Appgain - A Mobile Growth Platform

QR Code: combine digital and in-store marketing!

As a food franchise or a coffee shop with lots of branches, a local food, or a retailer company you always look into new retail tactics of getting new customers and also retain your current ones. But how do you spark the flare of keeping current customers and also generating new ones? What could be your marketing plan as a retail store? Well, that’s easy you probably googled it yourself, but you found multiple options, and you don’t have the time and the resources to peruse every one of them right? That’s why we did all the heavy lifting, and we’re here to give you the easy way to get exposure to your retail store, restaurant, or coffee shop, QR code mixed with Digital marketing!

Yep, QR Scans are still a thing, and they are capable of generating new customers and keep your current ones coming back, they’re the new retail strategy!

Let me tell you what a QR code is!

It’s a “Quick Response” code, or QR code is a 2D scannable graphic that could direct you to do anything on your phone, open a link, make a phone call, send an SMS, have a deep link to open your app directly, it doesn’t matter what would you like for the QR to do it’ll do it.

But you might ask how a QR scan would help me generate more revenue right? It’s a straightforward retail marketing channel!

In-store promotion ideas

To make an awesome retail sales campaign all you need a compelling message to make your users want to scan your offer, maybe you should go with “Scan and can, get your free soda can” I don’t know, get creative!

Then make your mobile deep page which is powered by Appgain.io, which includes your offer in it.

With the mobile deep page of your offer, you could easily get them to be a web push subscribers, and not only that but also collect their Facebook pixel ID, you could also make sure you’re targeting a specific location you could make a specific QR code tailored to each branch.

When you get this part done, that’s mean you now have very powerful marketing tools within your hand, period.

Retail Marketing Tools

How do you use your new techniques to make your marketing more efficient and spike your ROI? How to come up with a retail promotion strategy that’s simple?

When you have a Web push subscribers that means that you could retarget the people who visited that specific branch only with that offer!

And those web pushes would give you analytics to know what your campaign did!

Also with the Facebook pixel, you could remarket those who opened your mobile deep pages.

And we all know how powerful Facebook is and how remarketing is effective when you have the pixel code of everyone who has redeemed your offer and that way you could retarget them without having to retarget a broad audience and waste a lot of money.

But what benefits could you get from the Deep pages associated with the Mobile deep page? Of course, other than the web subscription and the Facebook pixel, you get quite some benefits for your App if you have an app or in general to your brand or business.

You could share your offer as we said in our case study above, but you could also add buttons to enable new features to your mobile deep page, like opening your app if you have an app or maybe visiting your site.

And you could optimize your SEO settings to gain more downloads, visits, or views when you rank on the top search results.

Not only that but also you can use our stripe payment option to make your offer easily when you use a well-known service like stripe for your payment you’re not only making your brand more trustworthy, but you also are making sure that your customer gets the maximum satisfaction when redeeming your offer.

And if you ever feel like expanding your offer, you could simply mix your SMS campaigns with our smart deep links to reduce your SMS marketing costs while also gaining a competitive advantage with a rich SMS campaign.

Food retail marketing?

When you’re considering the marketing campaign, you might think that marketing is different for retailers to food services,

but both retail companies and food store have in-store promotions and multichannel marketing campaigns,

they’re pretty similar in technique for the retail marketing process.

But Why Appgain?!

You might ask yourself, why do I go with Appgain and not just some random QR generator and save me the money? Well, you get more features when you go with Appgain

Features	Appgain	QR code generator
Deep-linked	Yes	No
Easy to customize the landing page	Yes	No
Customizable CTA buttons	Yes	No
Facebook pixel tracking	Yes	No
Push notification	Yes	No

Want to boost your ROI?

Expand your revenue stream with Appgain’s QR marketing now

Still, got questions? Do not hesitate to reach out and Contact Us! Request Demo now.

The Next Big Thing in Retail Retargeting

Marketing for retailers has evolved through the years

From mass broadcasting, billboards, and traditional marketing retail strategies

To inbound marketing and digital marketing

and then we have Retargeting because retailers are always looking for the next big thing!

But you might ask why?

Why does Retail marketing evolve rapidly?

That’s simple actually because Retail marketing is competition,

and competition is always looking for the next step to be a step ahead!

I’m not going to take you through the whole process of retail marketing evolving, but I’m going to focus on things that are key to our talk.

Mass broadcasting

Retail marketing was seen like I want to be heard everywhere, even at the moon! So aliens could buy from me!

But the thing is; aliens really aren’t interested,

and so are a big portion of the audience that you target with your mass broadcasting and that wasn’t the best retail marketing strategy

but it had some sort of effect!

Let’s say you’re traveling on a highway to your work,

you get bombarded probably with tons of billboards and other printed media types, but how much do you relate to them?

How many times do you say, Oh my god I need to buy this product or service, I can’t live without it!

Probably once or twice in your entire life, and probably you found a discount for that product or service and that what made you buy.

You see where broadcasting is broken and why is it a bad retail marketing strategy now?

It’s now seen as spammy and not helpful for anyone, and so we’ve developed more efficient ways to market our products without looking spammy.

And billboards are absurdly expensive anyhow, so why to pay so much to get so little in return?

