Mobile Commerce for Coworking Business: How to Have a Finger in the Pie

We live in the era of eCommerce with 50% of all internet traffic shopping from a mobile device. If you are not selling online, you are missing out on revenue.

The topic of workspace monetization is burning for 99% of coworking space managers and operators. If you are one of those concerned entrepreneurs, continue reading and we will tell you why you want to burst into the world of mobile Commerce and how to do it.

 

What Can You Offer to Mobile Shoppers

The answer is pretty much everything. The coworking space business is about providing comfortable places to work. These may be hot desks, dedicated desks, or private offices that are included in pre-paid membership plans.

Surely, a seating arrangement is not enough for a businessman to be happy with the service. That’s why coworking spaces offer an array of additional perks to meet all possible requirements of their customers.

They are:

• Conference rooms
• Event rentals
• Printing facilities
• Food and drinks
• And all sorts of other additional services.

Everythingthat is not included in pre-paid membership plan gives you additional sales opportunities. Besides, it’s much easier to upsell existing members that know and trust you and grow your revenue than to convert new leads that didn’t hear much about your brand.

However, if your flexible workspace offers mobile apps, you can try to tackle both existing customers and non-residents, which is the power of mobile commerce in action. This has become an important practice of eCommerce development along with the customers' changing needs.

 

Why Is Mobile Coworking App the Best Place to Offer Value-Added Services?

Modern customers are spoilt by seamless mobile experiences. Just think about Uber and mobile banking.

The average American spends 5.4 hours a day on their phone.

66% of smartphone users are addicted to their phones.

80% of smartphone users are more likely to purchase from companies with mobile sites or apps that help them easily answer their questions.

—review42.com

It’s really critical to give customers the possibility to interact with your brand on their smartphones. This way you connect your website and physical space as members get access to all your perks right after sign up and start to sell more by giving customers the possibility to pay inside the app without having to go to the front desk.

People rely on their phones to help make the best decisions at the moment of purchase. In fact, 70% of smartphone owners who bought something in a shop first turned to their devices for information relevant to that purchase. And when people search on mobile, it tends to lead to action: 92% of those who searched on their phone made a related purchase.

— thinkwithgoogle.com

I am pretty sure you are aware of the phenomenon that people are more likely to spend more when they use their mobile wallets such as Google Pay (for Android), Apple Pay (for iPhone), and Samsung Pay (for Samsung), or any other payment method other than cash.

According to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, once consumers began to use mobile wallets, their total number of transactions rose by 23.5%, primarily spent on low-cost items. Overall, spending increased by 2.4%.

So, when you are struggling to maximize revenue per member of your shared workspaces your primary task is to encourage coworking space residents to download your app and start to charge them for snacks and additional services through it. It’s quite another experience when you pay your fees with a tap of your finger instead of going to the front desk, waiting for ever-busy community managers, and pulling banknotes out of a wallet.

Besides, giving coworking space members awesome mobile apps you not only get immediate benefits such as revenue increase. You also invest in your future business growth as customers happy with their mobile experience at your flexible workspace are more likely to recommend your brand to friends and peers.

According to a recent study by Google, “89% of people are likely to recommend a brand after a positive brand experience on mobile.” And when the mobile experience is helpful, people are more likely to use the brand again.

—originalone.in

Pro Tip: When choosing the best coworking space management software for your flexible workspace, make sure that members’ apps are not an afterthought or by-product for a vendor. Remember that your revenue depends on how simple, usable, and intuitive are those apps.

 

How to Promote Services to Coworking Space Members Through Mobile Apps

In the previous section, we talked a lot about the importance of mobile phones, mobile searches, and mobile purchases. We arrived at the conclusion that mobile apps are the best places to promote additional coworking space services to members. It’s really easy to reach members through their phones as they never part with gadgets, spend many hours using them, and love to make purchases via beautiful simple apps.

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If your mobile apps are nice and modern, you won’t have any problems with making members download it. Here are a few tips to increase the activation and engagement rates of your coworking space app.

Now let me show how to benefit from mobile commerce using a coworking space app on Spacebring example.

 

Let Customers Book Rooms and Desks from Mobile Phones

I have already mentioned here that coworking space is about providing comfortable workstations. Meeting room/conference room and desk bookings are some of the most frequent activities at a coworking space. Let’s view a couple of examples of how you can monetize bookings at your hub with the help of mobile members’ apps.

