6 Strategies to Drive Up Sales with Your Mobile App

In today’s digitized economy a mobile app is a powerful marketing tool and a smart competitive differentiator. It can help you promote your brand, products and services faster, get to know your customers like never before, and aid your marketing research. Moreover, with a good strategy in place, a mobile app can drive up sales.

According to this research, the average smartphone user spends roughly 3 hours a day on their device, 90% of which accounts for mobile app usage. By tapping into the purchasing psychology of e-shoppers, your app can support your sales thus helping your business thrive.

However, an app that is downloaded is not necessarily used. There are more than 80 apps installed on the average person’s smartphone, of which 9 are used every day and 30 every month. About 62% of all installed apps aren’t used at all, and in 25% of all cases apps are used only once after being downloaded. To ensure that your customers use your mobile app it’s essential to remind them that it’s on their device and give them compelling reasons to use it.

Mobile apps offer a plethora of ways for businesses to improve their customer base, engagement and loyalty as well as promote and secure sales. Since its 2021, this means we will be seeing a surge in mobile app adoption by many types of companies, you might want to consider investing in yours.

In this article, we’ve researched and outlined 6 strategies to help you drive up sales with your mobile app. So, read on to find out how to create a sales boosting machine worthy of your competitor’s envy.

1. Segment Your Audience Well

Segmenting your audience is an essential first action you need to take in order to increase your sales. Framing user segments will help you identify what drives users to your app so you can design more effective targeted marketing campaigns, messages and offers. This will also give you meaningful insight into the features that appeal to your audience the most and give them good reasons to use your app and purchase from it.

Think demographics, purchasing and in-app behavior, location, psychological and socio-economic factors. Conduct thorough research and make calculated decisions.

Regardless if you want to appeal to one specific segment or a few, you have to adapt your mobile app marketing strategy. It should fit your brand’s goals and objectives, while also successfully catering to your customers’ needs. Keep in mind that different segments require separate approaches, so you might want to experiment with a few strategies to see which one works best for your niche. Think of the different formats so you can move your audience through the sales and marketing funnels successfully.

2. Personalize the Shopping Experience

With mobile apps it’s much easier to track your customers’ behaviour and respond to it accordingly. This means that wherever they’ve taken an action on your app but they didn’t complete it, you can reach out to them to find out why.

For example, a user left your app after browsing through your store. During their visit, they may have saved items in their ‘favorites’ list, or maybe added them to their shopping cart, but never pressed the checkout button. You can remind them to go back and finish with a push notification, or you can ask them what happened and get valuable feedback.

Understanding why your customer didn’t complete their action a.k.a the conversion, will give you valuable insight into what might have gone wrong in your funnel. It could be a bug in the app that they stumbled upon, or maybe they just changed their mind because it’s too pricey.

By learning what works and what doesn’t you’ll be able to update your app and marketing strategy accordingly, and advance your business offering. Knowing the real customer experience will help you create better personalized campaigns, messaging, ads and discounts. This should improve the in-app user experience and nurture your prospects into buyers.

You can even take this approach one step further by trying to cross-sell and upsell products based on the customer browsing and purchasing history. For instance, a shopper buys a beach towel, sandals and a beach tote bag in their last purchases. You can then send them recommendations for products in the same category or trend, e.g. sunglasses or a sun hat. This will add a personal touch to the shopping experience which can positively affect your sales.

3. Send Effective Push Notifications

Push notifications are a unique feature that mobile apps can leverage to boost sales. They are a powerful form of mobile marketing that allows you to engage customers within your app by reaching out to them wherever they are and seamlessly nudge them to a higher offer.

In 2020 alone, push notifications resulted in roughly 26% higher mobile open rates and 92% higher mobile app retention rates. What is more, 50% of users who opt-in for push notifications do so to gain exclusive or special offers, which means that these users were already looking to buy from you.

Push notifications have also proven to be more effective in converting compared to email, but in order to have them successfully increase your mobile app sales you should use them wisely.

