How to Engage Users Across Web and Mobile

User and customer engagement is crucial to survival in the digital age; but it’s no longer enough to simply have an impressive looking website and a siloed mobile app. To truly engage users, businesses must focus on creating seamless, standout experiences across web and mobile. Here’s how. While having a robust website and a shiny mobile application is all well and good, what happens if the two don’t interact with each other (or your users)? The bottom line is this; you could be harming the customer and user experience without realising.

In a world where convenience and relevance are no longer a ‘nice to have’ but a necessity, the companies that stand out (and indeed survive) put UX and UC first.

With that said, here’s how to engage users across web and mobile—and how a cross-platform app development approach can help. Read on.

Convenient and timely messaging is the key to intelligently engaging your users and customers—and ideally prompting them to take a desired action. Bombard users with untimely notifications when they’re not ready to buy, and your efforts will likely be fruitless.

Leveraging customer and user data revealing their behaviour can help your organisation to interact with users when they’re most likely to buy or take a desired action. For example, you see from your data that X Customer normally uses your mobile app between 5:00pm and 8:00pm. This is also when they have placed most of their online orders in the past.

Sending a timely notification with a compelling offer during this time is more likely to provide genuine value to the user (such as a discount code for 10% off) and prompt a desired action. Depending on your business, the notification could be to remind them to add an item to their basket and check out, sign up for a course or webinar, or register their interest in your services.

Location-based alerts are another clever way to pique users’ interest when they’re in the right frame of mind to engage with your brand (or even to purchase something). Again, the key here is to make communications convenient, timely, and reflective of their stage in the buyer’s journey. Cross-platform app development is helping organisations like yours to accelerate features delivery, unleash innovation and compete. Learn more.

In 2023, there’s no excuse for having disparate mobile and web applications. Companies that are leading the way recognise the importance of creating a seamless experience for users and customers. The two applications should effectively talk to each other—even when the user switches between devices part way through their journey.

For instance, User Y starts browsing your website on their mobile web browser at 10:00am. They click on several product pages comparing similar products, before switching to your dedicated mobile app, which remembers the last page they visited and displays this. They add one of the products they were browsing to their basket at 12:00pm, before becoming distracted and leaving the app.

The next morning at around 10:00am—when the user is known to interact with your brand the most—they receive a push notification to their mobile letting them know that stock levels are running low (and reminding them to check out). The user purchases the item from the app because the notification was convenient, relevant and timely. Related Read: 5 Reasons to Embrace a Cross-Platform Mobile Architecture

Managing disparate code bases and applications across web and mobile is a sure-fire way to create a disjointed user and customer experience. Without a single point of truth, new features may become inconsistent over time, leaving users feeling frustrated and disconnected from your brand.

However, by adopting a cross-platform approach to app development, customers can enjoy a seamless user experience across web and mobile, while always benefitting from the latest version of your software.

From a business perspective, embracing cross-platform development also makes life easier for developers, since they don’t have to manage separate code instances for each platform. As a result, they can be more operationally efficient, roll out new features faster, and experiment and react to market conditions more quickly, since there’s only one code base to focus on.

Another important benefit of moving to a cross-platform approach is the impact that it has on talent acquisition. Using a common digital stack with platform-agnostic tools like React Native not only opens up the talent pool to a wider network of tech talent , but it makes it easier for developers to come in and start making an impact from day one

All in all, using a modern tech stack and taking the leap to a cross-platform mobile architecture lays the foundations for greater velocity and innovation. This is good news for your users and customers, developers, and the business as a whole. Related Read: How Cross-Platform App Development Reduces TCO

At NearForm, we know what it takes to build fast, modern applications that provide a truly seamless user and customer experience across web and mobile. We’re experts in helping businesses like yours move to an efficient and innovative cross-platform approach to app development, and can help you de-risk your cross-platform journey at every stage.

From identifying the right tools, technologies, and selecting modern data stack, to coaching your teams and ensuring wide-scale adoption, you’re in safe hands. We have over a decade of experience helping businesses leverage cloud-native technologies, open source frameworks and engineering best practices to accelerate digital transformation.

Click below to find out how you can start creating seamless experiences across web and mobile, empower your development teams, and boost tech talent within your organisation. Find out more about our approach to cross-platform app development and discover how it can benefit your business.