The 2016 Mobile Media & Advertising Conference, arranged by Danske Medier (the Danish Association of Media) partnered with Mobtimizers on September 29th, emphasized what we have known for a long time: Mobile and apps are dominating internet consumption and thinking mobile first is now a requirement for anyone wanting to interact with the 2017 consumer. App engagement is key, though.
Among the speakers were leading Danish and international businesses: Google, Adobe, Facebook, Coop, MobilePay and Saint-Gobain Distribution Denmark. They were speaking to an audience of 150 consisting of publishers, danish media, organizations and businesses all attending with a desire for inspiration on how to strengthen their mobile presence.
It’s an app, app world
We have indeed entered into the era of mobile and apps. Among the most important conclusions was the fact that we can no longer distinguish between desktop and mobile when it comes consumer use. Thus, future development within mobile marketing has to be with a strong focus on the user and across all platforms.
New research shows that today mobile time spent is based on 19% browser traffic and 81% app traffic. As an example of this development, the Danish app MobilePay, accounts for 25% of the Danish app traffic alone.
As 800 apps are downloaded every second in the Apple App Store mobile will be all about apps in the future.
Panel: How to work successfully with apps
Brian Egerup Kjærulff of Mobtimizers curated a panel debate with best practice business cases from Mobtimizers’ clients; MobilePay, Coop, and Saint-Gobain, who all are currently successfully working with apps and app marketing.
“The aim of the session is to learn from the best how mobile can be used most efficiently in business to enhance the experience of the consumer.
It is imperative to engage consumers. Many businesses invest big parts of their marketing budgets in the development of apps, but few think it full circle and forget to also allocate budget for the further marketing of their app and engagement of the consumers,” Brian Egerup Kjærulff said in his introduction to the panel.
“Today we are here to hear about some of the challenges businesses experience when they work with mobile and apps in highly competitive industries.”
The eco-system experience
Peter Gregersen, Senior User Experience Specialist at MobilePay, spoke about the journey Danske Bank has been on for the last 10 years, since their first venture into presenting a mobile bank solution. Since then, the MobilePay team at Danske Bank has worked along with technological development and in 2014 launched the payment app, MobilePay, which completely revolutionized the market. This year, MobilePay followed up with the add on app WeShare, that help groups settle payments between them. App engagement at it’s best.
“The background for developing WeShare is data. App users today look for user friendly solutions that have few, specific features, that they do well. As a contrast to the Swiss army knife – an item that claims to have a solution to everything but really does a mediocre job at everything,” Peter explained. “We have worked with the new WeShare app from an ecosystem perspective: We wanted it to work on its own – but in a way where users tap into the universe when they need it.”
The overall ecosystem platform is MobilePay – which today has 3.2 million satisfied customers. In order to help along the launch of WeShare, MobilePay focused on marketing and app store optimization in cooperation with Mobtimizers, knowing that optimization is an important first step: “We made sure to start off with tests, keyword analyses, A/B testing of texts and screenshots, and used app store videos. Competition is too hard today, when you want to launch a new product, and you need to think of constantly adding to the marketing experience if you want to succeed. Currently WeShare has 90,000 users. A number which is growing every day,” Peter concluded.
Making apps relevant for their users
Brødrene Dahl is Denmark’s leading wholesale supplier of plumbing equipment for professionals. Their customers are characterized by being on the go, and they spend very little desktop time. This challenged Brødrene Dahl to develop a new app. Bjarke Sejersen, Head of E-commerce with Saint-Gobain Distribution Denmark, which owns Brødrene Dahl said:
“We wanted an app that could be a powerful tool to ease the workday of our customers. Our work with data showed that they go online and shop at night because that’s when they have the time. So we developed an app that was synchronized with our customer’s browser webshop account, making it possible for them to shop and have products delivered wherever they are. That is the kind of app engagement we were looking for.
