App Commerce Insider: 4 tips for promoting your retail app by Mallzee

So you’ve taken the plunge and built a fantastic mobile app on the Poq platform. You’re ready to start driving sales and take advantage of the huge growth in mobile shopping, but how do you then start to drive downloads and see the impact on your bottom line?

We spoke to Cally Russell, founder of personalised shopping app Mallzee, which broke into the top 100 apps in the US during Black Friday weekend and spent 36 hours as the top searched app in the UK the week before Christmas. Here are some of his tips for success:

1. Cross Promotion

App store marketing should sit across your wider marketing efforts. Provide a spot to download on your website, include information on receipts in store or when sending an email confirmation – then include a link to download the new app. Review all current communications with customers and think of ways to funnel them towards the new app.

Insider tips from the Poq team: add a banner to your mobile website that sends customers to your app. This will incentivise first-time customers to download the app, and remind users who already have the app. You can do this using Smart App Banners.

2. App Store Optimisation

Something that is often overlooked, but an area that is vital to the number of downloads. Play about with the keywords on your app, the name and the app store screenshots. The content is also vitally important and small changes that we’ve undertaken have sometimes seen our daily organic downloads more than treble.

Insider tips from the Poq team: don’t limit your app to certain countries’ app stores. Also, we have found that adding apps to both the catalogue and the lifestyle section of the app store works well.

3. Paid Installs

Facebook and Twitter are the big guys in this space and offer a great way to get in front new users, if your Lifetime Value allows for it. Social Networking is now highly linked to mobile and around 80% of Facebook users now use the service more on mobile than desktop. With this in mind, it’s a great place to target users, and with their current targeting capabilities you can ensure high quality users.

Insider tips from the Poq team: promote your app on Instagram. A great way to get customers excited is to run an Instagram competition – ask them to post pictures of themselves using the app, with a hashtag, for a chance to win a prize.

4. Offline Marketing

We’ve found some old school marketing techniques work the best. In the UK we have 30 reps promoting Mallzee on University campuses and have benefited from a high press profile.

Insider tips from the Poq team: offer benefits for the first purchase made using the app, such as free shipping for the first order, and communicate it in-store and via email.

Hopefully through using some of the above techniques you’ll start to build your user base and can take advantage of the jump to mobile, especially with the under 30 demographic. But your actions shouldn’t stop there, as for many shoppers third party apps (like Mallzee) offer a different shopping experience that shoppers love and should to be part of your mobile marketing mix in 2015.

About Cally:
Cally Russell is the CEO and Founder of Mallzee, the personalised shopping app some call Tinder for Shopping. Mallzee showcases over 100 stores and allows shoppers to build personal style feeds tailored to their own tastes. The app is available on iPhone, iPad, Android and now through GALAXY Apps and GALAXY Gifts on Samsung.

Want to add your brand to Mallzee as well? Then email Cally and the team at Brands@Mallzee.com.