An app and a loyalty program are quickly becoming essential tools for maintaining customer engagement, even for small businesses and services. Not only does it increase brand recognition through near-constant visibility and access, these tools provide value to your customers that set you apart from your competitors. But getting your customers to download your app and engage with your company is only the first step.

Do you know when customers stop engaging with your app?

Most usage occurs in the first thirty days. Then customer retention and usage starts to sharply drop off. Make sure your marketing analysis software doesn't just stop at app acquisition. It's important to also know how often your market is utilizing the tool, which features are the most useful, and what bugs are getting in the way.

A lot of different factors could be causing sharp drops in activity. Knowing which ones are the underlying factors, especially for different customer profile types within your market, is one of the most essential tools for increasing that retention. Regularly test your app for malfunctions, slow load times, poor syncing, and other performance problems that could be affecting engagement. You can even set up surveys to get feedback.

How can you regain engagement?

If you have a powerful marketing tool like Marketo, it's much easier to manage marketing campaigns and outreach efforts across multiple platforms. Use the analytics to find the customers that need more reconnection efforts and targeted marketing strategies. Then you can:

• Use their customer profile type to send them targeted deals which are most likely to encourage recurring sales.
• Send targeted content asking what you can do to encourage more engagement (a direct appeal).
• Emphasize new features and improvements that benefit specifically targeted groups.

There several simple ways to reach out to inactive users. Tools like Marketo make it even easier by helping you filter out those inactive users and create campaigns designed for reengagement. Go to folio1 for more specific strategies and how to boost your sales through Marketo marketing.