E-commerce Apps: Smart Ways to Increase Store Visits & Customer Engagement

Pratik Rupareliya
Intuz
Published in
5 min readMar 7, 2018

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Every day, a new player is jumping into the e-commerce arena in the hope of making it big. Challenging situations in the segment are motivating online stores to adopt innovative techniques for improving sales. In such a scenario, improving customer engagement and store visits by launching a mobile app is turning out to be the best bet for startups. As users cling to their mobile screens for more time than desktops, targeting them on mobile platforms fetch more results.

Instead of just focusing on a single channel to target customers, an omnichannel approach proves out to be more beneficial. The number of mobile users has surpassed desktop users already. In such a scenario, it is prudent to focus on an integrated model consisting of an M-commerce channel too.

Reference: https://www.merchantsavvy.co.uk/mobile-ecommerce-statistics/

Adopting the Mobile approach: Enriching an E-commerce Mobile App for customer engagement

Having a mobile app has a strong impact on customer engagement metrics. As users are more inclined to interact with brands and businesses using their mobiles, having a mobile app for the success of an e-commerce business is essential.

Customer engagement is defined by all the activities that motivate a customer to interact with a business. A business can boost customer engagement by investing in a mobile app. While investing in a mobile app and adopting the mobile first approach, a business should focus on the following to improve customer engagement:

Embed Personalization Features

Customers feel more inclined towards businesses that offer them a great shopping experience. Using an app, a business can improve customer-initiated as well as automated personalization capabilities.

Personalization empowers customers to use the ecommerce store in a way they like. They can input their shopping preferences. A mobile app can also adopt an automated approach that studies consumer’s purchase history, behavior and presents a different screen on mobile app, every time he/she opens it.

Improve UI/UX

Improving customer engagement metrics is impossible without offering a great user experience (UX). An intuitive user interface (UI) not only improves UX but also helps in reducing the instances of cart abandonment- a major reason for distress among ecommerce business owners.

Source: https://www.shopping-cart-migration.com/

By building a mobile app, a business can promise better user experience than a mobile website and can solve major issues listed above. A mobile app helps users to search extensively, avail various payment options and checkout easily.

Promote Personal Touch with Live chat support

E-commerce lacked behind brick and mortar stores due to lack of personal touch. But with the coming of live chat solutions, this problem is solved, too. Including live chat support in apps can help businesses to interact with customers in a better way. They can solve their queries and problems quickly, reducing the chance of dissatisfaction.

Live chat is extremely convenient for customers as they are not required to wait for talking to a sales representative. Using live chat solutions in mobile app can help improve engagement and ultimately store sales.

Related article: Why Should Your Business Use Chatbots?

Engage with Push Notifications

Push notifications are a great way to engage customers. Online stores can identify customer purchase patterns and shoot targeted push notifications that would motivate users to visit the store and engage in what it has to offer.

Know here How to utilize push notifications in your mobile app

Improving Store Visits via E-commerce Mobile Apps

Customer engagement is a challenge that every eCommerce business needs to tackle alongside the challenge related to store visits. In a crowded landscape, businesses are troubled by the problem of visibility. But using the following techniques and tips, any mobile app can improve store visits phenomenally.

Offer Financial Incentives

Providing financial incentives such as discount coupons can attract potential buyers towards an eCommerce app. Integrating push notifications with time-bound deals is a good tactic that can enhance store visits in a short period of time. Other financial incentives can include time-specific deals, freebies, or gift hampers on logging in the app.

Post Product Videos on Social Media Networks

Using social media to reach potential as well as existing buyers is a great way to enhance your outreach. By posting product videos, tutorials or new shopping interface can motivate users to try out your app. Moreover, video is the most engaging form of content at present and you can leverage its potential for your benefits.

Developing a social media marketing plan that embeds product videos and store interface to prompt users to download the app and visit the store can be a great strategy to boost app traffic as well as store sales. Dedicated campaigns that prompt users to like and share a video to get a discount voucher can also work wonders to boost organic reach.

Referral marketing

Referral marketing always helps in getting more and more customers to your e-commerce business. It has been estimated that a recommendation from your family or friend can influence the overall buying decision.

Remarketing

Remarking is the technique in which your ads will be shown to all such people who have already visited your website. This can turn out to be a great way to show advertisements to people who have taken a look at some of the pages of your website but have not taken any action.

Upsell

It is a false statement that upset is not worth as many small e-commerce companies think this way. With proper upselling, you can drive an average of 4% sales and that too with your current customer base. When Amazon tested upsetting on their platform, they got an increase of 35% in their sales.

Give a Social proof

Social proofs are proof that your peers trust a brand to buy from it. 92% of customers have trust in a recommendation from a peer and 70% of people show trust in the recommendation of a stranger.

Strategize ASO

SEO is highly important and should be given a lot of attention to perform all of its useful techniques. 93% of web traffic that website gets comes from a search engine and only 5% of web searchers visit the second page of search result. That’ why you need to be present on the first page of the search engine.

Opt for paid traffic

Paid traffic is used for quickly generating sales for your e-commerce store. You might be thinking that paid traffic is expensive but with proper strategy, you can always achieve huge traffic for your website.

Intuz has been helping global e-commerce stores in improving its customer engagement metrics and store traffic by building intuitive mobile apps. Using agile app development methodology and app marketing techniques, Intuz makes sure an app succeeds in its motive to improve customer engagement and ultimately store sales.

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Pratik Rupareliya
Intuz

Techno-commercial leader heading Intuz as head of Strategy.