How Mobile is Changing the

Face of Beauty Industry

Beauty and personal care industry is close to 84 million dollars in US alone. The industry is not just huge but also very versatile. From pharmaceutical medicinal products to cosmetic products to natural products, there’s a market for everything. Like every other industry, the beauty & personal-care industry is also going through the digital & mobile evolution, and has some key takeaways for other industries as well.

Going Mobile Savvy

Beauty and personal care customers are as ‘mobile’ as any other industry. In fact according to research, customers aged 18-44 use mobile devices the most for information, reviews and opinion sharing about beauty products. Around 79 percent of customers use their smart phones to check reviews in-store.

Brands that understand the gravity of this huge number, make it a point to make mobile presence. Customer engagement on social media works best. Make it a point to be present on all major social media platforms. Also, be vigilant of both good and bad reviews being posted on the internet. Always acknowledge a customer comment made on social media. Make it a point to especially reply to bad reviews. That does the best patch-up work for a bad review. If you can humbly accept the problem and provide a solution, in many cases it works as good as a positive review, if not better.

Artificial Intelligence & Augmented Reality

Chatbots, virtual make over, simulated makeup, hybrid mobile shopping experience, virtual makeup workshops, interactive tutorials and so much more. The head of Glossier, Emily Weiss was quoted on a popular website Buzzfeed, “Luxury today is getting what you want, how you want it, when you want it, getting a very personalized experience.”

Customer Engagement

As a savvy marketer, you not only send personalized marketing communication to the customer but also foster your customers to interact with the brand. Create contests, social media campaigns, photoshoots, makeovers, training sessions and so much more to get customers engaged with the brand. 

Awesome Customer-Engagement Examples to

Draw Inspiration From

With mobiles, online platforms and digital marketing in place, mere presence across channels does not suffice for marketing. It’s a global market and the competition is so fierce that getting noticed also is a big challenge, let alone getting a piece of the market pie.

Brands need to come up with creative ways to interact and engage with their customers. Channels are just the medium. Here are some great examples of companies and campaigns that successfully created a connect with their customers reinforcing brand loyalty.

• GE launched a smart LED bulb that can be controlled remotely with the app. It’s not just the bulb, a host of devices that connect on Bluetooth and other wireless systems can be linked. Value for the customer – well not really, but can get a great connect with customers who are fond of the toys for big boys!
• Kellogg’s “From great start comes great things” campaign was a big hit with the customers. They glued a mobile call-to-actions on the cereal boxes. When customers called a pre-recorded message by a former Olympian played. For each call that was made, Kellogg donated for food for needy children. There was a great joy-of-giving feeling that worked well with the customers.
• Coffee with newspaper is an awesome example of how you can keep it simple and still get the mobile advantage. Starbucks collaborated with New York Times to bring 12 weeks of free access to NYT through Starbucks’ mobile app. NYT otherwise has its own app that has a subscription fee.
• A simple way of deriving customer engagement through mobile is by offering convenience and replacing paper or PCs with mobiles. Although its is one of the most basic form and is very common, nonetheless it works every time. Pepsi printed codes as SMS call-to-action on the soda cups sold in movie halls. This code made the customers enter sweepstakes that gave them a chance to go to the 86^th Academy Awards Show.

Here’s How You Can Get

Your App Discovered

With over a million apps in the Google Play Store and Apple App Store, having your app discovered is a challenge. For every possible requirement there are so many options available, that chances of a newly launched app getting discovered become very grim.

Here are some quick fix ways to get your app noticed.

• Sponsored presence

This is the quickest way to getting noticed. How much you need to pay will depend on the kind of category and the amount of competition. When you do a detailed analysis of ROI on paid presence, you must also note that with every install your rating and presence on the store also gets a boost. As the number of installs increase, the chances of your showing on top also increase.

• In app advertising

In-app advertising is also a great way to get noticed by users. Advertising with popular apps or social media apps gives results faster. For instance, Facebook advertising gives a lot of options to focus on your target group along with a promising window.

