How to Reach the Top Charts: Three Strategies from Successful Shopping Apps
Mobile is the future of retail, and retailers are being forced to adapt quickly by increasing investment in digital strategies or face failure. But many brands are still trying to figure out what mobile strategies will serve their customers best.
To help retailers understand what works and why, Apptentive set out to uncover what makes five of the top retail mobile apps successful.
To identify which shopping apps to analyzed, we used SurveyMonkey’s Intelligence tool to find apps that have experienced the largest gains in MAU by percent in the last 30 days, and apps that have the lowest weekly churn.
Then, we compared those lists to the top charts in the app stores and chose five apps that made all three lists. The five apps are Kohl’s, eBay, RetailMeNot, Walgreens, and the Amazon App.
We dug in to discover what attributes might contribute to the apps’ success and uncovered three key strategies all of the apps share: reduce friction in the path to purchase, make customers’ lives more convenient, and create seamless omnichannel experiences.
Discovering three common strategies enabled us to understand which features contribute most to the success of these apps. We compiled our findings into a report, which explores the tactical approaches these retailers take to make their apps a hit with customers to drive revenue, loyalty, and retention.
In this post, we’ll discuss the three overarching mobile strategies of top retail apps in detail. If you’re interested in the specific tactics and features apps use to optimize their customer experience, our report is available here: How to Construct a Retail App: Key Strategies & Elements from Top Apps.
Three Key Strategies of a Top Retail Mobile App
- Reduce friction in the path to purchase.
Reducing friction in the path to purchase is a smart strategy that encourages customers to complete a purchase by making it easier for them to get what they want, when they want it, with little interference.
People are often multitasking or passing the time between appointments when shopping via mobile, which makes lowering the barrier to purchase a high-value strategy for apps with easily distracted customers. And while mobile is an integral part in making it easier for customers to buy things digitally, it can also play an important part in reducing friction in-stores too.
Don’t be mistaken, this strategy also applies to brick-and-mortar retailers who don’t offer the option to make purchases directly in their mobile app. Consumers don’t want to spend a lot of time in the checkout process regardless of which channel they’re shopping in. Which brings us to our next strategy…
2. Make customers’ lives more convenient.
People’s lives are busy, so everyone appreciates time-saves. Retailers who design their mobile apps to make the lives of their customers more convenient are more likely to have engaged customers.
The inherent value in mobile shopping is its convenience factor. Without an app that supports that allure, consumers are less likely to keep your app on their phone; instead opting for a competitor who has optimized their customer experience for the mobile shopper.
Creating a mobile app that makes consumers’ lives easier extends beyond the digital realm into the physical realm, which brings us to the third and final goal.
3. Create a seamless omnichannel customer experience.
Having an outstanding customer experience has quickly become a requirement, not a nice-to-have for consumers.
As such, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that 84 percent of companies aspire to be leaders in CX. And most brands truly do view great customer experiences as an aspiration, because in reality only one in five companies deliver a good or great CX, according to Forrester Research.
Retailers who aren’t investing in creating seamless omnichannel customer experiences are leaving potential revenue on the table by failing to meet expectations.
Forrester found that customers are willing to pay nearly five times as much for a great customer experience versus a poor experience. And the companies who are investing heavily in omnichannel customer experiences are outpacing companies who are late to the game by over 500 percent.
Wrapping Up
Retail apps that have features that reduce friction in the path to purchase, make customers’ lives more convenient, and that create a seamless omnichannel customer experience have soared to the top charts and kept churn to a minimum. To meet ever increasing consumer expectations, consider building a mobile app that achieves these goals.
Many mobile app features check the boxes of all three of these strategies, and the features you choose are totally dependent on what is right for you company and best for your customers.
Our report, How to Construct a Retail App: Key Strategies & Elements from Top Apps, is meant to serve as a playbook for retailers looking to make their apps a hit with consumers. Who better to learn from than chart-topping Kohl’s, Amazon, eBay, RetailMeNot, and Walgreens?
Want to learn more about how to take your mobile customer experience to the next level? Check out Apptentive’s Best Practice Guide for Mobile Order and Pay.
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