Your Mobile Presence: Top Tips for Retailers

Our recent survey puts smartphone ownership at more than half (54%) of the adult population. If they search for your business on their handset and can’t get the information they need then their business is lost to you. Here, we give our top tips for retailers for how they can profit from the smartphone phenomenon.

1. Mobilise Your Web Presence

Many technologies that are prevalent on PC websites cannot even be viewed on iPhones or iPads, such as Flash. It is therefore essential that you make adjustments to your existing website (such as removing Flash) or ideally create a separately rendered mobile website, that has been optimised for smaller screens.

2. Make sure your premises is listed correctly on Google Places

Smartphones contain GPS features enabling users to find locations and places near to them, usually using Google maps. Many other 3rd party applications also make use of Google maps so its very important that your retail sites are correctly listed there so that it is easy for potential customers to find you. Registration with Google Places is easy – just go to www.google.com/places

3. Monitor and Engage with Social Media

The next generation of services such as Apple’s new ‘Siri’ personal assistant will rank your business by the amount of positive adjectives associated with it. The current generation of customers work the same way! Reviews sites like Yelp are part of the search results your customers get when they’re looking for a business like yours. By registering with Yelp (which you can do on biz.yelp.ie) you can then publicly or privately engage with customers who have reviewed your business. For example, if there’s a bad review maybe contact the reviewer and “kill them with kindness” so that they might post an update more favourable to you? If there are no reviews consider an in-store promotion that incentivises positive reviews with vouchers and discounts.

This logic applies to other review sites. Google your business and key words that your customers might use to find what they’re finding and apply the same methods.

4. Get started with mCommerce

Can your product be sold or booked online? Apps and mobile websites can and should be portals for these type of services and in most cases there is no reason why your mobile website or even a dedicated mobile app can’t drive ecommerce sales for you. Consider also whether mobile might provide some additional value for customers when integrated with your website – for example using ‘m-tickets’ for in-store collection and SMS alerts to keep customers posted about home delivery purchases.

5. Send Mobile Special Offers

Customers are willing to share their location and other information with you but only if you provide them something of value in return - and of course that you do so in a secure and trustworthy fashion. One of the key ways to motivate consumers is if you send them special offers and this is now possible to do securely using the new digital voucher system from Púca. This enables any brand or retailer to set up, issue and redeem their own unique voucher campaign and provides a highly effective and trackable way to generate new sales. As we are doing with West Coast Cooler this can also be integrated with Facebook to provide some very powerful additional ‘social marketing’ features.

To discuss how you can benefit from Smartphone marketing techniques, get in touch with us.