The Mobile Experience: A Retention Generator

Fundamental for trading and service companies, retention has regained its former glory in recent years. Indeed, brands have understood that it’s much more difficult and expensive to recruit new customers than to retain customers with whom they have already proven themselves. To be convincing, the loyalty program must therefore become a real experience for each consumer. Find out how mobile can help you create a complete and powerful experience.

Every consumer in the world has one thing in common: the constant use of their phone. Did you know that 70% of people suffer from nomophobia, the fear of being away from their phone?

Far from offering the same features as its ancestor, the smart mobile phone makes it possible to accomplish almost any task. In a single day, we can talk to our loved ones, work, manage our finances, and make purchases, all on the same screen—with an increasingly low number of clicks.

Faced with this observation, offering a retention-oriented mobile experience is essential: by bringing your entire retention ecosystem together, it enhances any marketing strategy to create a solution superior to anything that can be created on different channels. In a mobile application, digital marketing and the content, influence, and promotional programs strategy come together to be propelled by features only available on a mobile app.

Indeed, just think of Starbucks, which has become the 2nd most used payment application in the United States thanks to a powerful app that has become essential for its consumers.

Achieving such a result isn’t limited to the major players in this world: any product or service brand can claim to develop an equally solid mobile experience as long as it develops a clear product vision with a loyalty program as a mobile experience.

Stéphanie Mercier, a digital strategist specializing in customer experience, explains that it’s crucial to build “a retention-oriented mobile experience that creates a deep engagement aligned with the brand personality, the program, and the customer’s reality.”

To achieve this, your mobile application must be essential, powerful, and specific.

• Essential: By being mobile-first, it continually ends up in the hands of your customers. Clicking on your application must be a natural and obvious action for your customer, since it meets a need for them.

• Powerful: By mobilizing technologies, it leverages mobile accelerators and activators to create proximity and increase frequency of use.

• Specific: Thanks to your relationship with your customers and your knowledge of their habits, you can reach them at key moments on a key medium with customized offers.

“Designing the mobile experience for your loyalty program means first and foremost thinking about the program as a mobile experience. Although it may seem subtle, this shift in perspective makes all the difference. A well-orchestrated mobile experience is an unequivocal engagement vector that becomes a definite competitive advantage,” explains David Alexandre Hamel, VP Strategy, CX & Design.

Its success is based on the four essential pillars of an engaging mobile experience: the customer journey, the digital product, the technology, and the loyalty program activators and accelerators. The latter make it possible to create a unique mobile experience aligned with the DNA of your brand.

Developing a mobile experience vision based on these four pillars can be done in a single brainstorming session if the right people are in the room. It’s a matter of following the logical framework and adding your ideas to it at each stage. This is a valuable tool to use in the pre-project phase to establish a common vision and objectives.