Engagement is the core focus of any customer-centric business initiative. That’s true whether your focus is on mobile and modern platforms or traditional brick-and-mortar experiences. You need to garner proper and perpetual engagement from your audience if you hope to achieve a steady stream of revenue.
Perpetual engagement, for instance, keeps your customers interested and active, making them more likely to interact with your brand and its products in the future. This naturally contributes to a boost in loyalty, revenue, and nearly any other metric you can think of.
We’ve discussed the value of mobile and mobile-first initiatives for building proper engagement in the past, and often too. But once you have such a system established, there are other—more fun and interesting— ways to keep activity levels sustained.
Of course, we’re talking about polls and user-reliant activities or mini events. Believe it or not, they are an incredibly valuable tool for gauging and measuring audience sentiment. They also provide in the moment feedback, which can be used almost immediately to improve various processes, experiences, or systems for the better.
Perhaps the best part is that they are capable of reeling in larger groups of people, sometimes even bringing back customers that have long since abandoned your app or services.
Why You Need to Poll Your Audience
Naturally, when you think of polls and surveys you consider the type that are delivered after an event has already occurred or after an experience is over. This is one of the most common ways to deliver a poll or customer questionnaire. However, thanks to modern technologies, it’s no longer the most effective way to make use of this medium.
Through a mobile community app, for example, you can activate a group-wide poll to gather instant feedback from attendees and audiences. Imagine knowing exactly what they are thinking or feeling, in the moment, allowing you to make a last-minute shift to grab their attention or support?
It can even be used as an interactive tool during a presentation or event, simply by displaying results on-screen or in front of everyone, in real-time.
Ultimately, this creates many new opportunities and reasons for polling your audience. And in such a hyperactive, digital society that can make all the difference. It offers a modern form of learning and participation, especially when presented via online and social communities.
Just How Compelling Are Real-time Results?
Real-time results can be leveraged in many ways. They can drive live, interactive audience participation during an event. They can provide real-time and live insights, displayed to customer and audience mobile devices shortly after the poll is published. They can show real-time, in the moment results during an extended event, as sort of a gamified experience. They can also be used to increase engagement, by showing non-participants how the current poll or event is going for those who are involved.
People love to be a part of something, which is where the “in the moment” description comes from. While an event or activity is happening, should your audience see this through signage, mobile apps, or even digital alerts, they're more likely to get involved.
You can use polls and questionnaires to engage audiences before, during, and even after an event to boost interactivity and performance.
You Can Leverage Them to Aggregate Unique Data Over Time
As much as you’d like to, there are some instances where you cannot simply ask your audience what they’re thinking, or how they feel about a particular experience. You also cannot keep hounding them over an extended period of time to spill their secrets. That’s exactly why platforms such as data analytics and advanced customer metrics tools exist. Over time, you can watch their habits and actions to build a more complete profile of who they are and what they want. This is especially true of mobile users, as mobile devices naturally provide more contextual information and environmental data.
Back to polls, however, they are yet another way to collect and harvest data from your audience that you might not otherwise be privy to. It can be something as simple as “did you enjoy your most recent visit, why or why not.” The insights gathered from user polls and the resulting data can be incredibly powerful, provided you are paying attention and using it appropriately.
Fun vs Serious
The tone of your polls and interactive experiences make all the difference. There’s nothing wrong with having a little fun and coming up with a unique, interesting theme for your content. But in a more professional setting, it might be more beneficial to stick with a serious tone.
May the 4th, the popular Star Wars themed day just passed, for instance. Imagine coming up with a relevant yet related poll that incorporated the Star Wars universe into your event and current participation structure. You’d be drawing in your regular crowd, obviously, but you’re also more likely to attract new audiences with an interest in the Star Wars universe.
Think of it as a modern form of contextual conversation with your audience. When you converse with peers, sometimes you have more serious discussions and other times you have off-the-cuff and more fun conversations about external topics or events.
In-App Mobile Polling Experiences Are the Ideal Way to Go
Activating in-app mobile polling experiences are the best way to engage with your audience and existing community. For starters, it’s simply because mobile has so many users at the ready. Mobile apps accounted for nearly half of all global internet traffic, with mobile traffic as a whole exceeding that of desktop and additional platforms. That’s a massive audience to be tapping into for any type of experience or insights, but imagine what you can gain through something as straightforward as a user-experience poll or survey.
In addition, it’s a modern twist on tried and true engagement tactics because you’re reaching out directly to an established community. You are, for all intents and purposes, talking directly with your most loyal and interested customers, gathering insights from the people who matter most.
When you really think about it, it doesn’t make sense to not use polling and user-insights for future strategies. So, what are you waiting for?
