Customer loyalty is one of the most important factors that determine the success of any business. Therefore, besides offering high-quality goods or services, preparing a dynamic mobile loyalty app shall make companies more competitive than others.
Definition: There are many thoughts about the basis of customer loyalty. In the primary, customer loyalty is understood as when a person transacts with a brand on a regular level. This also reflects when a customer shows interest in specific ones, and shares with his or her friends. All in all, there are many forms of customer loyalty that businesses can count on.
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Key Benefits That Business Can Obtain From Mobile Loyalty App
- Maintain the number of valuable customers: When organizations have built loyalty within consumers, they are willing to spend more money and time on your business. Moreover, this also helps any future services or goods go smoothly.
- Increase brand image and brand awareness: Loyal customers will keep using services or buying products, they also spread and share their experiences about used brands via word-of-mouth marketing. From that, organizations can raise brand awareness and image naturally. More importantly, companies have more potential customers through current loyal customers.
- Enhance the quality of the feedback system: Loyal customers are likely to speak out their thoughts and want to improve. Due to their favorite brands, customers will not mind spending the time to suggest valuable feedbacks. From that, companies can turn those feedbacks into actions.
As discussed benefits of customer loyalty, the question here is: “How can we build an effective mobile loyalty app?”
To this day, several traditional ways in loyalty customers programs have been utilized. For example: punch cards, opt-in emails, vouchers, discounts, and reward systems without mobile apps. To enhance the performance of customer service, companies should create a convenient and innovative platform. Moreover, that platform should integrate aspects of loyalty customers programs via mobile apps. As a result, there are no more correct answers than a mobile loyalty app.
A mobile loyalty app is proven as an effective after-sales service tool for organizations to promote customer retention. Here are some specific steps that are suggested for companies to have a clear sight of this process:
Step by step to build an effective mobile loyalty app:
1. Research and draw up user behaviors:
The most basic step is to determine the behavior of users when logging in to your mobile loyalty app. Or forecasting the user flow – that emphasizes the functions of UX. Obviously, UX designers play a key role in drawing up frameworks to forecast the user experience. This step requires several tasks from UX designers. Their responsibilities are to analyze customer insights, adjust them with corporate objectives. Then, they transform them into product features, interactions, and interfaces.
A vital objective of companies utilizing a mobile loyalty app is to remain customer retention and consumer engagement. However, it is quite impossible to create a mobile loyalty app that can fulfill all of the wants of customers. As a result, the step of researching and drawing up the user flow is essential for a long-term strategy.
You should play a role as your customers and shall think like them. Then, you can make a list of steps by steps when customers use your mobile loyalty app. The prototype shall be very useful for this step. When making a prototype, you should start by setting up all potential user flow. This part is essentially a description of the activities users may do in the app and the stages they take.
Then, you can start making wireframes – rudimentary screen visualizations. From predicted ideas to mockups of the app’s screens, your mobile loyalty presents how it looks then.
Notice: Paying your attention to this step is crucial, it will determine how successful you are in promoting your mobile loyalty app.
2. Do some research on your competitors:
To get better performance via a mobile loyalty app, companies had better take their competitors into consideration clearly. Therefore, they can find out if there are any ideas like theirs that have existed. Or how their competitors have carried out those ideas and what they have achieved from those ideal apps. From that, they can edit or fix draft versions.
Notice: The most effective method is downloading those apps and having experiences by yourself. You can obtain more useful information than you have thought before.
3. Create and release the first version of the mobile loyalty app:
After steps 1 and 2, you have finished your evaluation and brought your prototype into shape. Then, you can start creating your draft version, which is MVP (Minimum Viable Product).
From here, the development team starts building a mobile loyalty app and preparing the back-end (database, server-side logic, etc). Furthermore, they also set up a web application for the operation team to monitor the app and its content.
To create an efficient customer loyalty program, there are some must-have features you should keep in mind.
