Why customer loyalty matters

Face it, most new app users won’t stick around for a long time. It’s the Achilles’ heel of creating a mobile app.

The upside is that there is a small portion of users who do engage with your app for a long period of time and may actually be responsible for most of your app’s success. But how do you make sure this crucial segment of users doesn’t dwindle in the future? Turn users into loyal customers.

Customer loyalty is something your brand can earn through thoughtful, personalized marketing. It’s an ongoing connection a customer has with your brand. Customer loyalty is not just a point in time. Rather, it’s consistent behavior that customers display over a period of time that’s characterized by goals like frequent app sessions, repeated purchases, and brand advocacy.

To a loyal customer, your app is essential. Buying from you and using your app is an active choice that customers make despite having an endless amount of options for apps and many other daily distractions. However, winning your customer’s loyalty is hard work and shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Mobile channels have further fragmented the already fragmented customer experience, making customer engagement more difficult. What this all means is that moving users down the path to loyalty has become more important than ever and the process for doing so is not straightforward.

What it takes to win your customer’s loyalty

A customer’s willingness to engage with your brand is dependant upon the experience they get in return for investing their time, focus, and money. Simply having a good app is not enough. In order to retain customers and create loyal ones, you have to excel at creating and constantly re-optimizing the experience around every touchpoint a customer has with your brand (e.g. mobile, web, email, social, and in-person).

The best way to win your customer’s loyalty is to focus on building valuable long-term relationships. Mobile marketing makes this more possible than ever before. With a marketing approach that’s built around mobile, you can create experiences that are seamless across all your marketing channels, timely, and consistently deliver value to convince users to stick around.

We’ve put together a bundle of helpful resources that focuses on key areas for turning mobile app users into loyal customers. Here’s how each resource fits into the customer’s path to loyalty:

• Put Users on the Path to Loyalty: Understand the journey users take from install to loyal customer.
• Build a Habit With Your Customers: Onboarding essentials to help you get a head start on increasing engagement, improving retention, and building customer loyalty.
• An Insider’s Guide to Multivariate Testing: This testing method will help you learn what messaging resonates best with your users to increase engagement in your app.
• Leverage Customer Insights to Improve Engagement [Infographic]: Learn your users’ unique behaviors and interactions with your app to improve engagement.
• Reach Customers Anywhere and Everywhere With Push Notifications: Use push notifications to communicate important messages with active users and re-engage lapsing users to put them back on a path to loyalty.
• Create a Holistic Experience With In-App Messaging: Provide active users with relevant updates that will keep them active and boost your chances of creating loyal customers.

Use these resources as the foundation for your mobile marketing efforts. And remember, loyalty means everything. Having loyal customers can propel your brand to further success down the road.