Smartphones are becoming more and more popular around the world. In countries like South Korea, Israel or the US the percentage of smartphone cover ranges from 72% to even 88%. No wonder that more and more retailers notice this fact and invest in mobile applications to boost their sales.

So how can an offline shop make use of a mobile app? And how to develop a good retail app? Here are the answers!

MOBILE APPS IN RETAIL MARKETING

Most retailers build a mobile application for two reasons: they want to enable purchases via the app or they treat an app like a virtual loyalty card which makes their customers buy more and come back to their brick-and-mortar store more often. In the case of GKN app, the software developed by Ready4S for the GKN (Główna Księgarnia Naukowa, Main Scientific Bookstore) in Cracow, Poland, the latter was a case.

GKN’s goal was to make their loyalty program easier and more convenient for the customers. They know that their clients, especially the younger generations, don’t want to carry a set of loyalty cards everywhere with them and that they are afraid of giving their personal details at a store because they don’t want to get tons of marketing messages afterward. So instead of a regular loyalty card, still popular in many retail shops, they went for a mobile app.

THE APP – A SUCCESFUL MARKETING STRATEGY

The GKN mobile app has achieved a great success on the local market. It has almost 5.000 downloads and was well-received by its users who praise it for transparency, simplicity, and functionality. It also gets high reviews in Google Play app store – on average 4,2 stars.

But why the GKN app has proven to be so successful? And how to create a perfect retail mobile app? We asked Wojciech Satoła, one of the GKN co-owners and Piotr Bosak, GKN IT Manager to share their views.