• Online advertising

Apart from in-app advertising, placing ads on webpages also provides great exposure to the brand. Through retargeting, you can select the kind of audience you want to focus your ad on.

• Blog

Blogs are a great way to get directly in touch with your target audience. Blogging creates a direct connection with the end users, and if your audience relate to your story, the sale is taken care of.

• Engage customers

Create fun contests, conduct surveys, incentivize social media sharing, likes etc. Social media marketing works on exponential numbers. If the campaign becomes a hit, it can go viral bringing overnight success to your app.

Video Content

A Must in Digital Marketing Age

Creating videos for marketing is not new, but it still works as good. Rather, in the digital marketing age, videos have become an excellence medium for marketing, it helps by engaging customers and building brand loyalty.

Right from advertising to explaining the product and features to the customer or creating engaging tutorials, the possibilities with videos are immense.

If you still need some convincing, here’s why you should have videos:

• Video is one of the best forms of customer interaction. It engages the customers auditory and visual senses and captures attention. Customers can instantly connect with the content in the video, and the message can be far more powerfully conveyed, than through a print ad in a banner or EDM.
• Videos help in SEO and social media marketing as well. A good video gone viral can give your brand many times the exposure that you would get through SEO marketing and social media posts.
• Videos also help increase the average time spent on the website. It betters the website rating.
• You can upload your video on various video sites like Youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Metcafe, Hulu, Facebook, Live Leak, Twitch, Vine etc. and along with the perks of video marketing, enjoy backward links.

The Big, Fat Data Forage for

Mobile Marketers

Marketing has evolved leaps and bounds since the days of traditionally defining target markets. It is beyond demographics and definitely beyond macro segmentation. Those were the days when information was limited and marketers hardly knew their customers well. Most marketing was based on surveys and even on marketers’ assumption of customer profile and customer psyche.

In the digital and mobile marketing era, the trouble is that there is so much of customer information available from so many different sources, that marketers are often overwhelmed by this information, and marketing strategy on a whole seems mislaid.

How to best use customer information

The first and foremost thing marketers need to do is access what data is relevant to them and what is not. This, in itself is a mammoth of a job. For instance, all the information about customer’s whereabouts, spending habits, social circle, internet usage pattern, all of this and more is available with marketers. But so much of information does not really mean anything until someone joins the dots and creates insights that actually come in handy as knowledge-base for marketers.

Joining dots, can be a very expensive and time consuming task that a select few big organizations can achieve fully. And when customers start aggregating, the level of precision required and granularity can become quite daunting. To achieve a certain level of datamining, the systems and technology required have to be very sophisticated, and the derivation and the analysis have to be very precise. Achieving this for billions of potential customers out there can be exorbitant and daunting, both at the same time. For small entrepreneurial firms and startups, it makes sense to just focus on the data that is directly relevant. For instance, GeoQpons uses geofencing to get real-time customer location, and based on this information, the app suggests retail stores that have a sale or discount on. Moreover, based on history, the intuitive app suggests stores and merchandise based on customer liking.

Another important insight is that there are no categories. There are fluid lines that pretty much don’t exist. From elders to kids, everyone in the family is making decisions like which car to buy or where to go for holidays, and the worst part being that the marketer does not know who’s the influencer and who’s really the decision maker. So it’s not a simple demographic categorization that would work here but a geodemographic, social breadcrumbs and psychographic analysis, all put together will give some insights about whom to target and how.

Here’s How to ‘Wow’

Your App Users

How well is your app doing? Are your users engaged? How good does your app score on the customer satisfaction index? Is your app’s ‘usage’ ratio high as compared to ‘uninstall’ ratio?

While these are questions that are common in marketing parlance, the real question that actually haunts marketers is ‘how’; how to increase customer engagement, how to avoid uninstalls, how to increase app usage and finally how to ‘wow’ customers?

Although the answer to all these questions lie deep in your offering, the value preposition of your brand, here are some general tips for ‘wowing’ customers.