More targeted more relevant

Retailers started to notice that they’re not doing the best strategy for the business and that they need to up their retailing marketing,

thus they advanced to more specific and more targeted areas of marketing, strategies, and overall retail strategy!

So we started to evolve digital marketing and inbound marketing and retailers started to focus their strategy on targeting the right audience.

And thus we see retailers narrowing down their marketing strategy to only focus on people who’re thinking about buying,

while also running awareness campaigns to be relevant customers.

Now that people spend more time on the internet it only makes sense that we evolve to more engaging retail advertising strategy!

And so we had digital marketing with all of it numerous forms to take your customer through the funnel from awareness to becoming a loyal customer of your brand.

Inbound marketing

So when you’re a retailer, you must be keeping up with the latest trends in the retailers marketing strategies!

And Inbound marketing is the new thing that looks promising for you!

So you google it and you check, okay what should a retailer do if he wants to do more sales?

The answer is that you need to build your long term retail marketing strategy that would cover your customer’s journey from knowing your app to buying from you over and over!

But what’re the steps as a retailer marketer that you need to do?

First of all, you need to make sure that your user knows about your brand, and know what do you sell,

that way you make sure that they think of you when they want to buy a certain product.

You might want to think about social media campaigns that go viral on social media,

to optimizing your web pages for certain keywords which are called SEO and tinkering around with writing blogs that would help your customer and sway his opinion

And when they’re at this first step they think about your brand, you start going more aggressive with your retail retargeting,

you focus more on directing your customer with forms and call to actions!

Then we move into more in-depth with lead generation and smart retailing techniques to eventually becoming your customer and promoting your business!

But that’s not where retailers stopped, they came with even a narrower and more specific strategy they called retargeting!

Retargeting, the spotlight

So retargeting, in a nutshell, is that you track people who have interest in specific product or service and you start to pop up to them on their social media,

Their favorite apps and everywhere there could be a retargeting Ad.

There are various different types of retargeting because every platform has it’s tracking mechanisms, like

Google tag manager
Facebook pixel

But we’re not going in-depth into the different ways they could be in use

But facebook pixel, for example, it’s a tracking code that follows you around the web to know what products are you into,

and it shows them to you on facebook, it’s quite simple and quite effective!

But retargeting works by putting a tracking code in the shape of a cookie in your browser,

and that’s not the case when it comes to mobile, because we don’t use browsers to surf our favorite sites

like Facebook, we use their app, right?

Get started with mobile retail retargeting!

That’s why retailers needed to find a new way that they could remarket their users on mobile.

And that’s when Smart retargeting was born, smart retargeting works by

making your user visit a site with the Facebook pixel in it
then remarket depending on the different campaign and product they’re searching for!

Also, you could add notifications to your website that would let you retarget your user with notifications which has a much faster reach speed, and more accurate!

So, the retail retargeting is the way forward for your market, and we can help you do it the smart way. Start trying it out now, it’s free to do that!

If you would like to know how would smart retargeting boost your retail business and increase your conversion rate

to help your business grow more and more without breaking the bank for you!

Still, got questions? Do not hesitate to reach out and Contact Us! Request Demo now.

Marketing with QR codes: Measure your success!

Any marketing campaign is as effective as the knowledge used in their construction. Without information, you can’t form a useful retail strategy. You need to know your target audience, what do they like, where are they, when they are most active, etc. You try many different channels and campaigns, but which is more effective and which doesn’t quite work? Do you know that you can measure the marketing success of your efforts, just by doing some marketing with QR codes?

: Marketing with QR codes is a great way to bridge your online and offline marketing efforts.

Using QR codes with your campaigns is a great way to introduce users to your digital marketing funnel. It is easy and convenient for users to scan them and get an offer or find out more about the product. You in return can get a measure of your marketing success if you use the right tools.

But how can QR codes help me measure marketing success you ask?

Well with using the modern marketing automation and analytics tools of course. Since a QR code links to a digital resource, this can be used to gather attribution and analytic information. When you have a person scan your campaign QR code, for example, it is possible to learn valuable information like their location, time of scanning, the platform they are using, etc. You can also use this to geofence your campaigns to specific areas.

Another simple trick to try would be using different QR codes for variations of the same campaign to test the effectiveness of the variables you change.

OK, I want to do some marketing with QR codes… So what do these platforms do for me then?

In our case, Appgain will embed a smart deep link in the QR code generated for you. This link will grab all this important data for you, and you will see this info in neat reports in your Appgain panel.

The links will also make the users’ experience much more convenient, as they are context-aware, and will take the user to the right link depending on their platform. This ease of onboarding and favorable user experience led our clients to enjoy greatly improved conversion rates!

Another bonus is that you can use QR codes to link people to another feature we offer: the mobile landing page! So that they will be greeted by a nice, mobile-friendly and content-rich page where you can deliver your message with effect. But the real beauty of these pages is not even this! People who get to your landing page can subscribe to notifications from it, thus you will have a database of users interested in the campaign without collecting any contact details! You can remarket with a high degree of precision thanks to this user list. Moreover, these web push notifications do not need to have an app installed, and they work on desktop systems in addition to the mobile ones!

Finally, using a platform with Appgain for QR codes will allow you to efficiently run both traditional and digital media campaigns together at the same time.

Don’t forget, the more information you have, the better your retail strategy can be.

