In-store apps are a fantastic way to engage with your customers.
Many customers use smartphones and tablets while they are at a store to enhance their shopping experience or research products. The opportunity this affords retailers allows them to increase brand loyalty by creating an app that offers rewards, discounts, and other means of communicating with their customers—even outside of their stores.
Effectively promoting mobile apps and getting your users to download them can be quite challenging. Just placing the app on the Apple App Store or Google Play is not enough, you need to let people know about it—and not just anyone, but the right consumers.
Fortunately, there is an audience that is already engaged with your brand: the customers in your physical space. Simple signage at the store is a good first step to provide awareness. In addition to signage, having your staff to promote the app can also be useful. But there are far more effective ways to promote your app to customers.
Your Captive Audience
Customers who have visited your store and signed onto the WiFi are prime candidates for your apps, as you already know they use the internet in your shops. Simply asking them to download the app when they log in is a free, effective way to promote your app’s existence to customers that are the most likely to use it. Even if they don’t download the app in store, the Aislelabs platform makes it easy to retarget them via digital channels such as email, online advertising, and SMS campaigns.
Aislelabs enables multiple ways to drive app downloads on your client’s devices. These include:
- Directing users to the App store after they connect to your guest WiFi.
- Notifying users by email or SMS (after they connect to WiFi or at a later date) that you have an app and where to download it.
- Re-marketing/retargeting users with ads on social platforms to promote the app.
App Store Redirection
The splash page is the first point of contact you have with your guests. They must first authenticate on the splash page prior to obtaining free guest WiFi access. Aislelabs provides an interactive editor to customize the WiFi sign up journey, customizing it to your unique business needs. In particular, you can customize the journey in a way that, upon a successful log in to the WiFi, users are redirected to your app store page to download your app with a click of a button.
Email and SMS Campaign
Enabling an email campaign with Aislelabs is incredibly simple. By sending out an email you can embed direct download links in the body of the email, making it as easy as possible for your customers to install your mobile app.
As an example, one of our clients was able to obtain nearly a 30% click-through rate from over 54,000 emails sent. With 20% of those clicks converting into app downloads, that yielded over 3,000 downloads as a result of a single campaign. The reason for such high open and click-through rates have to do with targeting such highly engaged customers. Because these individuals have actually engaged with the brand by visiting the retailer, they are the warmest possible audience a business can have and are far more likely to respond to their messaging.
Moreover, those that didn’t download can be reminded automatically in the future through a follow-up campaign. Future marketing activities can also include reminders at the bottom of the email to download the app as a more long-tail strategy of promoting the app.
Online Ads Based on Retargeting
An additional way Aislelabs enables higher app downloads is through targeted social media ads via mediums such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads. Instead of investing on ads targeting users within a geographic area, you could target users who have previously been to your property and logged into the WiFi. This ensures that the ads will only be targeting a warmer audience of people who are the most likely to be interested in your app. This provides a laser focused campaign targeting the right individuals, resulting in much larger engagement and app downloads.
