6 Reasons Why Your Grocery Business Needs a Branded App

The COVID 19-pandemic catapulted the World into disarray. However, businesses were smart enough to make the shift to digital ordering platforms. The resulting effect was an increased customer base, increased revenue, and an overall improved shopping experience for online visitors. 

In this post, we’ll talk about things specific to online grocery stores, and different reasons to scale them. 

Why your grocery business needs a branded app can be answered in many ways. A branded app offers not only benefits for your customers but also provides your business a great opportunity to stay ahead of its competition. 

Here is why your grocery business needs a branded app and what it can offer your customers. 

Why Your Grocery Business Needs a Branded App

There are many reasons why your grocery business needs a branded app. Some of these reasons have to deal with what such a branded app can offer your business.  However, there are certain elements of a branded app that provide benefits to the end-user and your customers. 

Here are just some of the reasons why your grocery business needs a branded app and why you should consider investing in one. 

What does a Branded App for your Grocery Business Offer your customers? 

Let us start with what a branded app for your grocery business can offer your customers. 

There are steps you take for your business that provide better experiences for your customers. After all, it is your customer’s positive experience with your business that leads them to keep coming back and allowing you to create a loyal customer base. 

By creating a branded app for your grocery business, you are able to provide better service to your customers and have more control over what experience your customers have with your brand. 

Satisfying your customers with proper customer service is a vital part of running any successful business. This is especially true for businesses that deal so closely with customers. 

When you offer your customers a branded grocery app, you give them a more convenient and efficient way of buying their groceries. 

An app offers the ability to get groceries delivered to your doorstep and thus avoid the hassle of going grocery shopping physically. This is especially beneficial nowadays where everyone is encouraged to social distance due to the Global pandemic. 

Apart from the ease that such an application provides it also offers customers the ability to save time. 

Getting ready to leave the house, making the trip to the grocery store, finding all the items on the list, waiting in the checkout line, and coming home takes up a hefty portion of an individual’s day. 

According to statistics by The ‘Time Use Institute’, on average, a single shopping trip takes around 41 minutes. Moreover, customers tend to go to the grocery store on an average of 1.5 times a week. These calculations roughly amount to 53 hours a year – a period that’s consumed by making trips to real-life store locations.

Using a grocery app can cut this time drastically and offers customers the ability to get everything they need from the comfort of their own home. 

Moreover, such applications also offer customers convenient payment options. Customers have the choice of paying by credit or debit card, and cash on delivery.

The bottom line is this: offering customers a branded grocery app provides them with what they are looking for quickly without hassle. A simple and online version of a task that needs to be done. 

In fact, statistics show that on average 64% of US consumers have shopped for groceries online with 29% placing orders every week. 

This is the age of technology. the new generation (*especially Gen-Z) demands having everything they need and want at their fingertips. 

Considering that 45% of millennials do their grocery shopping online, it is a great opportunity for you to boost sales for your grocery business by creating a branded grocery app. 

These are just some of the benefits that customers gain from branded grocery apps. But what’s in it for you as a grocery business? 

What a Branded App for your Grocery Business Offers You?

Now let’s move on to what you can gain from implementing a branded app for your grocery business. 

1. Improved Brand Recall 

Whether you are in the restaurant business, the grocery business, or even the retail business, your brand matters. 

Creating a brand that is both memorable and recognizable in a positive way is an important way to gain and retain customers. 

You want customers to automatically think of your business’ name and no other whenever they think of buying groceries. This is referred to as brand recall, or top of the mind awareness factor based on unaided brand recall phenomenon.

Creating positive brand recall allows customers to be rest assured that, when they are looking for groceries, they have come to the right place. A place that will give them what they are searching for and meet their requirements. 

Having a smartphone presence in the form of a branded application is a great way to generate or improve brand recall. 

The fact that it is predicted that there will be approximately 4.3 billion smartphone users by the year 2023 shows just how important this presence is for your business. 

Having a branded grocery app allows your customers to constantly be exposed to your brand which will, in turn, create brand recall and awareness. 

Studies have shown that a customer needs to be exposed to a brand at least 10 times for brand recall to be automatic. With the frequency at which online shoppers nowadays use their mobile phones. Placing a company’s brand logo on app front is the way to go forward.

2. D2C (*Direct To Customer) Marketing Possibilities 

Other benefits that are to be gained from creating a white-label grocery app for your business are in relation to the marketing perspective of your business. 

When you create your own branded app for your grocery business, you open up opportunities to market and promote your products to your customers. 

While you may feel your marketing techniques and campaigns that you have run on different social media sites and paper publishing are enough. By having your own branded app you gain a low-cost, direct marketing channel. 