So, marketing with QR codes can bridge your offline and digital marketing spaces into a physical one, thus let you measure marketing success.

Still, got questions? Do not hesitate to reach out and Contact Us! Request Demo now.

Leveraging in-store QR code marketing for retail business

Digital media can be very powerful in cementing your customer’s loyalty and keeping your business in their minds. However, many of your customers may not be very active in adopting digital venues. How do you introduce those people into your digital funnel? We do have a few tips for you in leveraging in-store QR code marketing to benefit your retail business.

Why would you even need to move offline customers to an online world?

Knowledge, visibility, brand image, and customer loyalty. Looking into each of these:

Customer loyalty: Think of yourselves as customers: don’t you like free stuff or points you can spend on benefits? Loyalty programs are a great way to keep your regular customers with you or turn casual customers into regulars. While there are ways to run these with traditional media like coupons, it is just easier and way more effective through the digital one.
Information: We keep saying this, any marketing effort is only as effective as you know your target audience. Short of doing paper form surveys and one-on-one questionnaires, which tend to annoy people, digital media is the only place to gain this knowledge. Perhaps the most important benefit is that you can retarget these people with the right messages to get them shopping again!
Brand image: There are few things that can scream as loud as a good digital presence about being accessible and in tune with the times. People can use a page or an app to check whether something they need is in stock or not, they can take part in your loyalty programs, or just learn bits of cool information on your web page, social media profile, or mobile app. They will be more likely to choose you over a competitor who didn’t catch up with the digital world yet.
Visibility: A presence in the digital world makes that online users can find you without the need of you trying to find them instead. You can advertise on popular social media sites, search engines, videos, apps, etc. Moreover, people can find you in search engines and app stores. If you can get your happy customers to this world, they can easily share their experience with you with their network, essentially becoming free promoters for you!

So, you see the benefits are many. But how do you use in-store QR code marketing to get your offline retail customers online? Better yet, how can you use them to get more people in your store to buy your wares? Let us see one by one.

Do your customers like your wares and deals? Get them to share the love!

Happy customers are among the best marketing you can ask for. A happy customer is a brand ambassador, doing your retail marketing free for you! They share their experience with friends and family to get your retail business more and more customers. While the word of mouth has a special power of its own, the digital word of mouth has the ability to propagate very wide, very fast. And you can make it very easy to share their experience in the digital world.

Put a QR code to scan under your select products, and say “like this product? Share it with your friends!” You can offer small rewards or points to further incentivize their sharing if you like.

Out of stock? No problem!

Especially apparel retailers can benefit a lot from this. Say, there is that new cool t-shirt that everybody likes… many will end up missing the color or the size they wanted. Put a QR code under them, they can scan it and tell you that they want that color and size, so you can backorder it.

Another thing you can do is that, if you have products that you don’t keep in stock, but people want to see before they buy, you can keep exhibit copies so people can see them, and scan a code under the product to go to ordering page.

Aside from benefitting the customer, this approach also gives you important information. You can know how much in demand something is from how fast it is sold alright. But how many more still want to get it after it is out of stock? What features do they want most? Also, if you allow them to place orders online too, you will not lose those sales when the product is not in stock.

Offer in-store discounts for first purchases, subscribing to your newsletter, etc

This is something we see often in online stores, but why limit it to only there? You can leverage QR codes to get people in your store to become a customer to enjoy a discount, or to add them to your mailing list, to get them to download your app, etc.

Power of smart deep links will also let you gain valuable data from customers while making their digital journey much simpler, thus increasing their conversion rates.

Now knowing what they are interested in, and having a line of contact, you can use one of the most effective retail marketing trick: retargeting!

Inform the customers about the product

While seeing a product in person is one thing, it will often take more than that to convince some customers. They need to learn about it, they need to read their specs, etc. Store staff can help with it to a degree, but they can not be everywhere every time. They can’t be trusted to know it all correctly either. We’ve all been there, asked about a product to store staff, only to get less than convincing answers.

Why not let users scan a QR code, and go to your app or web page, where you can describe the product with all the details, and rich media like videos and images etc?

As a bonus, you can get the user to subscribe to your notifications, newsletter, etc.

QR code marketing: Appgain is the automation platform to cement it all together!

We offer complete QR code, smart retargeting, multichannel marketing, and event-based automation for retail businesses to increase their sales and growth.

You can use our all-in-one marketing automation platform to create mobile and SEO optimized landing pages, generate a database of users to retarget, create social media shareable posts, and generate QR codes powered with smart deep links. Powerful analytics is the cherry on top.

Still, got questions? Do not hesitate to reach out and Contact Us! Request Demo now.

Retail growth mega-boost: Smart Retargeting

Today with the power of smart devices and internet, promoters and enterprises can reach more people than ever. We now have the power of knowing the profile of customers interested in our business. We can retarget them to turn people who are on the edge into a customer or to increase the brand loyalty of those who already are. Using a smart marketing approach can help greatly in achieving a big boost in retail growth rate. Smart retargeting approaches can take your retargeting efforts a step further in that direction.

Let’s have a look at how can it do that, and how can we use it.

Turn more of the potential customers into actual customers

The process of getting new clients happens through multiple phases. First, you attract people, pique their interest, and make them aware of your existence. Then they step through the other phases to become your clients and even voluntary promoters.

