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Influence customer purchase behaviour by building a mobile app

Businesses often find innovative ways to influence the behaviour of their customers. These methods, however, sometimes prove to be very expensive.

Businesses strive to find ways in which they can accomplish their revenue growth objectives without increasing their sales and marketing costs substantially. One way to achieve business targets in a cost-effective manner is to build a shopping app for existing and new users.

You can use an Android or iPhone app builder to build shopping apps for popular app platforms, and engage customers in innovative and effective ways.

Apps can be used by businesses to understand and mould customer behaviour in various ways. Native apps have advanced features that help you use functionalities of mobile devices to achieve business goals.

Here are a few ways in which you can use a mobile app to influence customer purchase behaviour:

1. Innovating marketing methods

Mobile apps offer you efficient ways of marketing. You can send discount coupon codes, cash backs, special offers and other offers to customers through your apps. As customer who download your apps are showing an intent to purchase with you for a long time, you can incentivize all customers to shop through your app, so that you are able to retain more and more customers.

You can use various native app features to learn about your customers’ behaviour, locations and preferences to create effective marketing campaigns.

2. Re-marketing

You can collect valuable customer browsing data on your app to create re-marketing campaigns that will ensure that your conversion rate is high. You can use the data collected by your app to remind your customers to get back to their abandoned carts. You can also offer incentives to customers to complete an order in a time-bound manner.

Many companies capture browsing data of users, and later show them similar or same products through push notifications or in the app, to motivate them to purchase the said products.

3. Community and peer highlights

Many apps capture data about contacts of customers and show them activities undertaken by their social media friends or people in their contact lists. This influences customers to look at or purchase products their peers have purchased. Friends and family can highly influence the purchase decision of a customer.

Companies can also highlight the products popular among a certain online or offline community. This strategy encourages customers who identify with that community to show interest in the promoted products.

4. Product recommendations

After studying user browsing and purchase data over a short or long time period, you can show product recommendations to users. This encourages them to visit your app more often. This can even motivate users purchase to the recommended products. You can show product recommendations at prime locations in your app, during checkout, or in the ‘recommended items’ section.

You can offer discounts or incentives to customers to purchase products that you think might interest them. This will help you maximize a customer’s lifetime value by enlarging their purchase baskets, every time they purchase with you.

5. Intuitive and planned app flow

To influence customers to take desired actions on your app, you can plan your app well. Design the flow of your app in a way that the customers follow a charted path to place orders with you. This not only helps eliminate confusion for users while selecting products, but also makes it easy for them to complete their orders in an efficient manner.

An intuitive designed app can increase your revenue by many folds, as customers appreciate a purchase experience that is systematic and yet offers a good amount of choice. For example, Dominoes apps offer a step-by-step process of selecting location, pizzas, toppings, and additional items, making payment and tracking delivery.

6. Influential product categories

You can highlight a few influential product categories in your app to attract customers to visit your app more often or purchase more products with you. One way to do this is to create a seasonal lookbook that may attract your customers time and again to check what’s new in the current season.

You can also enrol some influencers to create a product list as per their choice and expertise. This will influence customers who follow those industry or other influencers to browse through the highlighted product category or purchase products listed there.

7. In-cart suggestions

One amazing way to influence and encourage customers to purchase more through you is to give complementary product suggestions to users while they are in the cart, ready to checkout. At this point, if you make relevant product recommendations to customers based on the products that might complement their selected items, then you stand a good chance to increase their product basket.

As your product recommendations during checkout become more and more relevant with time, you will increase your chances of influencing customers to buy more. Use app features efficiently to make product addition seamless and easy, while users remain in the cart.

8. Leverage native app features

You can use various native app features that make use of functionalities of mobile devices, to send messages and product recommendations to users to influence their behaviour. Geo-fencing can be used to send location-based discounts and offers to customers to encourage them to purchase more while they are in a certain location.

You can use other features like contact syncing, mobile wallet integration, face and fingerprint recognition and social media integration to mould and influence customer behaviour.

9. Loyalty and referral programs

You can create loyalty programs that are offered through your apps. This will encourage users to download your app, which will give you all the above opportunities to influence your customers. Nevertheless, loyalty programs are themselves very effective in encouraging customers to purchase with you more often.

You can also reward loyal and satisfied customers to refer new users to the app. This will help you increase your customer base. Apps make it easy for users and businesses to track and use loyalty and referral rewards.

10. Testing

Apps help you collect user data like contact information, browsing data, Wish lists of customers, products abandoned in carts, influencing factors, effectiveness of different marketing activities, etc. This data can be used to tweak products, pricing, app features, marketing campaigns, etc., so that customer behaviour can be influenced in the most effective manner.

Data and its analytics are powerful tools available to businesses. They help understand customers and find opportunities where businesses can influence their customers to make more purchases.

Besides the above influencing points, mobile devices are, by default, preferred by users these days to make purchases, as they are convenient to use and make it easy for users to make payments and save receipts. This ease of use of mobile apps influence customers, too.

Therefore, it is sensible for online businesses to create an app to increase and tap opportunities to gain customers, grow revenue, engage customers, and increase chances to sell more.

If you already have a WordPress of woocommerce website, then you can use a mobile app builder for WordPress and Woocomerce to easily build an app to influence your customers to engage with your content and purchase with you for a long time.

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