Understanding the Mobile Customer Journey Helps Increase App Engagement

Mobile traffic accounts for more than 50% of all website traffic. And that number is only going to increase in the next few years. Providing a consistent and engaging mobile experience is a crucial part of your company’s success.

Because the mobile customer journey is often an untapped opportunity to connect with your audience, modern consumers engage with brands through a number of different channels. Still, they spend most of their time browsing the internet on their phone or tablet.

When you understand this journey and how it integrates with the broader experience you provide, that helps your team provide value at every key touchpoint, from discovery to purchase. So much of your first impression depends on the mobile experience of your product, so you have to get it right.

Mapping the Mobile Customer Journey

The mobile customer journey mirrors the customer journey for other channels. It maps out the various steps a potential customer takes, from becoming aware of your app to making a purchase, and engaging with your product as a user. Understanding how different people move through this process helps you guide them to take actions that increase engagement with your app.

The mobile customer journey follows six stages:

1. Awareness: Consumers discover your brand. For mobile users, this probably happens via Google or social media ads that drive interested people to a mobile landing page.
2. Engagement: Interested consumers actively seek more information about your app. This information gathering can happen via your website content or through third-party review sites and relevant industry forums.
3. Consideration: Potential customers reach out to learn more about how your app solves a problem for them. This outreach will often occur via direct contact with your support team via live chat or email for mobile users.
4. Purchase: Customers download your app via the marketplace for their particular mobile device.
5. Experience: Users actively engage with the app and use it to solve their problems. To provide value via this experience, you’ll need to ensure a seamless onboarding process.
6. Loyalty: Brand advocates actively recommend your app to their friends and colleagues.

Understanding how people move through this process helps you provide the right kind of education and support through each critical touchpoint along the mobile customer journey. When it’s easy for people to learn about your product, engage with your team, download and use the app, boosting engagement is simple.

Using Push Notifications to Enhance the Mobile Experience

One of the best ways to boost engagement with your app is to provide contextual information as people move through their mobile customer journey. A well-timed push notification can help users know which action to take next or where to go for more information.

There are various types of push notifications that you can use to engage with users and provide this kind of contextual support as they become familiar with your app. Understanding which types of notifications are most valuable at any given time is much easier when you have a clear sense of the mobile customer journey.

Let’s say you’re working with new users in onboarding. By sending an incomplete action notification, you’re able to nudge these new people toward the next logical action with your app. If they’ve left the profile settings page without completing account setup, you can direct them back to the information that still needs filling out. Or if they’ve just completed that process, you can direct these new users to another area of their account to take their first step in using the product.

Triggering these notifications at the right time ensures that new users get the most value possible throughout the process of learning how your app works. As you learn more about how these notifications add value to the mobile customer journey, it’s easier to create experiments to refine the process.

A/B testing your push notifications helps improve critical aspects of the mobile experience and build engaged relationships with users by removing friction and is one of your first impressions with new users. Your ability to provide a frictionless and pain-free mobile experience will set your app apart from the competition.

Integrating the Mobile Customer Journey with Other Channels

The mobile customer journey is an integral part of the cross-channel experience with your company. When you gain insight into the different ways mobile app experiences build on the other customer journeys through your web and OTT campaigns, building a cohesive brand experience much more manageable.

And that cohesive experience is what fosters engaged relationships with users. Modern consumers have an abundance of choices when seeking solutions to their problems, so the more you can do to engage them across mobile, web, and OTT, the more successful your business will be.

One of the best ways to integrate these journeys with one another is by gathering secure data insights about your customers. Understanding how they engage with your brand on mobile and how that experience translates across other channels is the key to building a seamless experience with your brand. The more you know about how people interact with your app, the easier it is to provide them with content and notifications that provide value.

That helps you build better experiences throughout the customer journey. These experiences are meaningful because a poor website or mobile experience will negatively impact your company’s bottom line.

Mobile users need to feel like they can transition smoothly between your content—they seek out secure cross-channel experiences. Moving smoothly between these experiences helps them engage with your brand on a deeper level, and it enables you to provide consistent messaging throughout the journey.

Just keep in mind that these experiences flow both ways. Let’s say you have customers who found your product via a more traditional journey online. They engage with your content and use your product but don’t use your mobile app as a part of their daily workflows. Understanding the various points of crossover between these web and mobile experiences helps you pique their interest in your mobile products.

The Mobile Journey Provides Insight into Customer Behavior

When you map out the mobile customer journey, it helps you understand your target audience better. Not only will you be able to see how they engage with your product on a deeper level, but you’ll also be able to see what points along the customer journey are most likely to lead to conversion. That insight helps you narrow down targeting for experiments and improve the overall mobile experience, translating into a more engaged audience for your brand.