It is important to remember that marketing is not simply aimed at acquiring new customers. You want to continue to market your brand and products to existing customers as well. 

This is where your branded grocery app comes into play. 

You have a channel where you can directly engage your existing customers and inform them of any promotions you have running. 

You can also upload banners on your app’s homepage and send out push notifications to your customers as part of your marketing strategy. 

These personalized notifications allow you to establish a personalized connection with your existing customers quickly and affordably. 

New offers and promotions also can act to convince customers to buy more and thus increase their cart size improving your overall sales. 

3. Collect and Benefit from Important Customer Data 

Another aspect of running any successful business is knowing what your customer wants. 

With so many options available in the grocery business you need to make sure you stand out and deliver what your customers are out looking for. If you fail to do so you will simply blend into all the other options available and miss out on sales. 

But how can you figure out what your customers are after? What product is selling fast? Which product has now become obsolete and is simply wasted inventory?

A benefit of having your own branded app rather than using an aggregator site or keeping your business offline is that you have access to your own data. This data lets you gather relevant information that allows you to answer these questions. 

Creating a white-label grocery app can fetch user data, giving you insights into what your customer’s preferences are,, and more. 

Other information you can gather is for business analytics such as popular products and preferred payment methods to name a few. 

This data can be used to better your brand’s customer experience and provide your customers with exactly what they are seeking. 

Not only does this ensure your brand stands out from the sea of other apps and grocery businesses available, but it also provides a positive association with your brand. This in turn improves your customer loyalty and eventually, this leads to increased sales.

Apart from providing a better experience for your customers, you are also able to run your business better. By knowing which products are in demand, you ensure that you do your inventory according to these preferences.

You will, thus, be able to make sure that the products that are sought after do not diminish to the point of being out of stock. You also ensure you do not stock up excessively on items that will go to waste. 

4. Broader Customer Reach

When you have an app for your grocery business, you are able to reach a larger customer base and offer your business to those individuals who you may not reached previously. 

Consider the fact that, according to statistics, on average, US consumers spend approximately 86% of their mobile use time on applications. 

Furthermore, studies have found that around 43% of shoppers prefer shopping on mobile apps rather than in grocery stores. 

These statistics show that there is untapped potential and a customer base that you can gain access to, over time.

Therefore, creating a branded app for your grocery business can grow your potential customer base and help you reach more clientele. 

5. Offer Loyalty Programs 

You may also want to consider creating an on-demand grocery app due to your ability to easily manage loyalty programs for your customers. 

Loyalty programs incentivize your customers to keep supporting your grocery business. 

Having loyalty programs integrated with your app takes away some of the hassles such programs may pose to your customers.  

When you consider loyalty programs in physical shops, you often have to deal with registrations and loyalty cards that need to be remembered. 

This incentivization can encourage repeat customers with ease and without the difficulty that certain such programs offer.

 Making the process of loyalty programs more streamlined encourages customers to use them which leads them to shop more. This is in contrast to complicated loyalty program processes that can have the opposite effect on your customers. 

Such programs also have the ability to increase customer loyalty. Loyal customers have better brand awareness and are more eager to choose your brand over its competitors.. 

The longer the app stays on their phone the better chances of them using it and increasing your sales.

These are just six reasons why your grocery business needs a branded app. But creating a branded app can be confusing, time-consuming, and costly. Hiring your own developers can be a dreadful task that may not even result in the app you are hoping to offer your customers. 

That is where Blink comes into play. 

6. How Blink can Help You Create a Branded App for Your Grocery Business 

Blink provides a Software-as-a-Service and offers your grocery business web interfaces as well as mobile apps for both Android and iOS devices. 

The applications provide different modules that offer your grocery business the ability to provide your customers with a white-labeled, pre-designed, and branded template for your website and mobile app. 

Blink offers your grocery business a comprehensive back-end to provide you with a range of possibilities. 

Some of the capabilities that Blink offers include:

• Branded website and mobile apps to grow your customer base.
• Loyalty programs to entice your existing customers to keep coming back to your business.
• Analytics and reporting dashboards to gain insights into your customer base. 
• Marketing features allow you to send customers Push Notifications and other marketing strategies. 

Using Blink to power your brand’s own grocery app provides your customers with a handy and easy-to-use platform where they can place orders quickly and accurately directly from your business.  

Having such a portal is a great alternative to third-party portals since it gives you access to all your customer data and business analytics while also allowing you to avoid paying high commissions on repeat sales and loyal customers. 

To learn more about how Blink can help your business, get in touch with one of our consultants by booking a demo today.