App users spend about 3x more than people who only shop on your website. Most retail teams still aren’t set up to capture that.
Paid ads cost more and convert less than they used to, and shoppers bounce between ads, email, social, and your store before ever buying. Owned channels — email, QR codes, referrals, loyalty — could pick up the slack, but most retailers still lean almost entirely on Google Ads and app store optimization to grow their apps, leaving everything else underused.
This playbook covers when to route someone to your app instead of your website, how to put your owned and earned channels to work growing it, and how to measure whether any of it’s working.
What’s inside
- The routing rule for app vs. website, and the two numbers that decide it
- Acquisition tactics for QR codes, web-to-app banners, social, email, and referrals
- The onboarding and deep linking plays that turn installs into first purchases
- Retention tactics for push, SMS, lifecycle email, and loyalty programs
- The benchmarks and events retail teams should actually be tracking