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Creating Customer Engagement Via Mobile Apps: How App Usage Drives Purchase Behavior
Abstract and Figures
The proliferation of smartphones has spawned a new industry – mobile apps. Managers increasingly recognize the potential for mobile commerce apps to “engage” customers and thereby grow sales. To measure this potential, this paper examines what drives customer usage of apps and whether app usage drives purchases in the online and offline channels. The paper proposes three key drivers of app usage – marketing efforts, app-related consumer factors and app design. The drivers are empirically tested on a unique database provided by an upscale retailer on 1286 customers who have downloaded the retailer’s mobile app. The data record app usage and online and offline purchase behavior. The authors estimate models for using or “accessing” the app and the translation of access into both online and offline purchase. The results demonstrate that app access is driven by online advertising, social media messaging, app upgrades, state dependence and purchase history. Importantly, accessing the mobile app translates into both online and offline purchases, although as expected, more so online than offline. The paper concludes with managerial implications.
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... Today, when facing massive economic repercussions, local governments need to adopt strategic approaches as a part of their crisis management system (Shafi, Liu, & Ren, 2020). By keeping in view the distinguished characteristics of digital platforms, mobile shopping applications are paly an influential role (Dinner, van Heerde, & Neslin, 2015). As noted by (Butu et al., 2020), those consumers who rely on traditional shopping, are now more likely to depend on online shopping applications to purchase required products. ...
... If we talk specifically about mobile applications, today Google Play Store and Apple App Store are two dominant platforms. These platforms provide various opportunities for the users to autonomously purchase the products and services they want (Dinner et al., 2015). In this regard, depending on the types of mobile applications, here we can characterize the purpose of mobile app development into two primary categories: (i) applications that are explicitly developed from some particular platforms, i.e., IOS and Android (ii), device-neutral applications, that do not represent any specific software or platform (Bowen & Pistilli, 2012). ...
“Understanding and managing cybersecurity requires not only investing in technology but also considering its non-technical social and human aspects. Because cybersecurity is now a strategic necessity for digitalizing businesses.” A. Asiltürk
You can access this book chapter from this link: https://www.dosyaupload.com/2Mloz/advances_in_social_science.pdf
... Retail apps provide several benefits, such as store locations, reviews and product information (Danaher et al., 2015) and can provide relevant/directed and location-based information to customers (Grewal et al., 2016). Furthermore, retail apps enable a retailer to increase customers' awareness of prices, products and price promotions (Rosenbloom, 2013) and to provide experiential benefits (e.g., rewards; customer engagement) (Dinner et al., 2015). Retail apps enable customers to search for services and goods, compare prices, read reviews, make a decision to purchase products or services and complete transactions (Newman et al., 2018). ...
... With services such as community integration, smart push, information transfer and online shopping, retail apps help retailers to meet customers' needs and strengthen the communications between the two parties (Hsu and Tang, 2020). Previous studies have proven the power of retail apps in motivating customers to purchase from retailers (Dinner et al., 2015;. ...
Online retailers seek to motivate their customers to switch from web-based stores to retail apps as using the latter as a shopping channel has many benefits for retailers compared to web-based stores. This study aims to examine the drivers of customers' intention to switch from web-based stores to retail apps by applying the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-OR) model. The moderating role of habit was investigated. Data were collected from 389 Malaysian individuals through an online survey and analysed using the partial least squares technique. The results indicated that performance expectancy has a significant influence on switching intention and is driven by mobile characteristics. Furthermore, effort expectancy has a positive effect on both performance expectancy and switching intention and is triggered by visual complexity and aesthetic quality. The moderating effects of habit on the associations between performance expectancy, effort expectancy and switching intention were not supported. The findings extend the literature on retail apps by exploring the switching intention drivers and testing the moderating effect of culture, which have received less attention. The results enable retail apps' developers and marketers to strategise retail apps development and marketing activities in a way that encourages current web-based stores' customers to use retail apps as a better alternative.
... Interactivity involves customer-to-customer interaction and customer-to-application interaction. Lele (2015) and Dinner et al. (2015) suggested that adding social features to mobile applications facilitated the interaction and communication between customers, therefore increasing customers' engagement. Besides, by enabling mobile applications to appropriately push notifications (Pham & Chen, 2019;Pham et al., 2016) and send in-app messaging (Baker, 2020;Perro, 2018), customers' attention to mobile applications is grabbed so that their engagement can also be improved. ...