We have also employed a multi-channel marketing layer to our work and have started to cooperate with our large suppliers in developing iBeacon technology to make it even easier to see and understand the different products – building compasses into the app and physical products in the stores. Our customers now use the app to shop and learn.”
Use data to meet the customers and enhance app engagement
Annette Buck, who is Head of Marketing & CRM with Coop Danmark spoke about how to use data proactively. Representing Denmark’s leading retail chain with a 38% market share, 5 million clients, and 350 million transactions every year, customer data is plentiful.
Coop analyzes customer receipts, shopping habits, and their basic information, and translate it into knowledge about how to stock the different supermarkets, how to segment clients, and to know where and how to open shops.
“For the last three years we’ve had our customer loyalty app, which we have improved upon and optimized together with Mobtimizers. Among other things, we have worked successfully with app engangement and push.
Now we are launching a new app where we have used customer data much more proactively to tailor personalized offers to the individual customers. We use multi-channel marketing via newsletters, catalogues, and through our app communication, and we segment customers by shopping habits, age, frequency, etc.,” Annette Buck said.
Visibility, engagement, strategy & insights
The afternoon was focused on lessons learned from succeeding in mobile. Brian Egerup Kjærulff (BEK), from Mobtimizers, asked the panel a series of questions. Focus was on data and app engagement. The panelists are Peter Gregersen (PG) from Danske Bank MobilePay, Annette Buck (AB) from Coop Danmark, and Bjarke Sejersen (BS) from Saint-Gobain Distribution Denmark.
Brian Egerup Kjærulf: “Please tell us more about your experience in regards to the biggest challenge in mobile today.”
Peter Gregersen: “Our biggest challenge is definitely to keep up to speed. The development within mobile is so fast, and constantly accelerating. Whenever there are updates in iOS for example, this requires something of us – and we have to continuously update ourselves and our products.”
Annette Buck: “Adding to that is the challenge of working with old IT systems. That makes it almost impossible for us to keep up the tempo required.”
Bjarke Sejersen: “We too are struggling to keep up and we are trying to solve that problem by developing on the go.”
BEK: “How do you see future in mobile? Some claim that apps are gone in ten years.”
PG: “Well. The technology exists, if you want to avoid apps completely. But we believe in stronger apps in the future, with further integration between apps, creating one big intertwined system.”
AB: “I believe the future lies in our ability to continue communicating on all channels.”
BS: “We are trying to merge our app and website. So I believe in highly functioning apps with defined purposes.”
BEK: “What do you do to acquire new users?”
BS: “Our best clients are our online customers, and we encourage them to download and use the app. We also target people with ads in sites they use in their spare time. And now we are going to work with Mobtimizers on ASO as well.”
AB: “We offer services that are only available if you download the app. And we work very proactively with marketing and optimization together with Mobtimizers. It’s pretty incredible what you can do to drive downloads on your own channels and via ASO. Together we’ve done some experiments with push messages. By fine tuning the wording and making more personalized messages, we increased app engagement. We made a measurable difference.”
BEK: “Speaking of app engagement, how do you differentiate yourselves from the competition? Do you focus on services, mobile content, or something else?”
BS: “We have to give our customers something different and more of it. But also add to services they already know. We use data to get to know our customers. In return, they view us as their preferred partner in customer service.”
AB: “Consumers don’t want the weekly ad catalogues anymore. So it gets increasingly difficult for us to find ways to meet them. With our app we target people in a new way and offer them relevant, personalized information based on data.”
PG: “We are looking into the growth potential in e.g. add ons. We want to offer extra services within payment, loyalty programs, etc. And we also believe in improving the social aspects in the app, focusing on the chat function.”
BEK: “Lastly I want to ask you if you can share a bit about your findings. What do you do to keep up – and learn quickly?”
BS: “It’s essential to be the right team, so we work together with external specialists, like yourselves.”
AB: “Yes, and we have also restructured the organization so we work more cross silo. We are trying to share knowledge and be a little bit more agile than before.”
PG: “We never settle. We work hard to constantly be on track and improve our product.”