: It is essential for retail growth to turn people you have attracted to have a look into actual buyers. They are already interested in what you have, that’s why they have checked you out in the first place. Now give the last little push they need!

Thing is, you will lose some of the people you have attracted along the way before they become actual customers. In fact, their numbers will usually be more, much more than those that become your new clients.

Retargeting will, however, allow you to reach out to those who were about to close the deal, but didn’t.

Reach them out with a reminder, or better yet, an offer to convince them, to give them the final little push they needed to go for your product or service.

However, retargeting can run the risk of being spammy and feel pestering to your audience. Especially when it seems arbitrary and impersonal. This can hurt your brand image, and we don’t want that…

Here, the smart retargeting rushes to the rescue! With smart retargeting, you use the right campaign content for the right people. You use behavior and demographics data to retarget them with the right offer for the right product.

Not only will it make it more likely for them to finally go for your offer, but it will also help you with achieving a more sustainable growth since your audience will not see you like “yet another spammy salesman”.

Don’t let poor abandoned shopping carts to languish, let them become actual sales!

Retargeting helps your growth not only with getting new customers, but it also helps with the existing ones. Let’s say, someone either forgot or decided against a purchase after adding products to a cart.

Isn’t that one of the saddest moments for a retail business, when a happy purchase falls apart just as it was about to bloom? Do not despoil though! As this is just the right job for retail retargeting!

When a user leaves a cart behind, you can use retargeting to entice them and get to reconsider.

Increase customer loyalty

Another benefit of smart retargeting is that you can remind your existing clients of your business.

: Make your customers irresistible offers, provide the benefits. Retargeting them with these will keep them coming, and hep your retail growth a lot.

Let’s say a group of your customers who were interested in a certain type of your products or a campaign.

When you do another similar campaign or release a similar new product you can retarget those users who were already interested before.

Another use of retargeting can be reaching out to customers who have not been active for some time. Remind them of the products they liked, or incentivize their patronage with an offer.

So, ok, smart retargeting is good, but how does it work, how will it improve the retail growth rates?

: Don’t be this guy… shooting random messages will not guarantee your retail growth. Try smart retargeting instead 🙂

Well, not every retargeting tool will give you the options we call “smart”. Usually, you need a completely integrated toolkit to build databases of audience analysis and feed this information to the channels you want to use for retargeting.

In Appgain’s case, Mobile Landing Pages technology lets you to create landing pages for products and/or campaigns, and also give you a channel for Web Push Notifications. People will find you through these SEO and mobile-optimized pages and can subscribe to your notifications. These subscribers grant you a base of users who are interested in the offer you are promoting with the page.

You can also use your existing mailing lists or phonebooks to integrate with event-based marketing automation where many channels like SMS, App, and Web Push Notifications, or emails.

You can also track the success of these actions, who opens and follows on with the actions in your message? Where are they from? What platform are they using?

This helps you with refining your campaigns and go for better aimed and more personal retargeting.

Still, got questions? Do not hesitate to reach out and Contact Us! Request Demo now.

Different types of retargeting in retail marketing

You are probably aware of remarketing & retargeting, if not, you really should be! In a nutshell, it is a practice that lets you activate the customers/users you already acquired, instead of trying to acquire new ones from scratch. As with most things though, there is more than one way to do it. Each can be more or less beneficial given the type of scenario at hand. Let us have a look at a few different kinds of retargeting in retail marketing.

Retargeting visitors: Get them from “just-looking” to “totally buying”!

We all know that not everyone who steps in our shop will go out as a customer. Often, they are just having a look. While every retailer’s dream would be selling something to every visitor, sometimes they just won’t buy anything at that point.

: Retargeting in retail marketing: if someone goes from “just-looking” to “OMG what a deal!” in a second, you’re doing it right 😉

You can think of the same for a digital retailer too. Does your page get visitors? Great! Do they buy anything? Well, sometimes yes, sometimes no…

However, the very fact that they at least take time to visit you means that they are potentially interested in what you offer. For this fact alone, they are too valuable to forget about!

For example, it is enough for people to have just taken a peek at your Appgain powered mobile landing page to catch their social media “pixel”, so that you can target them on social media venues with your ads.

If, however, you would like a more direct approach, you can reach with web push notifications to visitors that subscribe to your notifications.

Now, what if your store is offline only? You can use the power of our smart QR codes to still be able to reach people online! Offer them a digital catalog, a coupon, or perhaps a digital magazine about your sector if people will be interested in it!

Keeping the pulse up Retargeting big-time shoppers!

Some customers, either for their love of a product, or of your business, can buy a lot from your retail shop, and perhaps even do so frequently.

: Keep her smile up by remind of all the excellent wares and deals and keep those shopping bags full!

Such fire shall not go to waste! No, you should attend to it, and keep it alive ;). Do you have a cool new product or offer? Is there a new model of their favorite product? Or did they just take longer than they usually do to buy from you? Well, then it’s time to reach out to the customer, and remind them of the offers or products in-store.

Especially in markets like technology or collectibles/hobby, the arrival of an anticipated new item, or a discount on one will likely get this type of customer to act.

Customers are happier for knowing the arrival of items they are looking for, or a sale they were looking forward to, and you can be happier for keeping them shopping!