... The findings of this case study suggest that factors impacting learners' engagement in education and factors affecting customers' engagement in mobile applications both matter to learners of mobile learning applications. For example, previous studies from the education field (Martin & Bolliger, 2018) and the marketing field (Lele, 2015;Dinner et al., 2015) recognized the importance of interpersonal interaction to learners/customers' engagement. This factor is also highlighted in this study. ...
Although mobile learning applications play a crucial role in today’s education and can support learning, the low retention rate is a prevalent challenge in mobile learning. Existing studies have found that interpersonal interaction, high expectations, and supportive environment (from an educational perspective) as well as compatibility, interactivity, and usability (from a marketing perspective) can impact learners’ engagement in learning activities and customers’ engagement in mobile applications. However, comprehensive studies investigating learners’ engagement in mobile learning applications from educational and marketing perspectives are rare. To fill the research gap, we analyzed learners’ reviews on five top-ranked lifelong learning applications (Udemy, LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, edX, and Skillshare). Inductive coding was used to identify critical factors impacting learners’ engagement in mobile learning applications, such as usability, availability of learning experiences, features to facilitate learning, interpersonal interaction, and incentives for completion. We further explored specific engagement strategies displayed in the analyzed applications through an analytical evaluation. Besides, this study expands Hew’s model of learners’ engagement and suggests new conceptual relationships between critical factors impacting learners’ engagement, self-determination theory, and learners’ engagement.
... It is therefore both academically and managerially important to understand how mobile app adoption and usage influence customers' subsequent purchase decisions. In the e-commerce setting, existing studies show that users' mobile activities can lead to higher purchase intention, more purchases, and sales (Dinner et al. 2015, Gill et al. 2017, Huang et al. 2016, Son et al. 2016). Potential reasons for the observed increase in sales include customers being more socially engaged and loyal with the business , having more induced demand for the service (Liu et al. 2017), and having an additional (and more convenient) channel to make purchases (Sun et al. 2019). ...
... Over the past few years, there has been a rich stream of literature that examines various aspects of mobile app adoption and their effects on behavioral outcomes. For example, research has shown that the use of mobile apps improves brand attitude and purchase intention (Bellman et al. 2011) and that app usage can lead to both online and offline purchases (Dinner et al. 2015, Narang and Shankar 2019, Taylor and Levin 2014. Taylor and Levin (2014) show that consumers' interest in a retailer app is positively correlated with their purchasing and information sharing activities, while Sun et al. (2019) find that providing information (vs. ...
The mobile application (app) market is one of the fastest growing markets in recent years. In this study, we investigate how app adoption changes customers' hotel booking behaviors using a dataset of around 16,000 randomly selected customers' hotel booking and stay information from one of the largest hotel chains in China. Our analyses find that customer purchase frequency and total sales increased after app adoption. Additional investigation shows that customers' search behaviors also evolved post‐adoption. Specifically, customers tended to book rooms earlier and select options with less discount, which indicates that app users reduced their search intensity after app adoption. We further investigate the differential impact of mobile app adoption on sales, taking into account consumer heterogeneity in price sensitivity and purchase frequency. We find that both price sensitive and insensitive customers increased the number of bookings, and they tended to book earlier post‐adoption. Furthermore, price sensitive customers on average booked more expensive rooms with less discount after app adoption, suggesting that these customers likely decreased their search effort. In terms of hotel stay frequency, app adoption increased low‐frequency customers' purchase frequency but did not have any significant effect on high‐frequency customers. These analyses provide a more nuanced view of how mobile apps change consumer search and purchase behaviors. Our findings have important managerial implications. With a better understanding of customer behaviors, firms can provide incentives to customers who are more likely to be affected by mobile app adoption.
... Measuring the quality of service the user received from interactions with the SP's app is essential to the operation of PR-LBS. Market research literature has a wealth of studies that analyze the user's retail app usage and its effect on user satisfaction and purchases [125,126,127,128,129,130,131,132,133]. This literature leads to the following conclusions regarding retail apps: ...
