Mobile is changing the landscape of consumer interaction. Over the last few years, the mobile market has matured coupled with the immense eCommerce revenue potential. The growing ubiquity of mobile usage is deeply rooted in consumers’ desire to accomplish their daily tasks or finish their transactions without having to go through multiple platforms. And mobile applications give them that seamless shopping convenience. They can research, read reviews, view photos or even complete their payment of the product in a mobile app.
Mobile app downloads are projected to hit 108 billion downloads by next year. For online retailers, this is a key insight to start joining the mobile app revolution today. There are fast and convenient tools to help you build your own mobile app.
However, starting your mobile app should not end there. Definitely overtime, you need to arm yourself with strategies to increase your mobile app downloads. And so, how do you grow your online store’s mobile app downloads? How do you ensure your mobile app’s visibility? What will make your shoppers download your mobile app?
Well, you do not have to look elsewhere because we have compiled only the best strategies to promote your app and persuade your shoppers to download your mobile app today.
1 – Make it noticeable, promote it on your website
Let us start with a simple, convenient and highly effective approach: take advantage of your existing website. All of your potential and present customers will obviously come across your online store’s website. And when they are right in the middle of browsing your website, that’s when you encourage them to download your mobile app.
But should you only promote it through your mobile website?
The answer is NO. The first thinking is to promote your mobile app only through mobile websites. But online marketers fail to weigh in that desktop shopping constitutes to 71% of e-commerce purchases. Allow your online shoppers to discover and even install your mobile app through your desktop website too. Here is an illustrative example on how a mobile app can be installed through a website:
Great ideas to promote your mobile app through your website:
Now that we have settled that both mobile and desktop websites are best ways to utilize your mobile app promotion, let’s now see the following techniques to put it into action:
Navigation Menu: One of the clever ways to promote your app is through your navigation menu itself. No matter how your homepage looks like, it is a good booster to insert a navigation link of your mobile app.
CVS Pharmacy incorporates “Download Our App” in its menu
Banner Ad: A striking tactic to attract your online shoppers to download your mobile app is embedding web banners on your website. Banner ads are intended to notify your customers that you have a readily available mobile app for them to download in an instant. You can put your banner ad on the top most part of your website’s screen or on either side. Just make it sure to be eye-catching.
Uniqlo utilizes a striking website banner to promote its app
- Exit Intent Popups: You may have heard about the booming of exit-intent popups to be an effective way to combat cart abandonments, but this message that appears when your online shoppers are about to leave your site is also a useful tool to increase your mobile app downloads. Pop-up a message of a link to download your mobile app just right when they are about to exit.
- Splash Page: A splash page serves as an introductory page of a website. Quite common to mobile websites, splash pages can help attract visitors to download your mobile app since this is the first message that an online visitor will see. However, if you want to use this aggressive approach make sure to present convincing reasons why they need to download your mobile app instead of your website.
Peapod uses splash page to introduce PeapodMobile’s availability in the App Store
2 – Share that app, let shoppers refer you
The top source of awareness for consumers on mobile apps come from friends, family, and colleagues. Let your shoppers share your mobile app directly with their loved ones. Word of mouth marketing is still one of the most credible modes of advertising. In fact, 92% of worldwide consumers say that they strongly trust the recommendations from family and friends.
Recommendations effectively work because the reputation of the referrer is always at stake. Credibility is always a vital component to effectively communicate any advertising message. Without it, the audience receiving the message is most likely to tune out. That is why personal recommendations work great in increasing your mobile app downloads. Always take note, however, that promoting your mobile app via referrals should always contain the direct install link and don’t forget to include irresistible freebies in exchange of successful mobile app referrals.
Most thriving areas to let your shoppers recommend your mobile apps to their loved ones and colleagues:
- Text Messaging (SMS): What is a more personal approach than sending and receiving a text message? Personal text messages increase response rates by over 250% than generic ad messages. You can announce to your online shoppers to send a personal text message inviting their friends or relatives to download the mobile app they are using. Entice your shoppers by incenting them for every successful mobile app download made through their referral.
- Email Communications: Email invites from someone you personally know are most likely to be opened because it removes the receiver’s doubt that the email is just a marketing nuisance. What you can do, if you have an existing email data of your shoppers, is to send them an email that they can forward to their friends, family or colleagues. In that email, insert a banner invite of the mobile app’s downloadable link. More advanced apps help you configure your online store to automatically send an email inviting your new customers to download your mobile app.
3 – Get interactive, engage with your shoppers via social media
Social and Messaging apps are spent more than 68 minutes per day by a mobile user. The time spent in social messaging apps by mobile users has increased to 50% year-over-year. This towering trend is something that online retailers should adjust and adapt to. One way to embrace this trend is to make sure you promote your mobile app via your social media accounts.
How to utilize social media sites in marketing your mobile app?