Here are some tips on how to set up your mobile app push notifications:

• Send them at the right time – If you’re hosting a sale it’s good to schedule the notifications for it within enough time before it begins. If, however, you want to let users know about a special offer like a discount code, then it’s ok to send the notification at an unscheduled time. Be smart and take strategic actions.
• Don’t be too pushy – As effective as push notifications are if you overdo them, users can get annoyed. So, test notification frequency to see which one users respond to better.
• Provide value – Make sure you understand how people use your app and only send out notifications when they are important.
• Allow opt-in – Remember that customers always have a choice and if you force them to receive your notifications they may delete your app altogether.

Push notifications provide welcomed updates for your audience. So to drive up sales, optimize conversion and retention rates you have to know how to use them correctly.

4. Include a Loyalty Program

Sending your customers special offers and promotions is essential, but if you want to drive up your in-app sales it’s good to take it even further.

Including a loyalty program in your mobile app will help you stay consistently engaged with your customers, thus boosting customer retention and building better relationships. Shoppers are more likely to engage in a loyalty program if it doesn’t require them to put in a lot of time and effort. Since mobile apps collect lots of relevant data they enable you to provide personalized experiences without flooding users with information they don’t care much about.

In addition to rewarding customers who are frequently purchasing from you, a good idea is to recognize those who spend more money while doing it. This will help increase order frequency and the average amount spent, thus boosting your overall sales and revenue.

Praising customers when they choose your brand over a competitor’s is a wonderful incentive to encourage loyalty. With mobile apps users can more easily collect points and exchange them for rewards, instead of carrying a physical membership card or a punch card.

When developing and perfecting your loyalty program it’s important that you make it easy to join and participate in. What is more, with features and functionalities like tailored product recommendations, messaging and notifications, mobile apps can change the way you motivate users to stay loyal.

5. Add the Right Features

Well designed, eye-catching apps make people want to use them, and while the basics like functionality, usability and layout help the user experience, it’s also necessary that they have the right features to meet customers’ needs.

Simplicity in Design

Your mobile app should have easy access to information and seamless navigation. Many users have short attention spans, so if your app is difficult to operate on they will quickly lose interest. So, to ensure an optimized user experience make sure to provide a clear, uncluttered layout with an obvious path to the next step. Additionally, make sure that what users see on their screen is sufficiently detailed to make their experience worthwhile.

Quick Loading Times

If your customer has to wait too long to load your app they might lose patience, get bored and decide to seek out something better. To provide seamless navigation means choosing an appropriate design approach.

Flexibility

Users will have different operating systems – Android, iOS and Windows – on their devices, so it’s necessary to make your mobile app available on all of them. Take into account the different screen sizes and resolutions. Ensure that everything works well by testing on all systems and browsers before offering it to users.

Secure In-app Payments

Security is an absolute must. Many mobile applications store sensitive and personal information as well as credit and debit card details. To protect your customers from unfriendly hackers it’s essential that you ensure and enforce strict practices and have a security checklist to go over when testing your app for vulnerable spots. When it comes to in-app payments, ensure that your app has the technical ability to process payments and partner with a trusted payment provider.

Search Options

The search option is a very important feature that many users make use of. Successful in-app search is a good conversion tool, as it helps users access all of your content to quickly and easily find what they are looking for.

Push Notifications

We have discussed why push notifications are important from a marketing point of view, so it’s only fair we provide some details on the technical side.

Just like easy to read emails are less likely to end up in a spam folder, push notifications that combine text, graphic or a combination of the two should be sent to your customers with content that they will interest them. Hence, providing personalized, clear and relevant push messages aimed at a particular user is what will drive your sales up.

Feedback Section

Well-performing apps are built with the customer in mind, so even if you think that you’ve perfected yours there’s always room to make it even better. The best way to understand what to improve and why is to ask your users directly. By including a feedback button/section on your app you will show your clients that your app is there to make their lives better. What is more, involving users in the process will also strengthen your relationship with them.

Updates

Once you’ve sorted out how to make your app better, make sure to send updates periodically. Updates keep your app fresh and ensure that you’re not only offering a better product, but also responding to security issues as they arise.

Conclusion

Developing a well-functioning mobile app can provide a great competitive advantage for your business. It can help boost your brand’s presence, make your services more accessible, improve customer loyalty and drive up your sales.

We hope you have enjoyed learning more about these 5 strategies and that you’re ready to incorporate some of these tips into your app.