3 ways to emphasize your products with in-app stories

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When it comes to customer engagement, in-app stories can do a lot of things. They can help with user onboarding and ensure that your customers get a decent understanding of your app. They can also aid with transitioning customers from other platforms to your app. And, they can help you highlight products within the app. In this article, we will give you three examples of how to emphasize your products with in-app stories, and briefly explain why doing so is so effective.

Emphasize your products with in-app stories

First, we need to go over the basics of web and in-app stories. In-app stories are story content placed within a certain app. Platforms like StorifyMe give you an easy way to create various story content and export it as widgets. As such, you can place story content inside your app with relative ease. This can be done to improve certain aspects of your app, or even warm up leads to your store. But, where people often fail is to recognize when and how story content is best used.

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The following three are the most common situations where using an in-app story can help with user engagement and ensure that your users actually take note of your products.

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1. Use products as examples in user onboarding

As we mentioned before, you can quite effectively use web stories in user onboarding. In fact, doing so can be quite beneficial as few managers rely on story content for user engagement.

A neat marketing trick you can do is to weave product placement into the onboarding process. While you are explaining away what your app is all about, and how to best use it you will likely use some of your products as examples. Well, through in-app stories you can dynamically change which products you are using as an example. Keep in mind that your customers are bound to take note of the product in question. As such, you'd waste the attention that the user has given to the onboarding process. By showing specific products, you will emphasise their value, and help motivate viewers to purchase them.

2. Recommend related products to the one that your customer is considering

Another way to emphasize your products with in-app stories is to recommend related products to the one your user is considering. Most online shops have (or at least should have) related products. For instance, if you are selling lamps, it is only natural that you offer lightbulbs. If you are selling knives, you should offer knife sharpeners. And if you are selling sneakers, you should offer related socks. All in all, you want to predict what your customer is likely to need and offer another product while they are in the shopping mood.

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Well, with in-app stories, managing this is quite easy. The most difficult part will be to decide when in the customer's journey, will you emphasize a similar product. Some opt to do so while the customer is viewing something. Others wait until the customer has headed for the shop, and has already decided to make a purchase. This may require some experimentation as different customers tend to respond better to different timings. But, seeing that in-app stories give you a ton of flexibility, you should have a fairly easy time altering them as needed.

Also, if you have multiple similar products to offer (like knife sharpeners of different types, or socks in different colours) you can easily set up your in-app story to scroll through them. If you track customer behaviour you can see what their purchase preferences are. So, if they prefer quality over price, you can look to recommend better items. If they prefer to be cost-effective, you can look to push best-value options. Personalization and in-app stories go hand in hand, which is what makes them so effective for marketing and eCommerce.

3. Highlight ongoing sales

The most straightforward way of using in-app stories for product placement is by highlighting ongoing sales. Again, the great thing about in-app stories is that they can be customer oriented. You can look to set up your in-app stories to emphasise products that your customer will likely want to see. If there are specific sales or special offers, in-app stories are an easy way to promote them. As stated, the dynamic nature of in-app stories gives you a ton of options. And the more you can learn about your customers and use the customer data, the better your app will do.

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What makes in-app stories so effective?

To help emphasise the effectiveness of web stories, we will go over a couple of factors that help them engage customers in such a meaningful way. If you take a look at marketing stats alone, you should get a decent idea of how powerful story content can be. And if you manage to weave it properly into your app, we are sure you will see a terrific ROI.

Personalization

When it comes to modern marketing and customer engagement, personalization is key. For you to engage your customers within your app you need to approach them at a personal level. The more you are able to gather their info, and orient your content to them, the better you will do. Fortunately, when it comes to both gathering customer data, and creating personalized content, in-app stories shine. Polls, questionnaires, and info sheets are easy to place in front of a customer, as long as they are in the form of a story. No customer wants to spend minutes filling out forms. But, if you use story content to put the customer in the right mood, and then push a couple of questions that will help determine what your customer is like, they will be more than happy to answer them.

Easy edit

Platforms like StorifyMe make creating and editing story content a breeze. Most marketing managers avoid investing too much in personalized content as it can be expensive to create. After all, you have to create specific content for each segment of your customer base, and then make modifications if needed. With written content, this is can be relatively easy and cheap. But, with visual content, this is seldom so. That is if the visual content is not web stories.

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With web stories, you can easily add, alter, and rearrange various elements. As such you can create different content for each segment of your customer base. And you can set up your app to automatically show specific content for specific customers.

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‍The allure of story content

To be completely honest, we cannot completely explain why story content is so alluring. No one can. The combination of visual elements, vertical-oriented content, short format and energetic feel all make story content far more effective than marketing managers at first thought it would be. Short animations and videos in particular have proven themselves to be quite effective in catching and maintaining users' attention (just look at TikTok stats). While we are certainly biased towards story content, we would strongly advise you to research it on your own accord and compare how easy they are to make, and how effective they are when compared to other types of marketing content.

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Final thoughts

By now you should have a decent idea of how to emphasize your products with in-app stories. What remains now is to experiment. There are tons of different apps out there. And what might work for yours may not be applicable to the rest. Test apps similar to yours and see if and how they are using in-app stories. The more research you do, the more inspiration you will get. After a while, we are sure that you'll find a specific use for in-app stories.

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