... 2. Continued app usage and interaction inside the store (during shopping) directly relates with user's satisfaction during the shopping experience [125,126,127,128,129]. ...
As interconnected devices become embedded in every aspect of our lives, they accompany many privacy risks. Location privacy is one notable case, consistently recording an individual’s location might lead to his/her tracking, fingerprinting and profiling. An individual’s location privacy can be compromised when tracked by smartphone apps, in indoor spaces, and/or through Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Recent surveys have indicated that users genuinely value their location privacy and would like to exercise control over who collects and processes their location data. They, however, lack the effective and practical tools to protect their location privacy. An effective location privacy protection mechanism requires real understanding of the underlying threats, and a practical one requires as little changes to the existing ecosystems as possible while ensuring psychological acceptability to the users. This thesis addresses this problem by proposing a suite of effective and practical privacy preserving mechanisms that address different aspects of real-world location privacy threats. First, we present LP-Guardian, a comprehensive framework for location privacy protection for Android smartphone users. LP-Guardian overcomes the shortcomings of existing approaches by addressing the tracking, profiling, and fingerprinting threats posed by different mobile apps while maintaining their functionality. LP-Guardian requires modifying the underlying platform of the mobile operating system, but no changes in either the apps or service provider. We then propose LP-Doctor, a light-weight user-level tool which allows Android users to effectively utilize the OS’s location access controls. As opposed to LP-Guardian, LP-Doctor requires no platform changes. It builds on a two year data collection campaign in which we analyzed the location privacy threats posed by 1160 apps for 100 users. For the case of indoor location tracking, we present PR-LBS (Privacy vs. Reward for Location-Based Service), a system that balances the users’ privacy concerns and the benefits of sharing location data in indoor location tracking environments. PR-LBS fits within the existing indoor localization ecosystem whether it is infrastructure-based or device-based. Finally, we target the privacy threats originating from the IoT devices that employ the emerging Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol through BLE-Guardian. BLE-Guardian is a device agnostic system that prevents user tracking and profiling while securing access to his/her BLE-powered devices. We evaluate BLE-Guardian in real-world scenarios and demonstrate its effectiveness in protecting the user along with its low overhead on the user’s devices.
... Balasubramanian et al. (2002) conceived of mobile commerce as enabling ultimate flexibility in both time and space. The development of B2B mobile apps has been shown to increase engagement and purchasing by customers both online and offline (Dinner et al., 2015). These apps can function as either a complement or replacement to existing sales channels (Swani, 2021) as well as facilitate mobile or automated payment (Kumar et al., 2018). ...
Abstract
Purpose
While few studies have examined business-to-business (B2B) mobile application (app) usage, none have examined the challenges in developing these technological assets. This study aims to examine B2B marketing executives’ perceptions regarding benefits, barriers and facilitators in app development.
Design/methodology/approach
A survey of 311 B2B marketing executives at selling firms in the USA was conducted to identify key themes related to the benefits, barriers and facilitators in developing B2B apps. The research featured “open-ended” questions exclusively, and advanced textual and thematic analysis of executives’ responses produced several key themes.
Findings
Results show that the perceived benefit of lowering customer servicing and costs drives development more so than trying to realize new revenue opportunities (e.g. “saving” vs. “making” money). Achieving internal buy-in/participation was perceived as a larger barrier than the commitment of financial resources. Additionally, training and education were viewed as the strongest facilitators of an app’s success over its design and functionality. Implications for B2B firms are discussed.
Research limitations/implications
The open-ended format of this research captures a greater breadth of perspectives at the expense of more granular analysis of any particular issue.
Originality/value
The themes generated from the responses offer novel insights into the benefits sought in developing an app, as well as the technological, organizational and environmental factors that act as barriers and facilitators. The open-ended format of this research captures a greater breadth of perspectives at the expense of a more granular analysis of any particular issue.
... [7] H1: Entertainment has a significant positive influence on youth engagement on Instagram mobile app. [8] ...
