Mobile applications are highly significant development in mobile communications and with the enormous amount of downloads made each month, there are major potential benefits for marketers in reaching their target audiences (Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick, 2012).

Taylor & Levin (2014) suggest that mobile apps provide several advantages for marketers as apps provide greater security features as well as allow consumers to bypass competitors’ information and go directly to the company application page.

Building an app sounds like an innovative idea; fun to make… but how would you make sure it’s driving your company in the right direction and affecting your business in the positive way that you thought it would?

Drell (2013) outlines 9 useful metrics to think about when launching a mobile app, however, this will vary depending on who you are trying to engage:

• Usage – how engaged are your users when it comes to your app? Understanding engagement metrics will provide useful insights in how the app is being used, and this should tell you where your weaknesses are to strengthen the app and drive greater engagement overall.

Key questions you should know about your users should be:

“Who are the users using the app and how are the using it?

What’s your demographic and what’s not?

How frequently are users opening your app?

What time are they opening the app? Day or night?

Are people using the app on tablets or smartphones?

iOS or android?”

Pay attention to segments as knowing your segments is crucial in marketing and this article tells us how digital marketing is redefining customer segmentation, with segments such as: high actual customer segmentation and potential customer segmentation.

The success of your app is dependent on these factors, so make sure you get a sense of your users.

• Lifetime Value – ‘value’ depends on your vertical. For example, music apps will value the time someone spent listening to content, a retail app will value purchases made. When you know the value of various consumers, you’ll be able to identify key segments and other groups to compare which needs improvement.

• Retention Rate – you want your app to be used even after its buzz. Strive for longevity! The more engagement and activity your app is getting the higher it will rise in the app store charts – not saying this will be easy, but it will be worth it. Ultimately, make sure your app is kept for the long haul!

• Active users – Monthly Active Users (MAU) and Daily Active Users (DAU) are your key users, these are people using the app with regularity, making the app more credible. You need to pay attention to this group of users are they are invaluable to understanding engagement and converting more users into active users.

• Session length – knowing how long people are on your app can help quantify the depth of a person’s relationship with the app. You want an app that’s sticky (something inherently valuable to the user) to lead to longer sessions.

• Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) – if you know how many users you have engaged on the app, are you getting the sufficient returns? Looking at this metric gives insight to the bigger picture, the ARPU indicate the value of an individual to your app business.

• App Launch/Load time – Users have to be able to access the app in a timely fashion, which is actually no time at all. It should be a seamless process and crashing is a big no for users.

• User Acquisition – How and why have customers downloaded your app? Paid advertisements or word of mouth? This is another metric of understanding of what’s working for your mobile’s digital strategy and what’s not. Looking at where you have acquired users and gives an idea of where you should focus and importantly, where needs more focus.

• User happiness – This I would tie with #7 well. Users want well designed apps and they don’t want to be going through page to page on the app annoyed with things such as crashes and bugs – so make sure feedback from users is kept under review so you’re able to deal with this as quick as you can – to keep your users happy!

Measuring your user’s behaviour is what will differentiate your app from being mediocre to something that’s ‘sticky’ for your intended users. These ways of measuring will really help in getting the true value you intend, although take note – tailor these metrics to the specifics as every app is different and targeted in a different way.

References:

Bughin, J., Shenkan, A.G. & Singer, M. (2009), “How poor metrics undermine digital marketing”, The McKinsey Quarterly, , no. 1, pp. 106.

Chaffey, D. & Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2012), Digital marketing: strategy, implementation and practice, 5th edn, Pearson Education, Harlow.

Drell, L. (2013). 9 Mobile App KPIs to Know. Available at: http://mashable.com/2013/09/04/mobile-app-metrics/#oQB36ugPAiqw (Accessed: 09 May 2016).

Taylor. G. D & Levin. M, (2014),”Predicting mobile app usage for purchasing and information sharing”, International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, Vol. 42 Iss 8 pp. 759 – 774

To be successful in e-commerce it’s become essential for companies to rethink their business focus into becoming more customer-centric. Putting customers at the heart of your businesses strategy adds to differentiation in today’s highly competitive market, therefore, delivering more customer value is necessary if companies want to keep up (Wu & Hung, 2009).

