Mothercare is raking in the prizes! Its newly released Android app just won the most effective consumer app award last night at the Mobile Marketing Association’s Effective Mobile Marketing Awards. Mothercare was up against tough competition, including ASDA, Hotels.com, Greggs, Tesco, Subway, The Open Championship and the River Trust.
Mothercare has partnered with NN4M to develop a collection of apps across iPhone, Android, iPad and Kindle, which have each been met with widespread acclaim. The company has been recognised with dozens of awards for its apps, including two PayPal Etail awards, two Retail Systems Awards, Three Effective Mobile Marketing Awards, a Loved by Parents Award, four Junior Design Awards, a Mobile Retail Award and many more. See the full list here.
Following on from the success of the iPhone app last year, Mothercare decided to develop an Android app in 2014. The retailer made the wise decision to create the app with Android principles in mind instead of simply replicating their iPhone app on the Android platform.
As with the iPhone counterpart, Mothercare wanted to create more than just a commercial shopping app due to the nature its business. We therefore worked with them to offer their customers not only the full Mothercare shopping experience but also provide a number of features that help parents. These include:
- Baby namer
- Kick/Contraction counters
- Pregnancy week by week guide
- A collection of lullabies and nursery rhymes
- Essentials lists
- To do list
- Mothercare TV
- Baby Tunes
- Ability for users to personalise their home screens with pictures of their little ones
We have seen that customers spend 57% of time in the shop, and 43% on non-shop features, which shows how successful these features are. The app achieved chart number 18 in the Google Play Shopping chart and Number 319 in the Overall chart. This is an exceptional result considering that Mothercare is a specialist retailer. The app currently averages a 4.0 star rating in the Google Play store.
The Pregnancy week-by-week feature was a particular success, providing expectant mothers with a pregnancy journal in which they could record and store important information and take pictures at various stages of the pregnancy. Additionally, the Baby Name feature is captivating the Mothercare audience by not only offering name meanings, but also offering a shake feature to generate random name choices for those still undecided parents-to-be. The app also features a store locator, a barcode scanner and wish lists.
By capturing customer data including due date and child information, Mothercare pushes out key offers to their customers about events, promotional activity and new product launches in line with key life stages (e.g. pre-natal and post-natal). This allows the retailer to send relevant and targeted messages and offers ensuring push acceptance rates do not fall too low.
Additionally, Mothercare allows its customers to engage via mobile in the in-store environment. We therefore worked with them to include in-store elements such as a store locator, essential checklists and a barcode scanner that allows customers to add items to wish lists or check customer reviews whilst wandering the aisle.
Also included was a feature called Baby Tunes, which is a collection of classical, lullabies, nursery rhymes and white noise sounds which help relax unborn infants or entertain babies and children. This feature covers several growth stages and is split into four playlists. Tunes for bump, tunes for baby, tunes for kids and white noise sounds that can be looped.