And so, we come to our final chapter. When it comes to jump-starting a mobile-first customer experience journey, we’ve explored the concepts of internal communications (telling), hosting a launch party (showing), and on-boarding or external communications (experiencing). These concepts explain the importance of a good mobile app strategy and relate to the value-added benefits of creating a custom meeting or event app program.
Lastly, we want to discuss post-launch initiatives for your app and how you should handle things from here.
First, if you haven’t read the previous chapters, you’ll want to do that.
- Chapter 1: Internal Communications
- Chapter 2: Launch Party
- Chapter 3: On-boarding
- Chapter 4: Post-Launch
What’s Next?
Your app has launched and likely working well, you’ve done your due diligence and made it available to customers or your target audience and even have internal support from stakeholders. Congratulations! Now, it’s time to sit back and rest on your laurels, right?
Wrong.
Any successful mobile app or service requires ongoing user engagement, continued user adoption and refinement. You need to fuel the engine, so to speak, to keep the momentum going. Don’t let the flame go out, keep stoking and feeding the fire.
How? It’s all about post-launch management and consistent, ongoing communications that support your digital touchpoints.
Plan Ongoing Communications for Engagement Boosts
When you launch a product, service, or app, you don’t release it and then move on, never to speak of it again. Or maybe you do, but if that’s the case, you should probably assess your business strategies as soon as possible.
You need to ensure users that have already adopted your app, continue using it into the future. You need to broaden your audience and bring on new customers. You must add new features, updates, and keep your app working in tip-top shape.
You cannot do any of these things unless you plan ongoing communications and strategies. It’s about more than just keeping things fresh. it’s about sharing the new content and future updates with your audience which is where the “communication” part of it comes into play. This includes publishing news and blog updates, new feature rollouts, and even marketing campaigns to pique or boost user engagement.
Use Your App Regularly… Yes, You!
Want your customers to use your app, features, and services? Then you and your team need to participate, as well. In fact, this must be one of the core concepts and beliefs of your customer experience program, because it enhances the journey.
There are several ways to do this:
News: Continue posting regular and relevant content to the newsfeed, particularly with thought leadership and industry-relevant articles that provoke conversation or other types of engagement like commenting and sharing. The more you have to contribute to your audience, the more likely they are to return, and this adds to your app stickiness. Remember to include some inspiring snackable moments for your on-the-go users!
Polls: One of the best ways to discern audience interest is to ask them directly. You can encourage them to participate by creating user polls and questionnaires. This is also a great way to get some feedback after an event or campaign through short-form, multiple choice formats. Also, with real-time results, your audience can monitor other user responses to get a sense of how others think, fell, and react.
Surveys: Use surveys after a month, quarter or year to map touchpoints for gathering more extensive user feedback. For many, surveys and polls are interchangeable. We happen to look at them a little differently, however. You can use surveys, for instance, the gather additional information like how engaging customers see your app being, and what features are their favorite. In other words, a poll is a great way to gauge audience interest; a survey is a better way to get their full opinion. They are an incredibly useful and powerful way to get user feedback before, during and after an event.
Social Tie-Ins: Get social! The power of social rests in crowd-sourced engagement and can be a very important community aspect for your customer experience program! You’ll want your users generating content too, so do what you can to make it happen! If that means running a contest or marketing campaign, go for it! You can even ask team members to get involved to help spark creativity. Want help getting perpetual engagement from your users? Explore some ideas about gamifying your user profiles and mobile app community.
Spread Your Assets and Examples Everywhere
Help spread your brand by sharing assets, examples, and the spoken word about your app everywhere you have a voice.
Blast new features and examples on all your social media profiles along with links to download the app, when and where applicable. Encourage team members, customers, and partners to share the app and content within the app as well.
Do what you can to spread your influence, and don’t be afraid to use the same marketing techniques you’ve used in the past, or new ones for that matter.
You should look at your app as another product or service you are trying to get in front of your audience. The goal here is to promote to the right audience.
Support Management and Help Content
Support your team and upper management by ensuring they know how to use the app, and they know what features are available. More importantly, give them exclusive previews of new content before everyone else has access. This will ensure that your team knows the ins and outs of the app, and when customers come looking for help, they have direct and hands-on experience to share.
This is also a great opportunity to get early feedback for changes or updates. Your team and management will be using the app, so they’ll know when something is broken or doesn’t work. You can cooperate with them to fix the problems before releasing it to customers so you’re always putting your best foot (or app) forward.
Lost, Stuck or Just Want More Guidance? Invest in Us!
Having trouble coming up with great ideas? Want to find new ways to boost your engagement, grow your audience, and generate reliable user retention ratings? Guess what, we have just the place you can go! Come to us, the team that built the app for you!
We have great ideas; you have great ideas, let’s get together and make this happen! If you want to ensure ongoing success for your app and brand, we’ll help you achieve it.