Consumers are highly informed, powerful and smart, and their demand for interaction and better service is something companies have had to give into. So, the customer relationship management (CRM) strategy is a management concept implemented to help approach the matter. CRM creates customer value, ultimately increasing customer loyalty by building long-term relationships and structural bonds for consumers (Wu & Hung, 2009).

Companies who have failed to build long-term relationships and fulfil their customer’s needs have felt the backlash and it has been the failure of many dot-coms, following huge expenditure on customer acquisition (Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick, 2012). As Reichheld & Schefter (2000) suggest, acquiring customers is 20-30% higher than traditional businesses – acquiring customers online are just plain expensive! So keeping the ones you already have engaged can save your company.

With the proliferation of the digital world, an eCRM strategy works alongside CRM. This article gives a good outline of the difference between the two. The goal of an eCRM system is to improve customer service, retain valuable customers and help provide analytical capabilities for an organisation (Fjermestad and Romano, 2003), this is done by using digital platforms to integrate customer databases with websites and generating a more personalised and targeted message (Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick, 2012).

This video shows how McDonald’s in Germany had a vision to ‘create a more personal and innovative dining experience’ so they used data gained from a promotion to find out what their customers like and how they can analyse the data to predict what their customers would like to eat! Such invaluable data to have, especially when thinking of creating a new burger – now McDonalds has the info on what certain people prefer, in certain locations. Amazing!

But there are some challenges of integrating eCRM technologies outlined by Kennedy (2006):

Customer Interaction & Relationships

The use of the eCRM system means that traditional physical customer proximity becomes substituted by digital proximity. Customers need reassurance when a purchase is about to be made, the absence of a real person there means consumers turn to other ways of getting this assurance e.g. virtual communities for their testimonials on the product. The overall ability to create intimacy with a customer makes building trust more difficult with the relationship element of eCRM as companies try to build a connection that’s more than purely transactional. Therefore, privacy policies in place help with this issue as it’s essential for customers to share the data they need from successful CRM.

Managing an online channel

As selling on the internet has become essential, companies have to make every possible effort to integrate online channels tightly with existing business processes and/or channels first. Companies can sometimes see the Web as a single channel and isolate from the other channels, which shouldn’t be the case, it should work together – a good framework to use for this is ‘Chaffey’s 6 channels’ http://www.smartinsights.com/reach/attachment/digital-marketing-channels/ showing how offline and online communications together (Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick, 2012).

If eCRM is used in the right ways it can provide rich and accurate data for its consumers, this article which talks about big data being the backbone for eCRM with examples of how major retailers are using the system and how it’s worked for them.

References:

Azar, F.S., Safari, R., Ebrahimian, K. & Fahimi, G. (2013), “Electronic customer relationship management (eCRM) and its role in marketing”, Interdisciplinary Journal of Contemporary Research In Business,vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 986.

Chaffey, D. & Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2012), Digital marketing: strategy, implementation and practice, 5th edn, Pearson Education, Harlow.

Jerry Fjermestad Nicholas C. Romano Jr, (2003),”Electronic customer relationship management”, Business Process Management Journal, Vol. 9 Iss 5 pp. 572 – 591

Kennedy, A. (2006), “Electronic Customer Relationship Management (eCRM): Opportunities and Challenges in a Digital World”. Irish Marketing Review, vol. 18, no. 1/2, pp. 58.

Reichheld, F.F. and Schefter, P. (2000), E-loyalty: Your secret weapon on the web. Available at: https://hbr.org/2000/07/e-loyalty-your-secret-weapon-on-the-web (Accessed: 7 May 2016).

Wu, I. & Hung, C. (2009), “A strategy-based process for effectively determining system requirements in eCRM development”, Information and Software Technology, vol. 51, no. 9, pp. 1308-1318.