Customers Are On The Go. Is Your Business Keeping Up With Them?

We live in an increasingly fast paced and busy world. Indeed, it can feel like the whole world has gotten itself in a big hurry. We’re working longer hours than ever before yet doing all that we can to ensure that each and every one of those hours is as productive as possible. In an uncertain economy many corporations hedge their bets by repressing employe wages. As such, we need to put in more and more overtime to keep up with the rising cost of living which we always seem to be two steps behind. We no longer want bang for our buck, we want bang for our minute. With less and less free time on our hands, we demand that the rest of the world keep pace with our lifestyle. We want it all, and we want it fast. While this may be ruining our health, it is an unfortunate reality for many of us that we no longer live in a 9 to 5 society but on an on demand society.

What does this mean for your business? It means that your customers likely have less free time and disposable capital than they may have had 20 years ago. As such you have to work that little bit harder to engage them. In a capricious economy customer loyalty is on the wan more than ever. If you want to attract and retain customers, you can no longer just wait for them to come to you. You need to take the fight to them.

Is your website responsive?

Over the past few years, as smartphone use has increased there’s a good chance that your customers are consuming your content or buying from your website through mobile devices. As such, it’s vital that you take steps to address how responsive your website may be. This not only means ensuring that your website is coded so that it looks good and functions well on mobile devices. It also means ensuring that your website is able to keep up with your customers’ frantic pace of life. The longer your page takes to load, the higher you can expect your bounce rates to be. In fact, a load time of just 7 seconds is enough to increase your bounce rate by 32%.

Do you have an app?

There was a time when a website was considered an essential for a forward facing business. Today, a website is something of an anachronism, especially if your target market is in the millennial demographic. If you expect to future proof your profits you need your own app. If you have your own in-house development team, Svitla Systems shares what to start with when going mobile. The right platform is everything, and you should ensure that your team know the differences in coding for an iOS device and coding for an Android device. A presence on the app store may boost your engagement, but if your app is unresponsive and prone to crashing you actually risk alienating customers. If you’re in any doubt as to your team’s ability to program and test your own app, you may benefit from outsourcing its development.

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Is your marketing targeted directly at them?

The smartphone age means that most of us spend our days with the sum total of all the world’s knowledge in their trouser pocket. But with such a wealth of information at their fingertips, it’s unlikely that they will find you unless you focus your marketing efforts directly at them. While a carpet bombing of a marketing strategy may expose some people in your target market to your brand, it is a very wasteful approach. Consider instead running a tightly focused targeted marketing campaign in which you focus solely on your core market and expand outward. You can even get your customers to do the heavy lifting for you by incentivizing them to expose their friends, family and colleagues to your business. A promotional code or discount is a great way to encourage advocate customers to get their friends and family in on the act. If it’s good enough for Uber, it’s good enough for you.

Are email shoots the only way you’re engaging with them?

While email shoots remain a great way of engaging with customers and alerting them to special offers and promotions, its a simple reality that many of your customers probably won’t check their emails very often or have an extremely prohibitive spam filter. Plus, with the imminent new changes in data protection legislation, email marketing is about to change in a big way. It might be the time to add other strings to your bow like push notifications, text messaging and rich media messaging.

As the pace of life shows no signs of slowing down, it’s up to you whether you want to keep pace with your customers or let them leave you behind.