5 Effective Ways to Build and Maintain Customer Relationships via Mobile Marketing Techniques

Whether you own a business or represent a business as an agency, the importance of creating, building and maintaining customer relationships is something that is always being worked on. Customer relationship programs have varied through the years with the rise of technology and the ways we communicate. First there was the direct mail piece, then the email newsletter, and now we are into mobile marketing. Using these five effective ways of mobile marketing, you can help to promote and maintain customer relationships during the mobile era.

Mobile Applications

A truly customized and unique mobile application for your company can help customer relationships immensely. With a complete and well thought out mobile application, a business can help to create a faster buying channel for its customers, enable them to receive unique and special coupons, or allow them to find a store near them faster, among other things.

Push Notifications

Using a smartphones geo-location technology to promote specials, coupons and send personalized messages to customers when they are near your business will allow you to interact with your loyal customers when they are closest to you and persuade them to come and visit your business, whether they were planning to or not.

Social Integration

Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare are just a few of the social media networks that businesses should be integrating into their mobile marketing strategies. These networks can help you spread the word on sales and promotions, as well as give you analytics on who has been to your store, how many times they have been there and when and what day is your busiest days. The knowledge gained from these social networks can help you to create better promotions and sales, whether it is to drive more traffic during slow days or promote a special event via a discount when someone checks in.

Loyalty Programs

 While loyalty programs in the mobile space can range from checking-in to a certain place to scanning a QR code with your phone and taking a survey, the limits can be endless. Send them push notifications for every third time they check-in, offer discounts on special products to those that share your coupons on their social media sites. These and many more options for loyalty programs can help set up a trusted base of loyal customers that are willing to promote and market your products and services to their friends and social networks.

Text Reminders

Text reminders are a basic form of push notifications. These messages can be sent to customers to inform them of new products and services that may be useful to them, or specials that are happening right now. The benefit of text messages is that they can also reach those users who do not have push notifications enabled on their phones.

These five effective mobile marketing techniques can be used together or separately, but whatever way you choose make sure to remember that there is a line you can cross from being “helpful, informative and beneficial” to “immediately deleted, unsubscribed from or ignored”. Listening to customers feedback on your mobile marketing techniques will allow you to fine tune your techniques so you can best serve your customers and gain new ones.

Mobile Apps and Customer Service – A Customers and Business’s One Touch Resolution to Problems

As customers move towards mobile devices for quicker responses and solutions to questions such as “How to repair a bike?” and “How do I fix my flat tire?”, it is important that businesses realize the ultimate potential that a mobile app may have for customer service and helping to build customer relationships. A mobile app centered on customer service will help to ensure that the customer comes to a business’s app first, instead of relying on potentially harmful forums or blogs for solutions to their problems. How should a company go about implementing such an app? Consider the following when deciding if a customer service mobile app is right for your business.

Are Clients Using Mobile Apps?

In short, yes. With 4 of every 5 minutes on mobile devices being taken up by some form of mobile app, businesses can rest assured knowing that customers do in fact use mobile apps. Using this information, we can see that customers use a wide range of mobile apps, from games to social media to health application, and by creating a mobile app that will effectively engage the client using these services a business is helping to create a positive mobile image and relationship with customers.

Have Something to Share?

Integrating social media channels into a business’s customer service mobile app can help to relieve the stress of both the business and its customer service support by streamlining where questions and concerns are answered. Using the mobile app, a customer would be able  quickly interact with the business via verified social media outlets that the company has allowed on the app itself, eliminating the possible chances of a concerned customer trying to interact with an unverified Twitter handle or Facebook page. This will also allow the business itself to create a communication channel that will allow them to share news, press releases, and other pieces of information that may be valuable to the customers.

Collecting Data, Feedback and Customer Data

With more and more customers using mobile devices, a customer service mobile app can help a business to identify areas where there customer service may need work. By creating simple surveys and questionnaires that can be filled out by the customer in the app, a business can begin to transform the way their customer service processes orders and complaints. This in turn can help to streamline the process and help ease customer anxiety and build-up customer relationships.

A customer service mobile app may not be right for every business, but it is important to at least consider the idea of having one available for customers. With more and more channels becoming available for customers to vent their problems on and the potential of these concerns going unanswered, businesses need to realize that a custom mobile app can create a branded, verified way for customers to reach a business in a few quick taps on the screen of their mobile device and receive help and support immediately.