• Focus on the user’s onboarding experience and the initial interaction with the app. First impressions is the last impression, and it cannot be any truer in this case. Design the whole UX in a way it is simple and fast. Follow the rule of three taps. Anything the user is looking for should be found within three taps.
• Always have an answer, whatever it takes. If the user searches for an item that is not included in the app, present a page that has options of places from where the user can find a similar product.
• And do it fast. Response time in an app has to be extremely quick since app users want answers/solutions fast, if possible real-time, which is why most of them use the app in the first place.
• An app is not about features and sophisticated technology. Those things are important, but more important is the delivery. How well do you deliver solutions that the user seeks? Add the special touch of service when you present solutions to your users. Let a real person do the communication instead of automated responses, provide telephone numbers for assistance, send surprise gifts, send hand written cards, just about anything as a gesture.
• Do not shy away from refunds. By providing a refund you may lose a sale, but gain a customer or even a brand ambassador for life. It is rather intimidating how word of mouth can go viral and a single person can influence masses.  

Seven App Sins

Seven App Sins

If you are getting an app made, or working on your existing app to reduce uninstall rate or improve engagement, here’s a list of typical app mistakes that you might be making and your app suffering the fallout.

The seven deadly app sins are:

1. Your on-boarding process fails to make a connect with the user or worse, you don’t have an on-boarding process.

Your on-boarding process is the brand’s first personal rendezvous with the user, your first impression. This is also your golden opportunity to initiate the user to the brand, make her comfortable and establish a strong connection with the brand. Neat and soothing visuals, clear-cut instructions, highlighting key features and taking appropriate permissions consists of a good on-boarding experience. A great on-boarding experience will have customization of app content as per the users preference. Without establishing that connect, user might not relate to the brand as much, and if she does not understand the app the first time she uses it, there are changes might not return to the app or might not use it frequently.

2. Your app has lengthy registration/check-out process

The very raison d’etre of an app is making life simpler and easier for the user. An app that tends to complicate the registration process or the checkout process, and if the user finds it rather easier to buy the product/ register service request/ get help fro some other channel, the very rationale of having an app is lost. This is the reason many brands make users register through social ids or email ids. But again, not all users are on social media, so giving users the option to register through various channels is a wise move.

3. Your app is exclusive, not really intertwined with other channels

An app has to have a distinct personality, it cannot be a copy of the website, but the app cannot be excluded from other channels of the brand. For instance if there’s a portal for registration of local businesses, sort of digital yellow pages. If a customer posts an opening through the website, and later downloads the app, the updates for that posting should automatically reflect in the app as well. If the two platforms are not connected, why would the user return to the app?

4. You are being too pushy with Push notifications

Push notifications are a great marketing tool but used too frequently, it can be a turnoff for the user. On the other hand using too little of push can actually make your brand lose out on the opportunity to sell, directly hitting on your bottom-line. Based on an analysis of the general profile of users, their orientation, spending capacity, and analysis of individual profiles for specific likes, attention days and time, etc. can lead to a strategically calculated rate of push optimum for the brand.

5. You are stalking the user

This, of late, has become a major concern for users. Many apps have permissions to access contacts, location etc. of the user, and then use these features to send push notifications that rather scares the user away. For instance, many apps use location locator to send geofencing messages, but many users term it as stalking. There has to be a line at which brands stop eating into users’s personal space.

6. Your app has bugs

If your app doesn’t function properly, it will most likely be uninstalled. Users have very limited patience with apps. Make sure you fix all your bugs and errors before you start marketing it. Because even if you make relevant changes and relaunch it in the market, a user who has uninstalled it is very less likely to re-install it.

7. Your app fails to engage users

Engaging users is a tricky concept. It includes customization, Personalization of discounts, deals and other offerings, optimized push notifications, intuitive marketing etc. The trick is to keep the user coming back for more.

Apps combine the best of all worlds - convenience of online, Personalization of in-store and responsiveness of customer support. Optimizing all of these will ensure your app adds a strong channel that contributes to the bottom-line and brand loyalty.