3 Mobile Apps That Will Help Draw & Keep Customers In Your Store

If you are the owner of a brick-and-mortar store, you may be concerned about online shoppers going to someplace like Amazon rather than shopping at your establishment. Brick-and-mortar store owners are finding new ways to draw customers in, and offering a mobile shopping app is one of those ways. Smartphones are used for everything these days (except, perhaps, making phone calls), and recent Google research revealed that 79 percent of smartphone owners also use their device to shop.

What if there were a shopping app with incentives for shoppers to come in to your store, shop and save? Here are three shopping apps that give customers what they want.

Shopkick

Shopkick is all about rewards to customers. It works like this: When a shopper walks in your door, the small Shop Beacon transmitter that’s attached to the wall “sees” that the person has the app installed. It sends a notification to turn on the app and welcomes the person to the store. The beacon will show them location-based deals, and if they have browsed the app at home and “liked” an item, Shopkick will automatically show themwhere the item is. If one of their liked items is on sale, the app directs the shopper to the sale item. Every time a shopper purchases an item at the store, they get points, or “kicks.”

Scanning the barcode of an item will earn shoppers points as well. They don’t even have to buy it; they simply scan it and automatically get credited with the points. When the shopper hits a certain number of kicks, they go to the store of their choice and redeem their kicks for a gift card to spend on anything in the store. Over six million shoppers have the Shopkick app. It works on both Android and iPhone devices.

Boutikey

Boutiques are usually quaint, wonderful little stores. They’re also rare these days. About 80 percent of boutiques go out of business within five years of opening due to the competition with online shopping, Tiana Haraguchi told the Boston Globe. Haraguchi developed a mobile boutique shopping app for the Boston area. Called Boutikey, it’s like Shopkick as far as points and a reward system go. Using the app, a shopper can locate any boutique in the area and the sales going on in each one. Anytime a shopper spends money at a boutique, the amount is tracked. After spending a specific amount, a shopper begins earning points toward rewards.

Haraguchi says the mobile app is what drives people to shop offline rather than online. Mobile apps personalize the shopping experience, which is a must if you’re going to get a customer to return. Both Android and iPhone users can use Boutikey.

Yowza

This mobile shopping app is designed for the coupon-minded shopper. Billed as the world’s most popular mobile coupon platform, the Yowza shopping app gives shoppers the best coupons for their favorite local establishments. It’s a location-based system that tracks the shopper’s city and the retailers in the area. When he is out shopping, the user simply opens the app, and Yowza will show him the cheapest place to get a particular item—and provide a coupon to use. The coupons run on the app all day, every day. Thousands of merchants worldwide accept Yowza. It can be used on both Android and iPhone devices, but the coupons display best on a device with a large screen.

Retailers can combine the best of online and offline shopping to keep their customers returning and their revenue increasing.

Photo Credit: Provided by Social Monsters with permission to use.