer engagement.

Why Mobile Engagement Matters

Engagement is essential whether a customer is on their mobile device or not. Since 70% of users that visit your website will be on a desktop or laptop, it’s tempting to focus on them and ignore the rest.

However, failing to account for the 30% of website visitors who will be on their mobile devices is leaving too much on the table.

Just like with the content you produce and where you post it, there has to be an effort to meet customers on their level.

This means doing things like posting your content on the right platforms, at the right time, and in the case of mobile users, with the right combination of a custom app, notifications, mobile-friendly websites, or text messages.

Here are some key stats to convince you of the importance of mobile engagement:

• According to Statista, there will be almost 7.5 billion mobile users by 2025.
• 42% of mobile users will engage with content, compared to only 29% of other visitors.
• 60% of Americans prefer to shop on their phone. This includes 84% of the population 18-34.

Your Website Must Have a Mobile UX

Customers, especially younger customers who are savvier with technology, can usually get by on a non-mobile interface.

If customers feel like they’re just getting by, they aren’t likely to tell their friends how easy and convenient it was to buy your product.

This is without mentioning the non-technology savvy customers who will probably just give up and look elsewhere to solve the problem.

Even if you complete the sale, the opportunity to provide a great customer experience—instead of just a mediocre one—could be lost countless times if you don’t meet the customer on their level. This means something as small as not having a mobile interface for your website could cost you big.

How to Increase Mobile Customer Engagement

Here are three simple ways to improve your mobile customer engagement overnight.

Improve Your Mobile Experience

Forget about having a mobile UX, which should be considered a bare minimum. Instead, you should ask yourself how to create the best mobile experience possible for every user across your website or product.

Is your mobile experience targeted to mobile users? Or does it exist just for the sake of it? Make your mobile users feel special; they’ll buy your product and then come back with their friends for more.

Consider the following factors of your mobile user experience:

• Website and App Response Time: Nothing is worse than a slow, unresponsive, buggy, or featureless website or app that seems to take up space. An experience like this could turn a customer away for good.
• Targeted Apps: Mobile apps that facilitate specific tasks like payments or reordering are popular because customers see them as convenient and trustworthy.
• Mobile-Friendly Content: Your content should be organized in a way that is friendly to mobile users. Pop-out menus, portrait-style layouts, and reminders to share content through mobile apps should be the mainstays of your content web pages.

Mobile-Specific Promotions

You should woo mobile customers just like you would with any other, and in some cases, that could mean offering mobile-only promotions or deals to new users.

This rewards the existing mobile user base and incentivizes your non-mobile users to engage there.

Users engaging with your company on multiple platforms, like a mobile app and your website, will order more and return more frequently.

Personalize Your Mobile Experience

Tracking data through mobile apps and webpages is a great way to get to know your customers better and personalize their experience while on your site.

Knowing what your customers want is the first step to selling it to them.

In the example of the salt lamp, you could imagine a similar scenario, except that the salt lamp recommendation was based on your history on the vendor’s website.

These kinds of personalization will help you surprise the customer in good ways.

Hushly Can Help

If you’re looking to build a great, long-lasting, and versatile mobile engagement strategy and are still unsure where to start, it could be time to let Hushly take over for you.

Our mobile content platform is proven. For example, our personalized self-nurturing landing pages (SNLPs) outperform standard landing pages by 20% across mobile platforms in terms of conversions and by 31% in terms of customer engagement rate (i.e., likes, shares, comments, etc.).

B2B Customers Love Great Mobile Experiences, Too

B2B customers are humans, just like your B2C customers. They enjoy the simple convenience of opening their phone, completing their business within a few clicks, and moving on with their day feeling like they accomplished their goal.

Whether a customer is finding your website for the first time on their phone or has been around for a while and is back to browse, they will appreciate an excellent and targeted mobile experience.

The more ways you can find to improve this experience, the more you’ll generate customer loyalty, positive word-of-mouth, and increased conversions.

Click here to see how Hushly can make managing your mobile B2B customer engagement strategy easy.