3 Customer Engagement Tips for Lifestyle Apps

Customer centricity and engagement are the hot topics of this year’s business conversations, especially for apps in the Lifestyle category. With generally active customer bases comes a constant flow of communication, and Lifestyle apps are required to play by a different set of best practices than other apps across the app stores.

Our 2019 Mobile Benchmarks by App Category report looks at trends and differences across popular app categories, with a focus on Lifestyle apps. The Lifestyle-focused data and recommendations make it even easier for you to analyze your current strategy, without comparing yourself to apps in other categories who approach feedback and engagement differently due to industry needs. Let’s take a look at three customer engagement tips for Lifestyle apps, including a “scorecard” showing average engagement and feedback benchmarks in the category.

Profile of an average app in the Lifestyle category

The intimate nature of apps in the Lifestyle category combined with the convenience they offer make them a powerful tool for understanding the customer journey. To give you an idea of how the majority of media companies approach gathering customer feedback, below is the profile of an average app in the Lifestyle category.

Sentiment is the emotion behind customer engagement and is at the heart of understanding, measuring, and improving our relationships. When you monitor sentiment, you try to measure the tone, context, and feeling from customer actions. We tracked sentiment for apps in the Lifestyle category, and here’s what we found.

3 tips for Lifestyle apps

1. Learn which customers love you and which ones need more time

Would your customer service team treat an angry customer the same as they would treat an elated customer? Probably not. Would you communicate with customers without first knowing how they feel about you? You could, but you probably won’t get your message across very effectively.

Understanding how your customers feel is the catalyst for all other communication. To treat digital interactions as you would in-person interactions with context in mind, the simple, yet effective, “yes” or “no” question Love Dialog offers gives Lifestyle brands the context they need to interact with customers in the most relevant way. The Love Dialog provides an honest look at customer sentiment and how it changes over time, and our customers see a 93% response rate from their consumers. It also boasts an extremely high response rate due to its simplicity. Consumers are more willing to respond when questions are straightforward and can be answered in no time. And you can be more confident in understanding how your customer sentiment changes over time.

2. Regularly survey customers to gauge sentiment

While there are lots of ways to listen to customers, mobile surveys are among the most effective for Lifestyle brands. Surveying your app customers is a great way to find out more about who they are, what drives them back to your app, how they feel about your app, and what they’d like improved. You can gather thousands of responses in a short amount of time, allowing you to make data-driven decisions faster than ever.

Unlike traditional survey methods that happen via email or the Web, in-app surveys allow you to target your customers without making them leave their in-app experience, at the optimal time and place. But if your survey is full of poorly written questions that discourage customer participation, the benefits aren’t as profound. There are plenty of best practices to lean on when creating a mobile survey, including limiting survey questions, targeting the correct audience, triggering the survey at the right place and time, and allowing for open-ended feedback. In general, survey questions return best when they are short and to-the-point, and allow customers to remain in the app to share their thoughts, which removes the concern of disrupting their experience in order to gather their feedback.

3. Proactively provide in-app messages for quick announcements

As we’ve already seen, Notes are a great way to send one-way messages consumers don’t need to take immediate action on, but when they still need to receive a message. Many of our Lifestyle companies leverage Notes for general announcements, such as playback or app issues, version upgrades, scheduled maintenance, and more.

With an in-app note, you can quickly deliver a message to the audience you need to reach, without having to release a new version of your app, or just say “hello.” If there is a known bug or a payment failed, you can lean on Notes to help save the relationship rather than waiting for your next app release to take action.

Now it’s your turn

As the above categorical data shows, being customer-centric is not an option anymore. It’s no longer a nice-to-have; it’s the need of the hour.

We release this category-specific benchmark data so Lifestyle brands can understand how effectively they measure their customer experience, communicate with their customers, and earn customer love. If after reading you’ve realized you’ve missed the benchmark, we want to help. Connect with us to discuss your options and see how Being Apptentive can move you closer toward these benchmarks immediately.

Note on methodology: This report includes data from over 800 unique Android and iOS apps across all app categories, from January 2018 to December 2018. The data was captured by interactions deployed using Apptentive’s mobile communication platform. Benchmarks vary depending on the nature of the vertical and the data in this report will be useful for companies to see how they stack up against the overall market as well as against others in their category.