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Leveraging the Power of Mobile Apps in Retail

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Mastufa
New Update

In this article I bring together the full spectrum of industry-adopted best practices in mobile enabled selling that retailers like you have been using the world over to bring footfall to their store fronts.

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Mobile Apps and advertisements The two easiest ways to use mobility to drive traffic to your store front are:

1. By launching an ad campaign that is targeted towards users of mobile devices and

2. By launching a mobile shopping cart application for your store.

Let's looks at these two approaches:

Mobile Apps: On the face of it a mobile app is just another entry point into your store just as a web site or a call-center or SMS based selling techniques are different ways of driving customer traffic to your store front. I say"on the face of it" for a specific reason which I shall come back to a bit later on.

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The Mobile Web Site: For now though, an easy way of putting together a mobile store front is to create a mobile version of your regular website. For e.g. if your website is www.acme.com, your mobile website would be called m.acme.com, and your customer's internet browser will be autodirected

to this website or to the regular m.acme.com site, depending on whether

the request came from a desktop or from a mobile device. There are several standard techniques and several website building tools available today that will let the mobile website to auto-detect the amount of screen real estate available on the mobile device on which it is running for e.g. whether it was opened on a 4 inch phone or a 7 or 10+ inch tablet device and for optimizing the rendering of web pages for that form factor. 

Go native

Mobile devices today specialize in providing high levels of usability and fluidity of use, eye-catching animations, high levels of user interface performance and the sheer "snaziness-factor" that come together to create the kind of user-experience that you would definitely want to fully harness in your company's mobile application. The mobile platform also provides features such as push notifications and camera support and access to specialized sensors such as the accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetic sensor etc that you can incorporate in your selling experience, but we'll leave those for a fuller treatment later on. 

Cross-platform compiled apps

Remember that the downside to developing a native app for your store is to have to get it developed once for each mobile platform you wish to target. There is virtually no reusability between the different mobile platforms today and this fact will obviously drive up the cost of  development and maintenance for you. People have found ways to

introduce reusability in the development effort by using development tools such as the Mono Framework from Xamarin or Titanium from Appcelerator, MoSync etc. which let you develop the app in a single high level programming language such as C# or JavaScript and then deep-compile

it into a 100% native app for a number of supported platforms such as Android and iOS.

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Note that once you decide to use such a tool (or let your app development vendor use it for developing your mobile apps for you), you are pretty much locked into the use of that tool's APIs and development environment for all future enhancement and maintenance activities on your native apps. This is a calculated risk that you need to take in return for the benefits of write-once-run-anywhere. Getting true cross-platform write-once-run-anywhere ability without running into the risk of tool lock-in & vendor

lock-in is a yet to be achieved and very much sought after goal in mobility.

On the other hand the upside of developing a native app for each platform is of course the promise of delivering a truly marvelous and high performance mobile shopping experience to your user using the native SDK's full power and performance and no-vendor lock in issues. The higher

cost of development and maintenance on native is the calculated cost you incur in return for the benefits of the write-once-for-each-and-every-platform approach!

Cross-platform Web Apps

To get around the problem of vendor lock/framework lock in issues and yet provide a near-native experience on multiple platforms, a recent innovation has been to use frameworks such as Sencha Touch, JQuery, Jo, XUI and many others that harness the magic of JavaScript, HTML5 and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) versions 2 and 3 technologies to create a native app like user experience on the mobile device. These are true cross-platform apps written in pure web-technologies that work just the same (or similar) as native apps on all mobile platforms such as iOS, Android, Blackberry etc. that have good support for these features. However instead of being write-once-runanywhere, they are really write-once-port-everywhere, since the application developer will need to almost always  make adjustments to the app so that it runs well on each

mobile platform. In this approach, the cost of development is naturally lower than for developing it from scratch for each platform, although the cost of maintenance can be higher than the native approach, especially for complex features.

An important downside of this approach is this: the HTML5/Web approach can offer a lower level of performance in terms of response times and screen rendering times than the native approach due to the interpreted nature of technologies (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) that are used in this approach as compared to the native code approach in which all code runs natively directly on the mobile device's processor and hardware. Note also that you will not be able use native only features such true push notifications, native animation support, access to the camera and other kinds of sensors etc. GPS is an exception - most HTML5 compliant browsers support GPS.