- Facebook Chats: If customers have started a conversation, either because they have a question or they need troubleshooting, via their Facebook messenger accounts, you can implicitly inject a promotion of your mobile app. Encourage them that most FAQs can be found via your mobile app so that they will get a faster solution right at their fingertips in the future. The good news is that there is a smart app, Quick Facebook Chat, that flawlessly links your online store to a shopper’s direct Facebook account.
- Twitter Cards: Expand the visibility of your mobile app, use Twitter’s “expanded tweets”. Twitter cards let online stores expand their tweets showcasing products, photo galleries, and even a downloadable link of the store’s mobile app.
Etsy uses Twitter Card to promote products and at the same time enticing shoppers to get the Etsy app
4 – One click away, make your mobile app downloadable in search engine results
App discovery is not only limited to the app store itself. 1 in every 4 app users discovers a mobile app via the search engine. While those who downloaded an app, 50% of them said that they were driven by a search ad.
Take for example, an athlete is eyeing to buy a new pair of running shoes. He heads to Google and searches for “buy white running shoes for men”. Then, the search engine lists all the available sites that offer running shoes for men with his preferred color. And this is where a promotional opportunity knocks for you. Instead of just the normal search engine result page, you can inject a link to your mobile app.
Both Nike and Lazada directly includes a download link to their mobile apps on the search engine results page
5 – Get it featured, leverage on reviews and blogs
60% of consumers say reviews and ratings are crucial factors when deciding to download an app. Gaining positive reviews from your app users can influence your downloads exponentially. The reason is that a positive review means that your mobile app is worth downloading.
In order for your reviews to positively translate to downloads, you must stay away from generating fabricated ones. People can sense a fake review. You want real people providing their testimonials about your app. A plus factor also is that you will also know the things your app needs to improve on or what they love about it.
What are the best ways to translate reviews into potential downloads?
- Pitch to app reviews sites: Request for your mobile app to get featured on credible review sites with rich web traffic. Aside from a possible upsurge of app downloads, you can also expect an influx of traffic to your website.
- Invite and reward user reviews: Invite your app users to leave a testimonial about your mobile app. In order to do that, always find a way for your customers to comment, e.g. a discussion or reply section on your website or mobile app. You can also offer discount coupons or freebies in exchange of their testimonials to increase the number of reviews.
- Blog about your users’ testimonials: Feature on your website a blog of what your users love about your mobile app. Compile and pick reviews that are worth mentioning in order to generate buzz on online readers.
6 – They will leave you, get them back with app re-engagement strategy
You have made them download your mobile app but a cruel reality is that they will delete the app if they do not need it anymore. In just a month of download, 60% of apps are deleted which progresses to 90% of app deletion in its sixth month of download. Every mobile app faces the dilemma of retaining the app users. As app users come and go, starting a re-engagement strategy to encourage abandoning users to try your app one more time. In fact, the good news is that 79% of abandoning users will try your app for a second time if it failed to impress them on their first time.
To take advantage of that second chance, re-engage your shoppers to download your mobile app once again with these reconnection strategies:
Incent shoppers to download again: App users who deleted your mobile app want incentives for them to download your mobile app again. In fact, 30% of abandoning app users want discounts or coupons on their next purchase and 24% want to receive exclusive or bonus content to re-install the app.
Lazada invites shoppers to download app in exchange for a purchase of
- Promote new products or collections: App abandonment is fueled by losing of interest toward the app (34%) and app’s uselessness (24%). A helpful way to drive your shoppers to try your mobile app one more time is by notifying them of a newly added product or top picks of the week. 16% of abandoning app users stated that they will download the mobile app if they are notified of news. The new arrivals could reignite their interest to come back to your app and shop again.
– Of course, it’s hard and time-consuming for any shop owners to pick new products or hot items of the week and send it manually to all customers. A mobile app builder with built-in marketing system helps you send push notifications of new arrivals or top picks to all app users automatically. What’s better than connecting with your customers than a notification directly to their phones, right?
7 – Always include an app link in your email signatures
One quick and reliable way to ensure that you are promoting your mobile app to all of your customers is by email signatures. Always make it a habit to add a download link to your app in your signatures on every email that you send out like the following:
- Email Newsletters
- Customer Service/Inquiry Emails
- Customer Transactions
AsiaTravel includes a link to its mobile app in its email signature
Getting the click
We live in a generation where mobile is a staple necessity. With 6.1 billion worldwide smartphone users anticipated by 2021, shoppers are rapidly adapting to mobile marketing. This basically means that mobile is a lifestyle to most of the consumers. Shoppers use the convenience of mobile apps in exchange for going to physical stores to find specific products or check prices and features.
With this, online retailers understand that they need to keep up with the changes in the marketplace in order to engage and bring more opportunities for their business. Joining the mobile app revolution is an easy solution, the most challenging part for online shops is how to encourage shoppers to download their mobile app.
Establishing credibility, explaining the functionality, and justifying the benefits of downloading your shop’s mobile app are just the many ways we have handed out for you to successfully get that click.
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