Halloween Special: Are Your Customers GHOSTING You?

Jennifer Shambroom

October 31, 2018

This Halloween, You Appi CMO Brings Five Techniques to Resurrect Your Customers

We’ve all been there: a customer or prospect arises, someone has downloaded your app, and then within days, weeks and sometimes months, all communication and engagement have disappeared. In the dating world, we call this “ghosting,” and unfortunately, it’s also a common practice in the business world.

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As marketers, it is important to put a strategy in place that prevents your customers and prospects from “ghosting” you by giving them a compelling reason to stay. When putting together a marketing plan, a marketer must put the effort into building multiple creative for different channels. Take the time to deliver personalized, relevant experiences that make them feel valued and understood.

If you find yourself being ghosted there are a few tips on how to increase interaction, customer engagement and return on ROI. Marketers must be innovative, creative, disruptive, and sometimes even aggressive — requiring greater time and effort into building multiple creative for different channels. Gaining a new audience is important, but just as critical to accelerating growth is retaining and engaging existing users.

For instance, re-engaging users within the first 30 days after installation can double in-app conversion rates. By addressing five key areas, today’s mobile marketers can keep customers happy and engaged.

Here’s how incorporating tactics from these areas can increase engagement and perhaps boost the bottom line: user acquisition, brand video, rewarded video, re-engagement, and social media.

Haunting Users

An effective user acquisition strategy can deliver great results and convert customers instantly. Determining how to acquire new customers can be difficult, however. A channel that is optimal for one company may be disastrous for another. By testing out a few different channels you’ll be able to compare their individual success in relative terms against each other.

User acquisition has to be planned well to make sure the campaign has a positive ROI and its goals are obtained. Usually, the strategy consists of a budget (daily and monthly), the CPI, some measuring metrics to evaluate the success of the campaign (KPIs), and targeting which segments of the user base you want to reach.

Eventually, what matters most is how you make the user drop his distractions and allocate his eyes to your advertisement. Simply setting goals here will enable you to actually understand whether something is working or not.

A Scary Good Brand Video

Video is the future of storytelling, and a good brand video can deliver huge results if done properly. Before brands start spending their budgets on video assets, however, they need to understand how their audience uses video. More importantly, they need to figure out how to implement video in a way that offers value to customers and leads alike.

Every customer journey begins with awareness, and your brand video is your first step. Here are a few interesting data points regarding video and why it’s important:

82% of Twitter users watch video content on Twitter.
YouTube has over one billion users, almost one-third of total internet users.
45% of people watch more than an hour of Facebook or YouTube videos a week.
More than 500 million hours of videos are watched on YouTube each day.
More video content is uploaded in 30 days than the major U.S. television networks have created in 30 years.
87% of online marketers use video content.

The way consumers interact with brands is changing, and video is leading the way in building relationships and engagement.

The Trick to Re-Engagement

Your app has been installed, but then the user goes dormant, what now?

Retaining and engaging existing users is the key to accelerating growth. According to some estimates, it costs 6 to 7 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one, making it all the more worthwhile to make retention a priority. The good news, there are many opportunities to re-engage. With 2018 winding down, now is the perfect time to consider targeting previous users with re-engagement strategies.

One technique that works is the use of dynamic deep links. This is a capability that amplifies the effectiveness of push notifications. These links can be personalized depending on the user. After clicking through, each user is taken to a unique place in the app, depending on their past behavior. We have found this to be very successful.

The Treat Lurking Behind Video Ads

Mobile video is one of the fastest-growing segments in digital advertising, and by 2019 it’s estimated to account for 47% of total digital video ad spend, as reported by eMarketer.

One form of the mobile video that delivers great results is rewarded video. Recently ranked as the most acceptable ad formats by mobile users, gaming companies have been using this technique for a while and have seen a tremendous response. These videos offer users the opportunity to seamlessly play through a game and be rewarded for engaging with the video, without exiting the original experience, creating a positive brand association and improving the user experience.

Because of rewarded video, mobile ads are no longer seen as forced intrusions. Non-gaming brands should highly consider joining the mobile game arena as a way to expand your brand and tap into a thriving market.

Don’t Let Social Media Spook You

Social media and mobile marketing go hand-in-hand and, with one billion users around the world accessing Facebook in a single day, it’s safe to say you need a social media strategy.

According to the Pew Research Center’s 2017 Social Media Fact Sheet, social media usage among American adults has grown by 69% since 2005.

Leveraging social media marketing can increase your customer base significantly, and with the right strategy and cadence, have an impact on your KPIs and bottom line. Setting goals, planning and executing campaigns, keeping your messaging on brand, and using metrics (data) to measure the impact of your efforts are all key components of a winning social media marketing strategy.

A successful social media marketing strategy can do much more than increase your website traffic and sales. It will allow you to better understand and learn from your target audience, and when done well, social marketing can lead to increased traffic, better conversions, and more customers.

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Jennifer Shambroom

Highly accomplished senior marketing executive with a 18 year track record of success achieving growth objectives within start-up, turnaround and rapid growth environments. A veteran of the mobile ecosystem boasting 13 years of mobile app experience. Marketing leadership has also contributed to 10 funding events, the sale of five software companies, and the acquisition of several more. Named Mobile Women to Watch in 2017 by Mobile Marketer.