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Go hybrid

There is a third approach sometimes called as "hybrid development" that uses frameworks such as PhoneGap from Adobe Systems, Apache Flex,

or Marmalade from Ideaworks3D that let you encapsulate an HTML5 app into the thin jacket of a native iOS, Android, Windows Phone etc. app. This way the "meat" of the app remains crossplatform and therefore can be in

theory developed only once. This "meat" is then packaged into a platform specific native app once each for Android, Blackberry, iOS etc. The  advantages of this hybrid approach are:

1. Most of your app remains cross-platform and therefore less costly to get developed as compared to a strictly native approach.

2. Since the app still gets packaged as a native app, it can be hosted on the App Store, Google Play etc. as a first class native app.

3. The app can access some of the native features such as push notifications, camera, sensors etc. via the services provided by its native jacket - a feature that is not possible with pure HTML5 web apps. Finally note that the hybrid approach is a bit different than approaches such as Mono that are mentioned earlier which do a deep-compilation of the application code into a true native app - one for each platform that the framework supports. The hybrid approach on the other hand compiles

only the "jacket" into the native app and the body of HTML5 based code that the jacket contains is as-such kept untouched in the native app.

Because the body of the app is built using open webtechnologies,

it becomes much easier to discard the "native shell" and port to a new shell technology, should you feel the need to take this step. Hence technology lock-in or platform lock-in, or indeed vendor lock-in becomes less of an issue with the Hybrid approach than with the first approach mentioned above. Indeed many of the deep compile players appear to have noticed this advantage already and frameworks such Titanium, MoSync, Marmalade etc. are already beginning to offer the Hybrid option!

Mobile advertisements Now that we have looked in detail at all the different ways in which you could get your store front developed as a mobile app, let's look at the age-old, tried and tested way of easily driving traffic to your store: via advertisements!

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1. Mobile Ads: Mobile ads can be placed inside in other mobile apps via mobile ad services such as Google Mobile Ads, MADS etc. When a user taps on such an ad they can get directed to one of these places:

Your mobile store front or

1. A special deal section inside your mobile web site or

2. The download link to your web app or native app on an app store or

3. The launch URI of the mobile app that is already installed on the user's device or

4. Download link for digital coupons that can be  redeemed in your mobile app or on your website or in store.

2. Online Ads: Ads placed on other web sites or on search result pages using ad services such as Google Ad Sense, or on your own web site can direct the user upon clicking to:

1. Your mobile store front or

2. A special deal section inside your mobile web site

3. The download link to your web app or native app on an app store.

4. Download link for digital coupons that can be redeemed in your mobile app or on your website or in store.

3. Email and SMS based Ad Campaign: Ads sent via a bulk SMS or email campaign can similarly channel user traffic to:

1. Your mobile store front or

2. A special deal section inside your mobile website

3. The download link to your web app or native app on an app store.

4. Download link for digital coupons that can be redeemed in your mobile app or on your website or in store.

4. Print Media Ads and Scanable QR Codes: A QR Code placed in print media such as magazines and newspapers or on media such as side walk mounted billboards or placed on placards/boards/banners in malls or in your physical store, can direct the user upon scanning the QR code to:

1. Your mobile store front or

2. A special deal section inside your mobile web site

3. The download link to your web app or native app on an app store.

4. Download link for digital coupons that can be redeemed in your mobile app or on your website or in store.

5. Broadcast media ads: Ads appearing on TV or radio can channel viewers/listeners to:

1. Your mobile store front, web store front or physical store

2. App store, Google Play etc for downloading your mobile app, perhaps to avail of mobile app only offers.

6. Near Field Communications: Although not strictly a channel for dissemination of ad content, NFC has opened up another channel through which a user with an NFC enabled device can:

1. Download digital coupons into your mobile app that is installed on the user's phone.

2. Download PDF versions of coupons or advertisements that can be transferred to the user's phone even if the user may not have your app installed.