Giving a pulse where there is none! Targeting less frequent shoppers

This approach is the polar opposite of the previous one: Instead of going for the frequent buyers, you target infrequent shoppers.

Sometimes they need that little push, the little reminder to finally make their purchase. This fits especially well with retailers of long term and/or relatively pricey goods.

People tend not to buy a new TV every day for example, but having looked at some means that they are interested in getting one. Don’t miss them. Seeing a nice model and/or a good offer can give the final push they need to make a purchase from you.

Do not let those poor abandoned carts languish in despair!

: Such a sad sight isn’t it :(? Retarget the owner to avert this tragedy! 🙂

Isn’t it a sad moment when your users abandon their shopping carts… The goods sit listed there, forsaken, so close, yet so far, silent witnesses of what could have been.

Do not let it stay so! Take action, and make the user an offer they would not refuse. Perhaps offer a little gift or some store points if you have such a thing. Perhaps a discount.

The user gets what they wanted to, and you make a sale, and the good aren’t abandoned in a forsaken shopping cart, everyone is happy! 🙂

Types of retargeting for retail marketing: Use the right kind of retargeting in the right context

In a nutshell, different kinds of retargeting works better in different kinds of situations. Some fit better with certain markets, others work better for certain types of customers.

There are many kinds of retargeting in retail marketing, use the right combination at the right time to maximize your profits.

Of course, you will need to know about your customers and have access to all the channels you can retarget them with.

This is where Appgain comes in. From analytics and automation to multi-channel messaging, Appgain has all the tools you need in one place. Our smart retargeting package is designed to carry things a few steps ahead of traditional retargeting.

Still, got questions? Do not hesitate to reach out and Contact Us! Request Demo now.

Smart retargeting – the future for retail market

Retargeting has been around for a while now. Quite a while in fact… enough to know that it can both win and lose you, customers. It is essential to check back with your target audience, to remind them of your campaign. But retargeting without having the right audience, or making it so impersonal that it will look like “just another marketing spam” will yield less than satisfactory results. Thus, you need to look beyond the brute force approach in retargeting. Now it is time for smart retargeting, the future for retail market!

The smart entails having the right audience to retarget, using the right channels together, and making the call more engaging. Let’s have a look at how we can achieve these.

Don’t just spam anyone and everyone, pick the right audience

It is easy to retarget anyone and everyone who has ever been in your marketing audiences. It may or may not work for every one of them. But hopefully, some of them will be interested, right?

While that is true, this approach also leads to increased marketing costs, as well as the risk of being seen spammy by the people you retarget.

A smarter approach will be to pick those who are actually interested in the campaign but didn’t go ahead with it yet.

This may be chosen from the people who had visited the landing page(s) you have for the campaign and chose to subscribe to your updates. Other examples of good retargeting audiences can be:

People who have registered an account on your campaign’s site, but haven’t started using it.
Customers who filled a shopping cart but abandoned it.
People who were interested in similar campaigns/products before.
Finally, people who are using or have used competitors.

This way, you will be able to target people who actually are likely to be interested in what you have to say them. The conversion rates of your retargeting efforts will be much higher this way.

Another side to choosing the right audience for retargeting is that just going shotgun on choosing people to retarget can, and often does result in some damage on the brand identity. Let’s be honest, none of us enjoy it when it is like “oh, great, another random marketing message pestering me for something I am not too interested in”.

There are lots of communication channels, utilize the right ones at the right times

Today, there are many digital channels to reach an audience. Each of them has different advantages and disadvantages. Which one leads to the future for the retail market though? Well, all of them, but only in the right context for each!

If you can harmoniously combine your audience research efforts with targeting these channels, you are going to be more likely to reap the rewards for your work.

Today, some of the marketing automation platforms can either be integrated with others or just outright include all the steps of your remarketing journey in their toolkit. Make sure you are using one of those. If, however, you want to facilitate this coordination manually, make sure you do your work very thoroughly so things will not get “lost in translation”. Also, know that you will spend lots of effort, time, and hence money in getting this right.

SMS messages, emails, app push notifications, web push notifications all have their specific pros/cons. App push notifications, for example, have some of the highest engagement and conversion rates, but they require an app to be installed on the targeted users’ device beforehand. Web push notifications, however, does not have this requirement and can work even on desktop/laptop computers.

Finally, no need to feel like all your retargeting needs to be through digital channels. You can use offline, physical media too. Let’s say that your audience frequents a certain venue. Why not print some stickers with QR codes of your campaign, along with an attractive offer on them?

Make your retargeting content engaging, make the user feel special

Something to the effect of “pssst! Why haven’t you still bought this cool thing yet?! You know you want it!” may not necessarily be the best way to go.

We are, after all, end-users too, be honest and ask yourself, what do you usually do with those?

It tends to go like:
“Mmmh… yeah, right…” (clicks delete).

We really need to put the smart in smart retargeting. Do a bit of due diligence and find out a few reasons why the users who were on the line decided not to go past it. Construct your messages with that information. Play on what they liked, reassure them against what they may not have liked.

Having composed a single message to fit-all is too old-school. Make sure that you at least have a few that are crafted for each persona.

If you can get the user feel like they are addressed in person, rather than as a part of a mailing list, your chances of persuading them will be much, much higher.

Make sure the message is engaging, and persuade them that you are selling a solution or something that they desire, and not just trying to move more copies out of your stock, and more dollars out of their pockets.

