4 Ways Retailers are Acquiring Mobile Customers

If you can attract customers to your store through their mobile devices, you are reaching an audience that looks at their phones all day long and carries them everywhere they go. When they’re bored, while they’re taking the train to work, they are checking their phones and surfing online. When they are looking for deals, your app should be promoting it to that enormous audience of potential customers.

The Importance of Acquiring Mobile Customers

How do you get Smartphone owners to download your app? A full 40% are willing to give you their e-mail addresses and download your app for a good deal. More importantly, once they come to your store in search of a promotion, over 70% will walk away with what they were looking for plus something they didn’t even intend to buy.

Clearly, there is an advantage to getting shoppers into the stores. One of the best ways retailers are doing it now is by using mobile apps to acquire more customers. Still, even for acquiring mobile customers, there are multiple ways reach tech savvy shoppers.

4 Ways to Acquire Mobile Customers

You can acquire mobile customers through many different media platforms from social media, to TV ads, to press releases. The goal is to attract as many people as you can to your company app or to the coupons and deals you are offering.

Therefore you are going to need to decide which avenues are best at reaching your customers; are your customers finding you through Facebook? Instagram? Word-of-mouth? You want to calculate your investment dollars versus the returns.

If you are spending $500 dollars on mobile ads but only manage to reel in a few new mobile customers, your CACs (Customer Acquisition Costs) are too high. You might want to try using these 4 methods for acquiring mobile customers.

#1: Mobile Apps

Mobile apps are effective at customer acquisition on multiple levels. First, when mobile users download your app, it is always on their phone’s desktop. Alerts for new promotions will either come via text alert or a message icon will appear on the app.

Yet, you can use your mobile app to help acquire more customers by targeting your promotions. There’s nothing worse than getting a sales alert for something you would never use. By acquiring mobile customers through your app, you will be able to glean more information about your customers so that you can better target app promotions, provide instant support, and offer exclusive discounts.

#2: In-Store Beacon Technology

Many shoppers these days come to a brick-and-mortar store with mobile phone in hand while looking at that store’s website. The problem is that customers often lose their signal while in the store. Beacon technology enables you to provide a signal to customers while they are shopping so that they don’t miss any of your online sales promotions when they are there.

#3: Flash Site Promotions

Small retailers would end up losing money on a flash site promotion. But if you have a big enough retail business where you know that you have some products that would fly off the shelves at a 50% discount for example, having a flash sale site is a creative new way that businesses are acquiring mobile customers. The sale is only sent to customers with the app making the deal more exclusive and thus more enticing.

#4: Measure CAC with Online Ads

Of course, you want to be sure to measure the effectiveness of your customer acquisition strategy. Paid online ads are a good way to measure just what customers are interested in. Are they clicking on a coupon or are they downloading your app?

For just a few dollars you can find out how many customers clicked on your coupons. What you really want to know though is how many liked what you had to offer so much that they downloaded your app. Your Cost per Acquisition numbers will tell you exactly how many customers signed up with your website or downloaded your app.