Consumers are now, more than ever, being pulled in different directions by numerous brands offering products and services that are often very difficult to distinguish between, writes Matthew Winters, the chief executive of Veoo. So, how can you capture consumers’ attention so that they will not only buy from you once, but will also continue to remain loyal to your brand? Engaging your audience via their mobile device is no doubt a challenge, but one that is definitely worth persisting with.

Here are some strategies I have pulled together which can help effectively increase mobile engagement while being relevant to your consumer audience.

Pay attention to your subscribers

The behaviour of your mobile subscribers will help you understand the effectiveness of your mobile marketing efforts. This data is easily available, secured through your mobile marketing analytics, and will enable you to understand which offers are most appealing and which do not work for your subscribers.

With this, you can tailor future promotions accordingly to ensure further mobile engagement and increase redemption of your offers, so it would be foolish to ignore!

Add the social element

Social media has become a great channel to market to and can further enhance your reach as you now have an army of people who can do your marketing on your behalf – by sharing and commenting on posts. Consider sending a giveaway offer to mobile users, perhaps customers can obtain a second entry to win a prize if they share the promotion on their social media profile.

This will increase the chances of their friends enlisting and will subsequently increase engagement with your brand.

Create an omnichannel experience

A seamless customer journey comes under the influence of social media, mobility, geolocalisation and being constantly connected. In order to maintain competitive edge over others, consumers should be provided with a frictionless experience at all points of contact with your brand. Research has found that the more channels customers use, the more valuable they are, spending an average of 4% more on every shopping occasion in the store and 10% more online than single-channel customers.

Utilising data gathered across devices and platforms is key in creating this rewarding cross channel experience.

Continuously update offers

The more relevant the offers you put in front of your mobile subscribers, the more they will take advantage of them – and this is where customer data comes in handy. Through both push notifications and mobile wallets, marketers can create compelling offers that consumers will want to take advantage of. Take push notifications, for example, 56% of mobile users allow push notifications, therefore by building these into your mobile marketing strategy you can reach a significant number of people with your offers. But to keep things fresh and interesting, be sure to change these up.

Try implementing things like seasonal offers and rewards on their birthday.

Keep people posted

Another opportunity for mobile engagement is through transactional messaging. These messages mean staying connected to your customers through an order process. Once such example would be for order tracking; a transactional SMS strategy could include a confirmation of the order, followed by notification of when it’s being delivered and a confirmation once it has actually been delivered.

As consumers check their text messages more frequently than they do their email, this is a great way to give up-to-the-minute details about their orders and therefore further instil their confidence in your brand.

As shoppers rapidly make the transition to mobile commerce, mobile engagement requires even more diligence and continual effort. But if you pay attention to how mobile users are responding to your efforts, you will find it easy to continue to be important to them.