Introduce various payment methods

As a rule, when a customer purchases a membership, some free meeting room hours are already included in the package. However, a member may need to run more meetings than the package allows. Of course, they can always come to the front desk and buy additional hours. But we have already discussed that direct contact with the coworking space manager and watching money leaving the customer’s pocket may become a serious barrier. I mean, a customer may choose to reschedule or cancel the meetings to avoid inconveniences. In this case, you are losing money. Here’s what you can do to encourage customers to make as many bookings as they need/wish.

Introduce meeting room and desk booking systems with a variety of payment options to choose from. For instance, when a customer is booking a desk or a room via Spacebring app on their phone, they can pay with credits (free hours), banking cards, or an invoice that is sent to a member at the end of the month.)

This way, when a member runs out of credits (free hours), they just choose another payment method inside the same app and complete the booking. You get your money straight on your account and members get the service they need without asking the manager. The system processes bookings and payments automatically.

Make an offer for corporate customers

These days most of the companies either let their employees work from home or use a hybrid workforce when some people come to the office and some stay at home.

Working from home has its benefits but brings many challenges as well. For instance, employers are concerned about team motivation and productivity. Not all people are as happy and efficient working from home as they are in the office.

Coworking space is a brilliant solution for companies that want to boost team motivation and productivity. What you need to do is craft an irresistible offer for them.

Here’s what you can do with Spacebring:

Invite company employees in your coworking app and let them book desks and meeting rooms from their smartphones whenever they need and pay with a company invoice. No long-term commitments for the company, transparent pay-as-you-go basis. The team leader gets one bill for all services used by the team and pays it in a click.

Allow bookings to non-members

If you have enough desks and meeting rooms at your flexible workspaces, you can lease the facilities externally. If you are using coworking space software with meeting room booking and desk booking solutions allowing reservations on mobile, there won’t be any overlaps or booking conflicts. Data is refreshed in real-time, so it’s impossible to book the same desk or conference room twice (customers see only available desks/rooms).

Moreover, with meeting room display functionality, if a member used their free hour, booked a meeting room and never showed up, the booking is released and becomes available for paying customers.

Non-members pay for bookings with banking/credit cards right inside the apps on their smartphones. As you already know all these bookings and payments happen automatically without any administration from the coworking space owners' or community managers' sides.

 

Let Customers Buy Services on Mobile

Shop is one more great tool available inside coworking space software. Here’s how you can use it for marketing purposes, to increase conversion rates, revenue, and mobile sales.

List all on-demand services (from parking to cleaning, printing, and whatnot) your flexible workspace offers in a virtual catalog. Supply them with attractive images and catching descriptions. Members will see that you added a new service every time they open their mobile app. If they are interested in some service, they can tap on it, study details, apply, and even buy the selected service in-app, paying with credits, cards, invoices, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and other available payment methods.

You can go the extra mile and do some extensive promotion for your new service. For instance, tell about the service on Feed community newsfeed and send members push-notifications inviting them to check out the new service.

Pro Tip: By analyzing services’ popularity (Spacebring allows to do it via Analytics solution) you will figure out what members really need and provide things that are valuable to customers.

 

Let Everyone Join Events on the Go

You surely organize events at your coworking space as this is a great way to build and maintain your community. Some of your events are paid, which contributes to your revenue as well.

However, managing events is always a hassle especially if you use social media or third-party instruments for their promotion. The best place to promote and sell your internal events is your mobile coworking space app.

Here is how it happens on Spacebring:

A community manager curates a beautiful events feed where members and everyone who has your app on their smartphone easily discover upcoming events and get all the necessary details to decide if they want to join. No third-party software, no Facebook groups. Everything happens on the same platform.

When you use your main coworking management software, there is no chance for a member or customer to miss the event they are interested in or close the page ad and forget about it like it often happens with Facebook.

A member sees that you added a new event when they open their coworking space app on a smartphone to make a reservation or talk to peers.

You can also inform members about a new event via Feed and send them push notifications. What’s more, when a member/customer joins an event, they are prompted about its approach with a widget right on the home screen of the coworking space app, which is also a great reminder.

 

Over to You

As you see, coworking software not only saves managers’ time and automates recurring administrative tasks but helps you enter the world of mobile commerce and earn more if you make good use of members’ apps and other awesome built-in instruments.

Are you ready to start making more money with Spacebring coworking space software and its trendy web and mobile members’ apps? Would you like our experts to tell you more about game-changing solutions that will fit your particular case? Schedule a demo call with us!