As a relatively new social networking site(SNS), Instagram’s user database has been growing at a staggering rate since it was first launched in 2010. Marketing practitioners have been making efforts on this increasingly popular mobile image(and video) capturing and sharing services to reach the end-users, more importantly, to build lasting relationship with them.This study follows literature study, positive worldview, and utilized contextual investigation plan. The information was gathered by qualitative substance investigation strategy through passing questionnaire. A questionnaire was conducted to collect primary data and secondary data the study sample consisted of 104 respondents. Therefore, these significantly affect the adherents, likes, and remarks, for consumer engagement. The variables that are considered for the study are customer engagement, perceived value, social value, ease of use. As per the result of the study perceived value, social value, ease of use have shown positive influence on the youth engagement.
... Despite the prevalence of mobile apps, there is limited research about performance metrics to understand mobile app usage behavior. Particularly regarding shopping apps and websites, purchasing as an outcome variable has been researched profusely (Dinner et al., 2015;Narang & Shankar, 2019), while the browsing behavior itself has not received as much attention. We focus on two mobile app performance metrics-shopping app stickiness and shopping app usage time-that are widely used in the field as key performance metrics in the mobile app context (Braze, 2016;McKinsey & Company, 2019). ...
Mobile shopping is on the rise, and the main channel of social media has now shifted from online to mobile. We aim to understand the role of social media apps in driving mobile shopping. Specifically, we examine two performance metrics for mobile shopping—shopping app stickiness and usage time—and classify social media apps into broadcasting and narrowcasting ones. Our empirical analyses using mobile panel data reveal that the usage time of both types of social media apps increases shopping app stickiness. As for shopping app usage time, broadcasting app usage time has a positive impact, while narrowcasting app usage time has a negative impact. We also find that the impact of broadcasting app usage is greater than that of narrowcasting app usage. Furthermore, offline social interactions weaken the effect of social media usage on shopping app stickiness and that of broadcasting app usage on shopping app usage time.
The authors investigate the impact of customers’ mobile app adoption on grocery shopping behaviors. Specifically, they investigate the cannibalization of existing physical and online channels by the newly adopted mobile app and evaluate changes in households’ total expenditures at the focal chain. They find that households adopting the mobile app marginally decrease their spending in physical stores, but considerably increase their expenditures and shopping trips through the mobile app. They present evidence that the mobile app plays a synergistic role for customers who never used a digital shopping channel. Lastly, the authors find a competitive encroachment effect by the mobile app. They find the impact of mobile app adoption is greater in markets where the focal chain faces more intense competition from a nearby competitor.
Media attribution is the assignment of a percentage weight to each media touchpoint a consumer is exposed to prior to purchasing. Many firms consider using attribution to allocate media budgets, particularly for digital media, but an important question is whether this is appropriate. An initial hurdle when answering this question is that, despite the surge in interest for media attribution in marketing academia and practice, attribution does not have an agreed formal definition. Therefore, this paper proposes an attribution formulation based on the relative incremental contribution that each medium makes to a purchase, taking into account advertising carryover and interaction effects. The formulation shows that attribution is proportional to the marginal effectiveness of a medium times its number of exposures. This means that often-used media will have high attribution weights. However, the profit-maximizing allocation for a fixed budget is a function of advertising effectiveness, but not a function of past exposure levels. By offering analytical derivations and studying simulated and empirical data, the paper shows how attribution can offer misleading insights on how to allocate resources across media. Moreover, the empirical example demonstrates that substantial gains in purchase probability can be made using profit-maximizing allocation compared with attribution-based allocation.
Continual innovation and new technology are critical in helping retailers’ create a sustainable competitive advantage. In particular, shopper-facing technology plays an important role in increasing revenues and decreasing costs. In this article, we briefly discuss some of the salient retail technologies over the recent past as well as technologies that are only beginning to gain traction. Additionally, we present a shopper-centric decision calculus that retailers can use when considering a new shopper-facing technology. We argue that new technologies provide value by either increasing revenue through (a) attracting new shoppers, (b) increasing share of volume from existing shoppers, or (c) extracting greater consumer surplus, or decreasing costs through offloading labor to shoppers. Importantly, our framework incorporates shoppers by considering their perceptions of the new technology and their resulting behavioral reactions. Specifically, we argue that shoppers update their perceptions of fairness, value, satisfaction, trust, commitment, and attitudinal loyalty and evaluate the potential intrusiveness of the technology on their personal privacy. These perceptions then mediate the effect of the technology on shopper behavioral reactions such as retail patronage intentions and WOM communication. We present preliminary support for our framework by examining consumers’ perceptions of several new retail technologies, as well as their behavioral intentions. The findings support our thesis that shopper perceptions of the retailer are affected by new shopper-facing technologies and that these reactions mediate behavioral intentions, which in turn drives the ROI of the new technology.
