What is mobile app marketing?
Mobile app marketing is promoting your business and engaging with customers through your branded mobile app. While mobile marketing broadly encompasses all promotional activities carried out on mobile devices—such as organic and paid social ads—app marketing focuses exclusively on interactions within your company’s dedicated app.
A well-designed mobile app creates an optimized experience for users on mobile devices, allowing for more tailored and effective interactions compared to mobile websites. Mobile apps are also a crucial component of an omnichannel marketing strategy for many B2C brands.
Brands who are thinking of diving in to mobile app marketing should take the leap, especially if you are looking to:
- Build deeper, more personal relationships with customers.
- Increase and improve engagement with your audience.
- Lengthen your relationship with your customers over time.
Your customers—both existing and prospective—probably spend more time on their phones than they do on their other devices. A mobile app sets you up to cater the marketing experience to that device effectively.
4 benefits of mobile app marketing
Mobile app marketing typically serves as a customer retention strategy rather than an acquisition tool. This is because the people download your brand’s app are generally highly engaged customers with strong brand loyalty.
When someone downloads your app, it signals a strong intent to continue engaging with your brand in the future—unlike website visitors who may browse once and never return.
The main advantages of mobile app marketing include:
- Immediate customer engagement
- More direct action and higher purchase rates
- Better long-term customer retention
- Higher customer lifetime value (CLV)
Ultimately, effective mobile app marketing helps maintain stronger customer relationships and drives greater revenue generation.
2 challenges to keep in mind with mobile app marketing
Despite its benefits, implementing a successful mobile app marketing strategy comes with two notable obstacles:
1. Resources for development and maintenance
Creating and maintaining a mobile app demands substantial engineering resources, which is why businesses with dedicated apps tend to be larger companies with bigger budgets and more technical capabilities.
Smaller businesses often aren’t ready to allocate the significant time, energy, and finances required for app development. Unlike websites that can be quickly established on platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, or BigCommerce,, mobile apps involve a more intensive development process and larger investment.
Of course, apps require ongoing maintenance and regular updates, adding to the long-term resource commitment.
Some smaller businesses overcome this challenge by partnering with app marketing agencies or using solutions like Tapcart to develop apps based on their existing ecommerce websites without needing an in-house development team.
2. Post-download engagement decline
Approximately 90% of mobile app users stop using an app within 30 days of download. That makes continued engagement a real challenge for mobile app marketing.
With an intense competitive landscape—nearly 3 million apps in Google Play Store and almost 5 million in the Apple App Store, plus the average person having over 80 apps installed on their device, but regularly using only about 9 apps daily—users won’t keep opening your app unless it provides clear, consistent value.
Even with excellent app development, comprehensive marketing campaigns, and effective app store optimization strategies combining thoughtful descriptions and attractive visuals—your efforts will be wasted without a strategy to convert downloaders into loyal users.
Push notifications are one of the most effective tools for maintaining user engagement after the initial download.