Competition between retailers in the digital sphere is fierce and unforgiving. Even if your app’s primary objective is increased conversion, merely offering the ability to purchase products will make your app fall short. The most successful mobile apps are those that provide an exclusively mobile experience and seek to offer additional features to help or engage their users. In this blog we will cover some of the best practices for the creation of a successful mobile app.

First Impressions Matter

After successfully getting a new user to download your app, it’s vital to allow them as much control as possible to earn their trust. You should enable them to select communication preferences, the kinds of messages they’d like to receive and even assign tags to the types of product they’re interested in. By respecting the user’s preferences and communicating only the most pertinent information, you’re setting yourself up for a successful app/user relationship.

Personalised Experience

The modern tech-savvy consumer is no longer satisfied with a one-size-fits-all service, but instead desires a personalised experience that is tailored to their interests. The amount of customer data now available allows for easy personalisation of services. App users are now quick to ignore irrelevant or poorly timed communications, in favour of those that are directly related to their interests, physical locations and shopping habits. In a world where every user wants to feel appreciated and valued, brands should seize the opportunity to show that they care about every one of their customers. There are many ways you can personalise your offering to capture and engage your audience including personalised push notifications, the ability to personalise app preferences and even the look and feel of the app itself. We will discuss personalised push messages in more detail below.

Knowing your Users

The first step of a successful relationship with your users is to truly understand your target audience. Ask yourself: what do you know about your app users? Have they signed in with an existing ID? Have you asked them to update their preferences? Have you asked them to share their location? What can you find out through their in-app behaviour? Once you have all of this highly valuable information, what will you do with it?

We recommend that our clients use Morelytics, our new analytics tool, to gather indispensable customer insights. You can drill down deeper into a multitude of retail related KPIs that help you to truly understand your app customers. Morelytics allows you to tag events, compare data, set alerts if your KPIs fall above or below a set value, add targets and intelligent projections, and generate effortless visual presentations of your data. You can use Morelytics via the web or through our intuitive iOS and Android apps, meaning that your app’s data is only ever a click or tap of the finger away.

Added Value Features

In order to compete for user attention, retail apps should offer more than the ability to purchase products. Apps must offer added-value features to enhance the user experience and keep users coming back. For example, Mothercare’s app strategy is a perfect example of a carefully planned and considered feature-rich approach. Along with full product line and standard purchasing tools, Mothercare’s award-winning iPhone, iPad and Android apps feature a baby name tool, a barcode scanner, wish lists, essentials lists, Mothercare TV, Baby Tunes, pregnancy week-by-week guide, and home screen personalisation to cement their position as the go-to companion for busy mums and mums-to-be.

Reward Loyalty

Mobile apps offer the unparalleled ability for retailers to promote and reward customer loyalty. You can connect your loyalty programme directly to your app, and even replace paper loyalty cards altogether by integrating with the device’s Passbook or Wallet. We look to another NN4M client, The Body Shop, for an innovative and highly successful example of an in-app loyalty programme. The Body Shop has incorporated Love Your Body™, its loyalty programme into its mobile app. Love Your Body™ members can access a wide variety of loyalty features right from within the app. Another good example is Starbucks’ mobile app, which connects My Starbucks Rewards™ with payments. In exchange for paying with a smartphone, members earn rewards that can be redeemed for free drinks and food.

Go native

Sometimes in an effort to save money and time, retailers create hybrid mobile apps. Hybrid mobile apps are built using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and are hosted inside a native application that uses a mobile platform’s WebView. These apps can be used across different operating systems but are typically slower and less responsive than their native counterparts. Tailor-made for each specific operating system and supporting complex graphics and intuitive features, native apps provide the best speed and usability, the best features, and the best overall mobile experience. Native applications are without doubt the most seamless way to deliver the best shopping experience possible to loyal customers. Customer expectations are constantly rising. If you offer customers an app, they will expect it to be seamless, bug-free and easy to use. By adopting a hybrid development approach, you run the risk of creating a sub-standard app and generating negative reviews.

Push Messaging

Unlike email marketing, push messaging offers location awareness, meaning you can personalise your message and time it specifically to when the recipient is likely to engage with your app. Unlike emails, push messages appear right on a smartphone’s lock screen. They can’t be ignored—the recipient must act on each message (either by tapping to open it or tapping to dismiss it), which means that it’s easier for them to be driven directly to your app. Mobile now gives marketers the opportunity to use a consumer’s physical location as a parameter to trigger push notifications. With the majority of consumers willing to share their locations, brands are now able to deliver messages that will drive sales by sending to devices that are in the right place at the right time. A consumer/brand relationship, when cultivated through personalised, pertinent communications can be highly successful and mutually rewarding.

In-Store Mode

According to a report from Cisco, 48% of users use or would like to use a smartphone to shop while in-store or on the go. One way that retailers are leveraging mobile inside their stores is by providing a separate mode for in-store shoppers that uses the phone’s location technology to provide relevant information based on where they are located inside a store. We can provide a separate “in-store” mode within your app that uses the phone’s location technology to provide relevant information based on where a customer is located inside a store. Delight your customers with in-store checkout, beacon functionality, barcode scanning, maps, stock checking and more. If your customers opt in, you can track their location to provide them with an app designed specifically for that store. Your customers could make lists by speaking into their microphone and they could search for products by typing in a word or phrase, and the app would show them where to go.

To Conclude

To ensure a successful app from both a customer engagement and commercial perspective, your app must cater to the preferences and behaviour of your omni-channel users. Today’s consumers are in control. They do not respond to generic, interruption-based marketing, meaning that brands need to get smarter and get personal. Omni-channel consumers are prepared to connect with brands, but only those that make their lives easier, offer added value and show deference to their individual preferences.