5 Key Trends to Excel in Mobile CRM

Are you curious about the future of CRM for Mobile? We’ve outlined five key trends to help you stay ahead and enhance your strategy.

The challenges—and changes—that the mobile industry has faced during the past couple of years have been discussed in depth. And now it is clear, or at least it should be, that mobile marketing as it used to be doesn’t exist anymore.

Table of Contents

1. What Is the Importance of CRM for Mobile?
2. CRM for Mobile and App Growth Taking the Lead
3. Recentering App Growth and 5 Trends You Should Be Aware Of
4. REPLUG’s Bonus Tips
5. Conclusion

Paid User Acquisition is not the king of the mobile reign anymore—investing huge budgets on paid activities alone won’t bring you efficient growth, but most likely, it will just leave empty pockets.

In this article, we will take a look at what should be our main focus and how everything has changed by the time. Let’s start.

What Is the Importance of CRM for Mobile?

Tailored and targeted mobile CRM system techniques enable marketers to increase the retention rate of acquired consumers. As a result, app usage will grow over time, lowering the churn rate (the number of users who abandon the app).

Additionally, mobile CRM enhances conversion rates throughout the funnel, driving actions like sign-ups, purchases, or subscriptions.

Focusing on key metrics and KPIs allows businesses to increase Lifetime Value, optimize marketing spend, and improve ROI, making mobile CRM platforms essential for achieving business goals.

Related: CRM for Mobile App: 8 Advices for a Successful Strategy

The Advantages and Why You Need to Know About Them

Mobile CRM is crucial in helping marketers build lasting relationships with clients and encouraging desired in-app behaviors post-download.

Various channels, such as push notifications, in-app messaging, and email, can be used to communicate effectively with real-time users. While traditional texts are less common, they can still enhance your CRM strategy. Additionally, modern mobile CRM tools often include features like the Inbox App for even greater engagement.

Now, let’s take a look at what is happening and what your focus should be.

CRM Trends for Mobile and App Growth Taking the Lead

Now, who’s the new king in the mobile kingdom, then? Let’s take a step back.

When Paid UA was the center of all the mobile marketing activities, all other activities were just supporting the budget spend. App Store Optimization, CRM data, and Brand activities supported the scale but were not essential for success.

Today, consequentially to the changes of the past three years, but also due to the fierce competition, all those activities that before were marginal now have to play a primary role.

Does it mean Mobile CRM is the new King? And App Store Optimization is the Queen? Absolutely not.

To identify the new king, we need to rethink all processes and put App Growth at the center of our kingdom, with all the app marketing activities playing an equally important role in efficient mobile growth.

Recentering App Growth and 5 Trends You Should Be Aware Of

At REPLUG, we’ve been stressing this concept since the beginning of time, pushing every partner to consider all the activities as part of a unique full-funnel strategy.

The Growth Rocket Model.

The Growth Rocket Model was created to assist app developers in determining what matters when defining the best app growth strategy. You can see the visual representation below.

Now, one of the most important activities is certainly Mobile CRM, which is crucial to increase engagement and retention, as well as the conversion of the users we pay so much to bring into our mobile applications—in two words: customer loyalty.

We will now cover the five trends you should follow in order to make the users more loyal and more engaged with mobile products.

1. Divide the Audience

Regarding these trends, you should be focusing on segmenting your audience based on the following:

• User Preferences: Personalize messages based on interests, like favorite brands for e-commerce or preferred orders for delivery apps.
• App Activities: Segment users by how they interact with app features.
• Monetary Value: Prioritize high-value users while incentivizing potential high-value users to build habits.
• Frequency & Recency: Tailor engagement strategies for frequent users and those who need occasional nudges.

Related: How to Ensure an Effective User Onboarding

2. Use Different Strategies

Segmenting users is just the first step; effective communication requires differentiation. Here’s how to enhance your Mobile CRM strategy:

• Personalize Messages: Tailored messages boost interactions and conversions. Analyze user habits, purchases, and behaviors to craft relevant content.
• Timing Matters: Send messages when users are most active or likely to convert, like targeting grocery app users during peak ordering times.
• Adjust Frequencies: Align message frequency and promotions with user activity levels, using clusters based on recency and engagement.