Use the right tools to get your retargeting smarter

First, you need the information to get your retargeting to be smarter. And by information, we mean lots of it.

Know the audience, know who was interested, who were on the verge of becoming a customer, what did they like, what they didn’t, where are they, what are they using?

Schedule your retargeting for the right time, automate your process based on events, use app push notifications where appropriate, web push notifications where available, etc.

Obviously, the best option is to have a solution that has all these integrated on a single platform.

A couple of other things to look for in the platform are:

The ability to compose short & to the point, but still engaging marketing content. Especially the shorter message media like SMS and push notifications fit the bill here. The best way to use these would include emojis etc. to make them more relatable and engaging, and also use shortened links to lead users to where the action will take place.
Also being able to host a page with much more rich content. Text as long as you need, images, animations, videos, etc. You can lead retargeted users here to give them the final push they may need to be convinced. The page may also attract new people on its own with SEO.

Appgain to the rescue! We offer what you need for smart retargeting, and to pave the way to the future for retail market enterprises

Appgain is one of the few solutions that offer all of the above features in a single package, and still with affordable prices.

Our platform gets you valuable attribution and analytics data to form the right audience for retargeting. On top of that, we offer rich push notifications, mobile landing pages, web push notifications, emails, SMS, high quality and engaging social media sharing of content, and creation of QR codes linking to these features so that you can join your offline and online marketing together.

Still, got questions? Do not hesitate to reach out and Contact Us! Request Demo now.

Best ways of retargeting in retail marketing

Retargeting is the hottest type of marketing nowadays. It allows you to actively target people who were interested in what you offer in some way. Instead of trying to find new customers, retargeting lets you get your existing customers to buy more of your offers. It is not surprising that retargeting fits so well into retail marketing too. Still, as with everything, there are right ways, and not so right ways of doing it. Let’s see what are some of the best ways of retargeting in retail marketing

Know your customers

Since retargeting means reaching out to specific people, you need to know in some way who those people are. Thus, we can safely say that the first step of a proper retargeting campaign is to gather knowledge on who to retarget.

Follow what customers are more likely to buy what product, and when for example. With this knowledge, you can target them with the right offer when they are likely to buy it.

Modern technology allows you to have many ways to learn a lot about online users and to use this information to inform the right marketing plan for the right audience. Of course, you need the right tools to be able to enjoy these benefits.

With Appgain for example, you can target your social media ads towards people who have visited the landing page for your product/campaign.

Though, since digital media is the best place to learn of your customers, you should try your best to get them to your digital funnel.

Use all the channels in the right context

There are quite a number of ways to reach out to your customers to retarget them. App or web push notifications, SMS messages, emails, social media ads…

Each of these channels has various advantages and disadvantages compared to one another. Make sure that you are able to make use of them all.

Target the most valuable customers

Extending further from knowing your customers, how much lifetime value they have provided you with is a very useful thing to know.

Every step in retail marketing costs you time, effort, and money. Therefore, it is wise to use these resources on targets that will benefit you the most.

For example, if a user has bought lots of a particular brand of perfume many times, you can let them know when you have more of those in stock.

Deliver your message at the right time

Depending on the type of customer and what kind of retailer you are, there are a few critical times you can choose to retarget someone.

For example, if you know that a user buys a certain type of consumable in let’s say every month, you can remind them to buy some more when their last purchase was about 4 weeks ago.

Alternatively, you can retarget someone right after they buy something! Did they buy a new, shiny gaming console? Well, remind them to buy an additional controller or a game that is rather popular for that console just after their purchase!

Did someone place an order for a product of yours? Great! Send a confirmation SMS/mail, and add them to your retargeting queue to turn them into more than a one-time customer.

Examples of similar “critical times” to trigger your retargeting messages are:

People who have visited recently
People who have not visited in a while
People who have bought something recently
People who have created a shopping cart, but abandoned it without completing their purchase.

Use the most applicable of these opportunities to reach out to your customers to get them interested in your products again.

Appgain is the toolkit you need in retargeting, and retail remarketing

With Appgain, you can get a detailed database of users, see their information neatly, target them with web push notifications, app push notifications, emails, or SMS messages. Host a mobile and SEO optimized landing page, and get social media ids of users to show them targeted social media ads. Retarget them based on their LTV, last order date, number of sessions, etc. Create Smart QR Codes to bridge your physical and digital marketing. Automate your marketing actions based on events.

All you ever need for smart retargeting in one place, Appgain is ready to cover all your retail marketing needs.

Still, got questions? Do not hesitate to reach out and Contact Us! Request Demo now.

QR codes in marketing: Phygital bridge between online & offline!

Today, both online and offline media are vital to your marketing campaigns. They both have wide reaches into different audiences, and one can cover where the other may not be easily visible. Although they are virtual vs physical in nature can make it difficult to run them together seamlessly. So can you even bridge your offline and online marketing together? Of course, you can, just use QR codes in marketing! Let us have a look at how!

: “Are QR codes dead?” we often hear being asked. On the contrary, the use of QR codes in marketing is the bridge between digital and physical media! Hence the term “phygital”.

QR codes in marketing: Connection between the worlds!

Are QR codes dead? This question seems to be a popular one… Well, QR codes in marketing are quite alive and kicking 😉 They have this important position of being the bridge between online and the offline. They are, the heralds of phygital marketing!

