For eCommerce marketers, mobile has never been more important. The fact that mobile commerce sales increased by nearly 40 percent from 2014 to 2015 should both excite and scare you into focusing on mobile. In that time there was nearly $30 billion more in mobile purchases. Did you miss out on this audience by not having an app? If you have made the dive into mobile, are users installing your app and ultimately making purchases? Whether your eCommerce app is brand new, or you’re already driving a majority of your sales on mobile, here are four ways to drive app growth:
Harness Your Mobile Traffic
Hopefully by now, you know that mobile web traffic is essential to increasing revenue at any eCommerce retailer. According to MarketingLand, “roughly 56 percent of consumer traffic to the leading US websites is now from mobile devices.” While mobile users are spending four hours a day on their phones, it must be noted that 90 percent of that time is spent inside of mobile apps; making it paramount for any and all eCommerce marketers to drive mobile app installs from their mobile site.
Organic search traffic drives more installs than all of Facebook’s paid app install product, once again proving mobile web traffic as a key driver of mobile app engagement. How do you harness that traffic into installs?
Interstitials or smart banners are a few ways that marketers are utilizing their mobile web traffic to drive those coveted installs. In fact, top brands successfully use this channel as a large driver of their growth. Interstitials and smart banners allow consumers to have a better purchase experience by offering the choice to download your mobile app or to stay on the mobile website if they choose.
Deep links will ensure that after the consumer downloads your app, they will be taken inside the app to the product that they intended to purchase. Jet, shown in the example above, uses a smart banner to increase their average daily downloads by 3x.
Deep Link Your Emails
Email is the oldest – and typically most effective – digital marketing tactic for eCommerce companies. It presents the best opportunity for you to repeatedly get deals, offers, or product updates in front of your customers. And similarly to your web traffic, 56 percent of emails are opened on mobile devices. In other words: your eCommerce marketing strategy isn’t complete without an effective email marketing campaign.
However, with current Email Service Providers, emails are broken on mobile. When a user clicks on a link on mobile, they are taken to the mobile website instead of the app where the user isn’t logged in, the conversion-to-purchase is much lower, and the overall user experience is worse. Luckily, Branch is now working with Email Service Providers to automatically include deep links in your marketing emails that will take users directly to the content they want to see in the app, whether that app is installed or not.
Customers will no longer go through a difficult coupon-code process to get 20% off, it will be a seamless path to purchase. In fact, our research says that using deep links in emails can increase app session times by 65 percent, ultimately equaling more purchases.
Optimize Onboarding
User onboarding is one the most subtle adjustments mobile apps can make to retain and engage their customers. App abandonment can happen suddenly, and is a metric mobile marketers are continually trying to solve.
We’ve found that personalizing the onboarding process will increase your onboarding rates. For example, showing the face of a friend that referred a user to your app, a personalized product, or a local deal during the onboarding process are all options for enticing a user to continue on their buying journey.
Along with personalization, simplicity is a key. Make the steps for log-in or sign-up as easy as possible. If a lot of the information you’re asking for at onboarding is only necessary later, do exactly that: ask for it later. In fact, Gametime used Branch and Apptimize to determine that users were 15% more likely to make a purchase if they were deep linked directly to content instead of going through a short onboarding flow. Think hard about what your users want from your app. Your onboarding metrics will thank you.
Enticing Offers
The psychology surrounding eCommerce discounts is no different than the psychology of a discount sign in a storefront. If users feel the deal is too good to pass up, they’ll make a purchase. Use these offers with deep links to make the user experience seamless and revenues will naturally increase. Entice your email list, social media channels, and organic/paid search with:
- deals of the day
- holiday sales
- rewards for being loyal
Make sure to reward word-of-mouth interactions and referrals with coupon codes, products, or cash. Consumers are now 18x more loyal when they use a brand’s mobile app, and even more loyal when they share the experience of purchasing similar products as friends and family.
The rewards they earn from sharing will bring in new customers, but also double as repeat purchases. Creating a win-win from a revenue standpoint.
While some of these marketing tactics can be used across mobile and desktop, they will all lead to mobile growth. eCommerce businesses especially must be conscious of the number of customers searching for their brand on mobile devices, and the power of their mobile app.
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