Firms increasingly offer engagement initiatives to facilitate firm–customer interactions or interactions among customers, with the primary goal of fostering emotional and psychological bonds between customers and the firm. Unlike traditional marketing interventions that are designed to prompt sales, assessing returns on engagement initiatives (RoEI) is more complex as sales are not the primary goal and often direct sales are not associated with such initiatives. To assess RoEI across varying institutional contexts, the authors propose a methodological framework and empirically implement the framework to investigate a business-to-business mobile app that a tool manufacturer provides for free to engage its buyers. The data include sales by buyers who adopted the app over 15 months, as well as a control group of buyers who did not adopt. The results from a difference-in-differences specification, together with selection-on-observables and –unobservables, show that the app increased the manufacturer's annual sales revenues by 19.11%–22.79%; even after accounting for development costs, it resulted in positive RoEI. This RoEI was higher when buyers created more projects using the app, so customer participation intensity appears to underlie RoEI. This article contributes to engagement literature by providing a methodological framework and empirical evidence on how the benefits of engagement initiatives materialize.
The difference and system generalized method-of-moments estimators, developed by Holtz-Eakin, Newey, and Rosen (1988, Econometrica 56: 1371–1395); Arellano and Bond (1991, Review of Economic Studies 58: 277–297); Arellano and Bover (1995, Journal of Econometrics 68: 29–51); and Blundell and Bond (1998, Journal of Econometrics 87: 115–143), are increasingly popular. Both are general estimators designed for situations with “small T, large N″ panels, meaning few time periods and many individuals; independent variables that are not strictly exogenous, meaning they are correlated with past and possibly current realizations of the error; fixed effects; and heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation within individuals. This pedagogic article first introduces linear generalized method of moments. Then it describes how limited time span and potential for fixed effects and endogenous regressors drive the design of the estimators of interest, offering Stata-based examples along the way. Next it describes how to apply these estimators with xtabond2. It also explains how to perform the Arellano–Bond test for autocorrelation in a panel after other Stata commands, using abar. The article concludes with some tips for proper use.
The authors highlight the need for and develop a framework for engagement by reviewing the relevant literature and analyzing popular- press articles. They discuss the definitions of the focal constructs-customer engagement (CE) and employee engagement (EE)in the engagement framework, capture these constructs' multidimensional, and develop and refine items for measuring CE and EE. They validate the proposed framework with data from 120 companies over two time periods, and they develop strategies to help firms raise their levels of CE and EE to improve performance. They also observe that the influence of EE on CE is moderated by employee empowerment, type of firm (business-to- business [B2B] vs. business-to-consumer [B2C]), and nature of industry (manufacturing vs. service); in particular, this effect is stronger for B2B (vs. B2C) firms and sen/ice (vs. manufacturing) firms. The authors find that although both CE and EE positively influence firm performance, the effect of CE on firm performance is stronger. Furthermore, the effect of CE and EE on performance is enhanced for B2B (vs. B2C) and for service (vs. manufacturing) firms.
Retailers are dynamic in nature, and their strategies keep evolving with changing scenarios and availability of new technologies. In the current scenario, there is a need for a comprehensive and organizing framework for retailers to develop and implement a complex set of strategies. In this article, we broadly categorize retailers’ implementation of strategies at four levels—market, firm, store and customer. The four-level categorization has been done using a triangulation approach consisting of inferences from previous literature, interviews with practitioners, and reviewing popular press. In the future, retailers will expand to even more countries, and there will be plenty of scope for using advanced technologies and big data. This organizing framework accommodates for any such changes as well as guides retailers about ways of increasing profitability in the future. In this article, we also provide generalized expectations of strategies under each level which not only can be used by researchers as a direction of future research but also by practitioners to understand and implement their strategies in an effective and efficient way.