Since pretty much everybody has a smart device nowadays, they can scan and use the QR codes pretty easily. Just incentivize them, offer rewards for using the QR code to let them into your digital marketing funnel.

These codes can be printed on any media: flyers, coupons, billboards, bus stops, or even on digital signage… Where you will use QR codes is only limited by your imagination!

These codes allow you to link people from any offline media to any digital content, and, with use of the right platforms, also give you ability to retarget these users, and gain valuable information from them like where the best buyers come from, which campaign performs best, etc.

Now, yes, online and offline marketing campaigns are connected great! But what’s the benefit? How can I use QR codes to bridge online and offline marketing?

There are multiple things that you can do, let’s look at them one by one.

Do you have an app? Use offline ads and get them to download it!

Apps can be either the meta or a channel in a marketing campaign. Since smart devices are everywhere, apps are always with us, so they are a great marketing channel.

However, for an app to be profitable, you need many downloads. There are many ways to achieve this. ASO and SEO efforts being the first two that comes to mind.

However, you can get people to know of, and even directly download your app even when they aren’t browsing the internet or app stores.

Let’s say that you hand out promotional items, perhaps in an event. Brochures, or a nice, branded notebook. Feature your QR code link there with an offer for additional benefits to app users.

Someone who is already positively influenced with the experience in the gift item will be more likely to check out the offer of the app, and you can gain users easily like that.

By turning QR codes into Dynamic and Trackable QR codes, Smart Deep Links technology makes it easy for users to get onboard within the apps. These context-sensitive links provide the following benefits:

They will take the user to their destination regardless of the platform they are using.
Let’s say they don’t have your app and are using an iPhone, the link will take them to download the app from App Store.
If they are using an Android device instead, the same link will take them to Play Store page of the app.

Handout coupons

Coupons and vouchers are a great way to build bridges with potential customers. It is even better if you get them to scan a QR code to enjoy the benefits. This way you will be able to track the success of your campaign, and even potentially build a database of users for later remarketing.

: Coupons and vouchers are a popular customer loyalty and marketing tool in many industries, such as retail market. When used together with smart QR codes, they are the incentivizes of the phygital marketing.

This is usually a great option for food and beverage venues for example. But it can be used in other services and products as well. The retail market would be one of those, for example.

Do you have a great landing page? Well, let people see it!

While a flyer or a billboard is great in their own right, a web page can feature so much rich media content that can not.

This way you can really get two types of media to mutually support each other. People can see a physical ad anywhere, in public transportation, in a cafe, just anywhere… You web content, on the other hand, can include many images, videos, text, and even interactive elements. These can help you convey the message of your product/service much more strongly.

Just put the link to your web content inside a QR code and feature this prominently on your offline ads, and reap the rewards.

Know what your ads are doing

Information is the greatest strength in marketing. You need to know many things to achieve the most successful campaigns. Who is the best audience to target? What do they want? Where are they? What time they are most likely to buy? Do they respond better to this or that kind of campaign? Marketing is hardly the cheapest thing when you don’t know what is working and what isn’t! Are you doing it right, or are you just losing money? Information is paramount in knowing this and adjusting accordingly.

However, collecting all this information may not always be the easiest thing to do. Well, at least it wasn’t always, but now marketing automation and analytics tools let you have this power at the tip your fingers!

Though, unless you integrate offline and online campaigns, their powers will only work in the digital realms.

This is where QR codes come to play! They can help with getting data from your offline campaigns too.

Retarget people who look at your offline marketing materials

Giving people an incentive to scan that cool little QR code on your ads will make it possible for automation platforms to retarget them later.

First off, you may ask the user to fill out a contact form to enjoy the benefit you offer. They may give an email or phone number.

Almost uniquely among the platforms, Appgain also enables you to get a database of interested users without even asking their contact information. As you may know, some users don’t quite like giving personal info to marketing campaigns. With our web push notification feature, they can just subscribe to your notifications and then you will be able to retarget them with notifications even if they are on a desktop system.

How can you use offline and online marketing together? How do you employ QR codes in marketing?

: QR codes will let your online marketing efforts work on physical media too, here you can see how it would work for a retail market case

Well of Course With Appgain! Appgain gives you the opportunity to make the best use of the QR code’s powers, and adds more to the pack! The answer to “are QR codes dead?” is a resounding no, and our platform is ready to provide you with all the benefits phygital marketing and more.

Retarget your customers on social platforms, with notifications, SMS or email. With Dynamic, Colorful and Branded QR codes, our offer is feature-rich, and besides, we offer not just a QR code platform, but a whole marketing solution!

Still, got questions? Do not hesitate to reach out and Contact Us! Request Demo now.

How mobile marketing automation boost conversion!

Mobile Marketing Automation

It is never easy to take a campaign literally from zero to hero. You need to reach out to people, make them aware of the product/cause, and then get them to be a part of it. But your campaign needs to champion that new thing, which is a droplet in an ocean of other, perhaps even well-established competitors. It doesn’t always need to be this hard, however, to boost conversion rates of your campaigns.

Let us have a look at how you can achieve great campaign results, and how we can benefit you in doing this.

