Peter Adams, Digital Marketing Manager – Mobile at Shell
Shell has been active in the mobile domain for several years now and has learnt much about the potential of mobile and how to leverage a global platform for local marketing engagement and activities.
Shell recognises the importance of the emerging digital eco-system and is actively discovering new business models which are developing in accordance with new customer engagement opportunities. The digital world is evolving quickly and you have to be in a continuous development mode as the technology matures and customers adjust to changes in how we interact with each other.
Clearly, the digital experiences extend beyond mobile and the infrastructure also becomes a touch point which is a contextual component of the customer interaction. This could be the fuel station forecourt, the fuel pump, the shop and now includes the car itself, through the connected experience on the vehicle dashboard. These increasing touch points are therefore relevant in how and when we engage with our customers and how our customers engage with us.
We launched the Shell Motorist App in 2011 and provided some relatively basic functionality initially, mainly centred around finding a Shell station and providing a “News” and “Products” area to inform our customers of relevant articles and information about our fuels products. Since then, we have matured in our own experiences and further developed the App to incorporate more features and functions that are applicable to the motorist, enhancing other areas to refine the customer experience.
This is a Global App and we have taken a platform approach in our development, leveraging this across ~30 markets. Our mobile customer base has almost tripled since 2015 and we expect this rate of uptake to increase as we continue to deploy more and more relevant and appealing features into our markets. Features range from customer utility, such as mobile payment and finding a Shell station for example, through to loyalty, driving performance scoring and 360 video experiences to name only a few of the growing feature sets.
This is an exciting time for us as we begin to converge upon a Global App platform that can offer a breadth of features to all markets, whilst giving markets more control and flexibility in how they integrate the App into their marketing campaigns and promotions. Mobile has shown that it is more profitable than the traditional marketing channels, producing healthy ROIs through being an ‘always on’ channel for the customer.
Going forward, we are striving towards a mobile first strategy so that we maximise our customer engagement opportunities, where more of our customers will choose mobile as their preferred access to Shell’s products and services.
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