From 50 K feet to 50 feet | Understanding the art of customer engagement.

Massive proliferation of smart devices changing how consumers live and consume media rapidly. Consumers are connected, they always go ahead of businesses. Identifying the right steps in the early stages of adaptation can help you get an edge, when thought of over a big scale.

This is the exact time when consumer facing business seems to be the absolute best deal. I hope young entrepreneurs are listening this, as the future is here.

Today, we are going to discuss what major changes that are observed in last few years and how people are focusing on customer engagement. My talk would be revolving around the mobility as already discussed previously we can not ignore mobility at any cost.  

As far as I know, major Indian businesses don’t have a mobile website that means people are not learning about you. Even those who have, don’t give the information which needs to be communicated.

Example: I asked few of my friends working in automobile industry and got to know that intention of designing automobile website is to generate leads.

I don’t think a customer will come to your website for generating leads. Moreover, are you giving the information which is exactly needed ?

“Researching online,  purchase offline” concept has gone off, it’s buying online as well. When we are in a store, we are checking competitive price of the products and deciding whether to buy or not.

E-commerce in INDIA is 4.5 billion dollar and it is just around 6 years old.
The live example is Flipkart.

What brands and market can get out of data, let’s see something

This weekend you would be 50 yards from your favorite pizza shop. Would you like a 50% discount coupon? I am just asking :)

Just for the curiosity, let’s check how we can make this happen i.e. letting the customer know about

your product at the right place and at the right time,If we have access to what data a consumer is consuming along with the location.

However, tracking path to purchases is difficult when an individual make decision on different devices and the consumer behavior as well.

Lets see an example

A customer goes from different locations in a daily routine day home to work, work to market and finally market to home or consider a day when you are changing from your standard routine path having 3-4 stops in between.

Brands are trying to reach customer by running most refined targeted ads considering right time, right place and at the right device.

Different options that are opted by market research companies are

1. Push notifications and In-app messages.
2. SMS
3. Display ads within the site you are browsing.

It’s really important to understand how soon a mobile customer actually converts with different strategy.How customer respond to an ad when they are in a shopping environment.

I have seen mobile get a bad flag for not being effective. But it won't take time to convince that final result that you see, may be generated from other platforms but the primary source is mobile.

In a research that we did, we found that when a customer is within 10 miles from the store and when we offered him a 50% discount coupon, 41 % conversion happened the same day as compared to 30 % discount coupon offered to customer who is within 10-20 miles from the store.Moreover conversion rates tend to increase on weekends.

This is one of the strategy, It may vary from region, business etc.

If you guys have heard the word 'Attribution' then you know what all I am taking about.

Few factors to consider that plays a quantifiable role are

1. Distance : Distance plays a very important role. The closer you are, possibility of conversion increases. Example is mobile geo fencing.

2. Rank : The size of the screen. No of offers you are going to see on your smartphone is less than the number of offers you see on a device, so the rank of the customized targeted ad serve more critical aspect.

3. Price & Offer : How far you are to send a right optimum value target ad or coupon so that you can redeem it going to the store and also which slot of your mobile screen it should be poped up.

4. Time : Identifying the time at which your ad is most probable to be seen.

The point at which customer is going to download your app it the best proxy to decide that customer is turning loyal to you and this is the time when you can play the game.

Monetizing the free apps. Pricing in app world is known as freemium pricing i.e. you initially provide your app as free and then start charging for some premium services.

How to earn, few ways are

1. Buy the products within the app.
2. In app advertising.

Let’s see, what I have seen people doing wrong while designing an app communication module

We uses In App messages and push messages for communication with the app

push notification

1. Push messages are those messages which are delivered when the app is not open or may be running in background.


2. In App messages are those messages which are rendered when we are browsing the app for more interactivity.

It’s really important to understanding what messages we are sending and the mistake we do always. Few of them are, we just define the text that renders to all consumer of that app. My suggestion would be

1. Don't use one size fit all strategy. As we have consumer information which is saved on registration so ‘Categorize people based on characteristics like age, region, profile.

2. Use actionable language(don’t use long and confusing text, remember KISS principle).

3. Make CTA(call to action) highly visual and clear.

4. Ask the customer when he want to receive notification like preferable time, day etc.

Guys, it’s a tough market and ever changing as well. Looser don’t get a chance to respond, taking small but competitive steps serves very critical role.  Theory of survival of fittest works everywhere and this is the time when we should start thinking on the very small small things that helps in customer engagement by providing better services.

Do your best !