3. Download links for downloading your mobile app from app store.

4. Download your app itself directly via the NFC transmitter. The NFC transmitter will typically be located inside your brick and mortar store. An

incoming user will tap their NFC enabled phone on this transmitter to achieve any of the above mentioned things.

Using mobility to convert foot falls into purchases

Once a potential customer comes into your brick and mortar store, how can mobility help in convert that foot fall into a purchase? It turns out that there are a range of interesting approaches that you can adopt with mobility to make this happen. Here are some of the ways businesses are using mobility to enhance the in store experience: Assisted selling apps & sales associate facing apps: You can empower your shop-floor associates with tablet based applications that can contain features such as item lookup, price lookup, inventory lookup, a richly laid out interactive product catalog that the store associate can use for performing guided or assisted selling etc.

Rewards Accounts based selling: If you can detect that an existing customer has entered one of your physical stores such as by using GPS or via an NFC tap, you can have a sales associate approach them with products and offers that might be available in that particular store that align well with the customer's previous buying history and any aspects of their profile that they may have made available to you. You can also have the same offers pushed to their mobile device via push notification services offered by most major smart phone OS manufacturers such as Apple, Google, BlackBerry etc, or by SMS. Bar Codes, QR Codes, NFC and the Promise of Self- Checkout: We have already covered how QR codes placed inside stores or on print media can cue to user to downloading

digital coupons directly to their mobile device or to download your mobile app itself while the customer is in your store. Ditto for an NFC based transmittal of content to the user's mobile device. A bar code scan of a product in store can similarly trigger a lookup of product information, reviews and a product comparison option with other products or price

comparison with your competitors (assuming you provide a price-match guarantee). A bar code or QR code scan can also trigger the addition of that product into the user's shopping cart.

Rewards Card and the Mobile Wallet: The above selfcheckout scenario also demonstrated one important thing, which is the potential of achieving a tight integration between a rewards card that is linked into your store's mobile app and the concept of a mobile wallet. If the customer's rewards card account is integrated into your store's mobile app, it has the following

advantages:

1. Customer identification becomes straightforward via GPS or an NFC tap when the customer walks into your store or is in the vicinity of your store.

2. At the time of check out the customer can quickly identify themselves to the POS via a scan of the rewards card barcode that is displayed by your store's mobile app or via an NFC tap.

3. The points accrued or utilized during any purchase made by the customer can be instantly reflected in their mobile app.

Achieving a unified selling experience across channels: If you have a brick and glass storefront, a web store front and a mobile store front, you need to create a similarly uniform experience across the different store fronts.

Here are some examples of unified selling:

- When a user buys something in your web store or mobile store, they should be able to mark it for pick up in a physical store.

- A transaction begun in one store can be seamlessly completed in another channel.

- Digital coupons delivered to the mobile device via SMS or push  notifications can be redeemed in any channel (web/mobile/brick/all center).

- While buying a product via the brick, mobile or web channels a user (or store associates in a physical store) should be able to search inventories of physical stores and upon locating the product, mark it for delivery

from that store or pick up from the store.

- Assuming that the customer has opted in, their purchase history and purchasing patterns across channels should be available in a unified

database for you to make potentially useful recommendations.

You should strive to create a unified server-side infrastructure

that will facilitate such unified experiences. This implies maintaining

a single user account across channels, a single shopping cart and unified ERP and POS system databases that cut across channels.

Creating demand using mobile technology: Here are two very popular ways in which retailers are using mobile-enabled orthogonal selling:

1. Create and publish games, quizzes, utility apps, personal finance apps etc. that create a very rich and engaging environment for the app's user. The important thing to keep in mind is to always find a way to project your

organization's brand and the products and services that it offers via the medium of this mobile application so that the user is always exposed to your brand while they are using the app. The ‘Lifestyle', ‘Food and Drink',

‘Entertainment' and ‘Games' categories on the Apple App Store are replete with examples of apps from companies that are following exactly this strategy.

2. Create and publish an Augmented Reality (AR) based app that immerses the user into your product while at the same time creating a very engaging experience when they point their mobile device at the real thing

such as one of your home theater system product in a store, or at a car model manufactured by you on the street. 

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