Tips For Delivering CX That Increases Cross Platform ROI
Executing on a people-first strategy means respecting customers’ privacy while at the same time delivering the unbroken experiences they expect. Digital leaders are working across their organizations to assemble the seamless, intuitive, and highly flexible interactions that generate the lifetime value their brands need. The key: ingraining mobility into every decision they make.
People-First Is Mobile-First
Smartphones are the linchpin in a digital ecosystem that has never been more complex. One of the keys to managing this complexity is to look beyond the table stakes of your digital portfolio.
Mobile apps and websites, while essential, are only as valuable as their ability to drive customer interactions. Strengthen the experiences among these assets and value will follow.
For example, Branch data shows that the average revenue per user (ARPU) for users engaging across mobile web and app platforms is 2.2 times higher than the ARPU for single-platform users. In addition, the average cross-platform retention rate four weeks after app install is 28% higher than for single-platform users.
By sharpening insights on what’s performing in real time, digital leaders and their teams can make quick adjustments to variables with the largest impact on conversions. They can turn the abundance of screens, platforms, apps, and websites competing for their customers’ attention into a competitive advantage.
An approach we’ve found worthwhile is to work backward from desired results to initial engagement. This helps identify the user flows and supporting tech that are working as anticipated and prioritize important changes. As a result, brands become as mobile as their customers and generate the ROI to prove it.
Unbroken Or Nothing
The positive correlation between effective user experiences and high ROI marketing is well-understood. The trouble is, an accurate view of experiences can be challenging to obtain. The reason: fragmentation. Fragmentation adds friction to customer interactions, generates reporting inaccuracies, crushes brand promises, and squanders resources. It is equally a factor for mobile-first brands as for everyone else.
What distinguishes the undefeated is how they manage it. A useful place to begin is by identifying the web-to-app, app-to-app, and related cross-platform combinations with the highest probability of success. These are ingredients for defragmentation. When combined with modern linking technology and supporting infrastructure, they help digital leaders turn mobile ecosystem chaos into opportunities. They also help marketing teams define customers by behavior rather than channel and use people-first attribution rather than siloed, channel-specific measurement methods, such as traditional fingerprinting, cookies, and device identifiers IDFAs (for Apple) and GAIDs (for Google).
The solution to the cross-platform balancing act is connecting thoughtful front-end engagement options (including onboarding) with seamless back-end support and SDKs that make target ROI a reality. For these reasons and more, improving mobile experiences was cited as the No. 1 marketing team priority in 2018 and is expected to remain so in 2019, our research found.
To The Experiences Go The Conversions
High-quality experiences aren’t subjective: They either convert or they don’t. Defining new standards is therefore a core responsibility of digital leaders. With revenue on the line, they iterate fast, trust their data, and know their customers inside-out.
A hard fact is that if a web-to-app, desktop-to-app, or app-to-app experience doesn’t meet customer expectations or is not uniquely tailored to specific use cases, a second chance is unlikely. The upside and downside are clear. For example, Branch research has shown that text-me-the-app experiences have consistently driven install rates of 42%. Similarly, there’s a 70% higher in-app purchase rate for users entering an app directly from a personalized smart banner. When also considering that the average mobile app loses 71% of its users within one day after they download, the benefits of investing in experiences that drive engagement are only made clearer.
At a macro level, innovative brands consider digital experiences as a sequence of make-or-break moments. From awareness to purchase, effective digital leaders deliver consistent interactions at every decision point while propelling customers forward in their journey. They combine UX expertise with differentiated platform features and keep objective KPIs in mind: to acquire and retain high-value customers.
Looking ahead, we see individual ecosystems converging. Rather than mobile, app, web, and other platforms acting in competition, the trend is toward experiences that align and convert rather than compartmentalize and frustrate.