Acquire the Attention of Right People

The first step of any campaign is to attract people interested in your cause, who may then decide to buy, join, donate, and/or share with other like-minded people to build more awareness for you. While the traditional media like TV (or nowadays YouTube) ads, billboards, etc. do have their places, today the greatest and cheapest way to be found is using the power of web and search engines.

Therefore, a mobile-friendly and SEO optimization-ready landing page is where it all starts. Your landing page needs to be visually simple but attractive and should have short but strong lines of text to outline the offer of your campaign. It should include a visible call to action (CTA), and the content needs to be created with a good target keyword in mind. Having a strong domain name in the address is also important.

Appgain’s benefits already start right here. Mobile Deep Pages are among our most prominent features, and allows you to have just that!

The benefits of Mobile Deep Pages include:

Stripe payment and lead forms
Can be created easily with a visual editor
Or, if you have an app, can be autogenerated from app metadata
Gives you a place with rich and powerful content to link from less powerful media like SMS messages.
Creates valuable advanced analytics for you to visualize your users’ journeys, see what works and what doesn’t in your campaign. Where do you lose interested people? Who can you retarget to convince?
Fully supports custom domains.
Allows the users to subscribe to your web push notifications. This is a very powerful tool that enables you to create a database of interested users without collecting contact information. Not only does that allow you to send notifications to both desktop and mobile without needing an app, but it also lets you retarget the correct people with notifications.

To fully benefit from our Mobile Deep Pages, we complement it with another powerful technology built by our tech team: Smart Deep Links. More importantly, they will help you to improve your conversion rate significantly!

Turn them into Customers With Mobile Marketing Automation!

The users are most often lost at the step of registering or the actual checkout process. The whole journey needs to be as simple and enjoyable as possible for them. It doesn’t matter what your campaign goal is. Whether you are trying to get more users for your app, get people to register for an event, sell some product, or gather donations for a charity… If your users need to jump through hoops, crawl under rocks, and dodge a few arrows, while also having to listen through useless and boring rhetoric, you can be sure that you’ll lose them…

Smart Deep Links are designed to help you with this issue. These links allow you to take the user to the right place, according to their context.

How does it do that though? Well it offers benefits such as:

Takes the user to right place depending on their platform. Let’s say that you are trying to get them to see a specific page in the app. Do they have the app at all? What if they don’t? Do they use Android or iOS? A single smart link can consider all these cases for you! If your user has the app, great! The page launches right away! If they don’t? Well, if they use iOS, they’ll be taken to the app’s App Store page, and if they use Android, they’ll go to Play Store one. Once the app is downloaded, they’ll still see that page you wanted when it launches! It doesn’t limit to apps either; if the user is on a desktop, you can get them to a website or a PWA.
Are you using SMS messages to reach out to potential customers? Well, you can incorporate the link there. This way you can use shorter but still more powerful messages, which will take the user to a media-rich page.
Let’s say you use the link to take the user to a checkout page for payment. Depending on being on mobile or desktop, you can choose to take them to a payment page, or SMS payment.
Do you want to tie your old media and digital media campaigns together? We can encode a quick deep-link to a QR code, and you can put it on your ads, etc. to take the users into your mobile marketing automation funnel even from a billboard ad!

All these features are tailored to make it much simpler for the users to go exactly where you want them to. No hoops to jump, no bullets to dodge. It is quick, friendly, and easy for them to go and do what they will. In just one magic link to get them right there!

This ease of use and the ability to suit every platform to work with just one link increases the user conversion rates with a considerable degree, often even multiplying it!

Well, This All Sounds Nice and Pretty, but… Do You Have Any Examples of It Working?

Well yes, indeed we do! And the example we chose here may not be what you are expecting: it is a charity! Shows that you can use our mobile marketing automation to benefit every kind of campaigns!

Here in Appgain, we are not only helping app developers and marketers, to achieve their goals. Our product also helps charity organizations! Furthering a cause, rushing to aid of those in need…

The charities are fighting the good fight! But to get people to move, they first need to reach out to them. This, in turn, is only possible with running an effective publicity campaign, using all the right tools available for the task. Today, the most important tools are digital media.

Through the digital channels, you can:

Reach potential benefactors
Make them aware of the campaign
Make it easier for them to donate, and hence…
Convert them into actual donors

One such charity organization is Sharjah Charity International. They usually do charity campaigns on social media channels and run SMS donation campaigns. While looking for a solution to make donations over SMS an easier process, the organization has found Appgain to be the answer.

And the answer we indeed are, as the Sharjah has enjoyed:

An increase in their SMS conversion rate from 3% to 12%
Shortened SMS length from 3 messages long to 1, decreasing their campaign cost at the same time.

Sharjah is just one of the many other charity organizations that have enjoyed a great jump in their success rate, as well as a great decrease in their campaign costs. And this is just one industry, we have app creators, digital marketers, and app marketers benefitting from our marketing automation product.

With the Right Tools, mobile marketing automation isn’t Rocket Science! Boost Your Conversion Now!

The science between digital marketing is made available in a custom-built automation tool in Appgain. Our features are designed and built by industry veterans of both technical and PR side of things, to offer you the solution for the challenges you will meet in converting people from mere strangers into clients, donors, and volunteer ambassadors who do your marketing for you!

Still, got questions? Do not hesitate to reach out and Contact Us! Request Demo now.