Why Mobile Apps are a Brand’s Greatest Marketing Tool

Grow Your Business by Investing in the Customer Experience

Let’s be honest, humans are pretty reliant on cell phones. For some, it’s their only connection to the outside world. While cell phones allow us to communicate through calls, text, email, and video chat, they also enable you to order takeout, check business hours, scroll through social media, and find the answers to just about anything. It’s no surprise that they have now become one of the best marketing tools a brand could have.

Brands who develop and utilize mobile apps have an opportunity to connect with customers in real time, while enabling a convenient shopping experience. They can also be a valuable resource in strengthening the customer relationship.

Connect with Customers in Real Time

To be a leader in any industry, it’s important to remember that customers are almost always looking for quick service. Mobile apps can facilitate direct connection between the customer and brand. Whether it’s a retail business or a service provider, making an app as seamless as possible is essential for providing an intuitive shopping experience or service offering and giving the customer exactly what they want.

When a customer downloads your mobile app, they’re making the decision to create a relationship with your brand. It’s up to your business to maintain that relationship, but what’s the best course of acton to do so?

• Account information storage lets customers digitally store various forms of payments, membership cards, gift cards, and vouchers, as well as frequently bought items. One-click purchasing provides customers with a quick, efficient checkout experience.
• Push notifications allow you to stay in communication with your customer. These alerts can include reminding customers of an abandoned cart, promoting a new sale, or delivering a new offer that was created specifically for them.
• Reviews, FAQs, live chats, and other customer service initiatives provide consumers with the ability to have their questions answered immediately and provide feedback on their experience.
• Live order status allows customers to be notified and view the location of their order. Through GPS tracking, customers are able to follow anything from furniture, groceries, or other products from the moment their order ships to when it arrives at their doorstep.

User Friendly & Convenient

Ensuring your app is user-friendly is imperative to creating the best, most convenient shopping experience possible. Forbes reported that 14% of people delete an app because they could not effortlessly navigate around it. In that same vein, the best way to ensure your app is user-friendly is reducing the amount of clicks.

Mobile ordering can also expedite the sale process with easy, convenient shopping. Delivery and in-store pickup options let the customer know their time is important to you, and the mobile app lets them shop at their leisure. And, by offering a user account function, consumers can store their payment information for even faster purchases in the future.

Loyalty Programs Build Stronger Relationships

Developing a loyalty program gives brands the opportunity to reward customers for their purchases. Because mobile apps can store customer information and promote loyalty programs, they can put consumers right in the driver’s seat. This allows consumers to directly manage their own experience with your brand, all while earning rewards.

With the ability to analyze customer purchasing habits, send product recommendations, and create offers based on their history, brands are designing an experience that makes it easy for them to find what they are looking for. The holistic mobile app experience thus increases how often your customers buy, ultimately growing the customer relationship.

How In-App Promotions Drive Customer Engagement

At DBM Group, we created and released a new loyalty app for an East Coast-based grocery store chain, with the goal of creating a loyalty program that would provide customers with offers tailored to their specific wants and needs.

The brand already had a promotion in place where for every $100 a customer spends, they would receive either a free ice cream or coffee from the in-store made-to-order counter. Not only has this offer resulted in an increase in the average ticket size, but with the implementation of the mobile app, customers are now excited to keep track of their earned points in order to receive the promotion.

In efforts to improve and promote the use of the loyalty app, they’ve began to implement push notifications to alert customers of their upcoming rewards and any in-store promotions that might relate to them. As more users download and use the app, they plan to create customized email campaigns that directly correlate with the purchase behaviors of a particular customer.

Mobile apps should be much more than just replicating your website onto an additional platform; it serves as an opportunity to connect with customers by giving them the ability to effortlessly communicate, engage, and grow their relationship with your brand. By investing in mobile apps, you are not only improving the customer experience, but ultimately opening the door to becoming an industry leader. You’re well on your way to obtaining unlimited future business opportunities.

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