Features:
Reward System: Besides your services and goods, the ways you carry out your reward system, which benefits in retaining your customers. This involves bonuses, special offers, discounts, personalized offers, and internal currency.
If you already have set up your reward system, the next step is to digitalize that reward system into your mobile loyalty app.
Onboarding: Like nearly any other modern program, onboarding should be as simple as feasible. It’s a good idea to provide your users with a few options for logging in. There are some options such as e-mails, social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Zalo, etc), and phone numbers. The key characteristics of this feature should be fast, easy, and secure.
Gamification: Gamification is very helpful since it keeps people engaged in a pleasant way. Here is where you use your creativity to build some exciting games. Making use of these games, users can earn internal cash and exchange it for discounts and rewards. Through gamification, you can present special offers to users, also increase in-app time, which can benefit your sales.
Notice: You should set up the amount of diversified and valuable prizes. This will attract your customer to collect internal points.
Geolocation and maps: Geolocation is a must-have feature for any customer loyalty program. You may utilize GPS devices to deliver push reminders to your consumers about limited-time deals while they are around. In addition, you also show the path to your nearest business location.
Payment Methods: You can select from a variety of payment processors, especially in online payment. Payment processors operate in a variety of marketplaces and under a variety of situations. Check to see if your payment processor supports a variety of payment options. As a result, your consumers feel more comfortable while making any purchases.
Near-Field-Communications Tags (NFC): NFC tags can be used in physical stores or loyalty programs. The functions of NFC tags are to give more information about items or to allow consumers to purchase immediately. NFC allows for the transmission of data, the detection of users, and the delivery of special offers.
Push Notifications: This feature is so compulsory that any mobile loyalty apps must have. Notify your users about new bonuses, purchases, and special deals with push alerts. Advanced push notifications may be used to make these messages more attractive and informative. This will assist you in retaining users and reminding them to take advantage of their benefits.
Notice:
While working with draft versions, your development team has fixed a lot of bugs and errors. Your development team should stick to the agile development process. This is a useful method to continuously identify bugs and errors in the development process before releasing a product’s public version.
4. Launch the app and keep track of the performance:
When you have finished your MVPs and set features, your mobile loyalty application is ready to be released on App Store and Google Play. In the end, your mobile loyalty app along with the web admin application is moved to a production environment.
However, you should keep track of the performance of your mobile loyalty app. Some analytic tools and frameworks that you can count on such as (Firebase, UXCam, Mixpanel and etc). From these, you can discover the most common problems customers have with your mobile app and decide on the next additions to make it even more adaptable.
Suggestion: Mobile Loyalty Apps Design Templates Vs Customized Mobile Loyalty Apps
There are two main ways of creating your mobile loyalty app, which is divided into customized mobile loyalty app and mobile loyalty app ready-to-go templates. Everything has two sides: advantages and disadvantages and there is no exception for them. However, a customized mobile loyalty app is more highly evaluated than mobile loyalty app design templates in benefits.
When you build a customized mobile loyalty app, you have full control of the customer experience. And you do not have to deal with any briefs or restrictions in creating and setting.
Recognizing the difficulties that companies have to deal with, many organizations have been founded to give a hand in solving the concern of creating a mobile loyalty app. Let’s take TESO as an example, a trustworthy consultant in software solutions. We have strong experience in building loyalty mobile apps which grow fast and have great ROI to our clients.
Read more: Our first Loyalty Mobile App in the Dairy industry, which serves +100K users and x2 our client’s revenue.
In conclusion, creating a mobile loyalty app for your company allows you to provide numerous additional services to your customers, also enhances your customer retention.
Are you still struggling to decide where to start on the journey to develop a mobile loyalty app? We, at TESO, have experienced consultants who are always available to help. Let’s schedule a quick discovery call and start your loyalty app from today. Check our expert’s calendar and book a meeting call for more information: https://calendly.com/quynh-tesosoft/business-meeting?month=2021-10