3. Be Helpful: Don’t Only Chase the Conversions

We see, unfortunately, more and more app developers and marketers asking the users to do actions—buy, subscribe, order, and others. It’s like continuously asking for users’ money. It is crucial, though, that you provide users with something they will appreciate. When it comes to Mobile CRM solutions, take a look at this:

• If you only ask users for their money, they will get tired: in the long term, the users will lose their interest in your product and in your brand, and eventually their loyalty.
• Send useful and interesting messages/statistics: for example, with a client operating in the wine delivery industry, we started sending statistics about wine consumption across our userbase, which wines were the favorites, etc. – generating interest and eventually conversions as well. It’s just a different approach rather than just asking.
• Ask for users’ opinions. They will appreciate: people love it when they get the chance to give their point of view. You can do it both with the most loyal users, to understand what they love about your app, but also with the ones that are unhappy, to understand what could be improved.

4.  Exploit Referral Programs

There are so many app developers that just don’t realize how powerful is word of mouth. Hence they just neglect referral programs, or at least they don’t invest time and resources to create specific strategies.

• Identify the best users and make them promoters: you probably have a good base of users who love your product, use it every day, and would like to be your ambassadors. Why not ask them to share it?
• Identify the right moment: of course, we should wait to be sure that the user really loves us. Maybe after they left a positive review or just after they received their second order, don’t ask to refer a friend immediately after the download.
• Offer rewards: yes, they love your app, and they probably will share it with their friends if you ask. But with an incentive, the probability of success can increase, and it’s also nice to reward the users who are happy to help.
• Get free users (+13%): a good and well-planned referral program can really help get new users “for free.” With a client operating in the photo printing app, we managed to get up to 13% of the new orders coming from referred members.

5. Surprise Your Users

You should try to be original, to be personal, and funny if you want. Try to include these tips to keep customer satisfaction:

• Be original, be personal, and be entertaining: we receive discounts every day and incentives from all the apps and products. Of course, promotions are welcome and useful to generate conversions, but they don’t create retention. Be personal—send a photo of your team to the users, and address them in the first person.
• Don’t forget the special occasions: if you have the information about the user’s birthday, don’t forget to send your personalized best wishes (with a present), but also don’t forget about the day when the user became your customer and other special occasions.
• Include gamification: reward the customer engagements they do inside the app, let them know that they are among the most active users, and create competitions to keep the users entertained.

The above points are, of course, just a few tactics that can be implemented on a Mobile CRM strategy, and each app and product is a different case. Nonetheless, we believe those are the points that are applicable to almost any type of app—subscription, nonsubscription, gaming, e-commerce, utility, and others.

REPLUG’s Bonus Tips

To help you apply those points to the mobile CRM strategy, we prepared a list of Dos and Don’ts to keep in mind when thinking about the retention activities:

1. Mobile CRM Dos

• Use multichannel campaigns—push + in-app + emails for maximum reach
• Collect as much data as possible to personalize the messages
• Segment your audience—seriously, segment it!
• Sleep, test, repeat
• Work in frameworks

2. Mobile CRM Don’ts

• Don’t forget to set specific goals—possibly monetary
• Don’t look only at open rates and CTR—they’re vanity metrics
• Don’t mix your goals—tackle one at a time
• Don’t forget about emails—they increase the reach
• Don’t stress your users

Conclusion

Keep in mind that the factors we included are a good starting point for creating a mobile retention strategy to maximize customer loyalty. But of course, there are many other things to do.

Be mindful and take a step-by-step approach when it comes to CRM technology for Mobile. Your app will get the best results (with satisfied customer interactions).

Need help implementing a CRM strategy for your mobile app or improving communication with your mobile users? Get in touch with us by clicking here.

Originally published on Oct 26, 2022. Updated on Jan 03, 2025.