By Lynn Wang, Apptimize
It’s January. The holidays are over. Take a minute to breathe and congratulate yourself for surviving yet another insane rush.
Now, the returns and exchanges start coming in. But don’t worry; this actually presents a really great opportunity for retail and e-Commerce businesses. January doesn’t have to be the time when purchased items come back in; it can be a time when you still have high traffic coming through the physical and/or digital door, which means this can be opportunity to sell.
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Rather than sit back and let customers return items, here are four ways to optimize your customers’ post-holiday experience:
1. Refresh Your App With Post-Holiday Creative
Studies show that an app with updated holiday messaging and creative can receive a 129% increase in session time on Androids and 24% lift on iOS devices. This doesn’t just apply for the holidays. In general, customers want to feel that your app is the right one for them at the right time. Updating your app after the holidays can really help users engage more.
Particularly, switching your images from scenes of holiday cheer to those of January sales can create a big lift in sales.
In general, the impact of images on your can be surprisingly astounding. You can have the same messaging and design in an app, but using a slightly different image or even icon can make a big difference.
As Nasty Gal CEO, Sophia Amoruso, describes in her book #GirlBoss, rigorously testing different images of the same item on different models or different angles sometimes made a success out of an initially poorly performing product.
Similarly, the following A/B test by Paktor of icons in their dating app made a dramatic difference in app engagement metrics:
Read the full story here.
2. Optimize User Flows
Whether you manage a retail app that’s looking to maximize revenues during the January sale season or any other app that’s looking for the jolt in downloads after everyone has gotten their new smartphones, optimizing your user flows will help you capture more of the post-holiday burst of activity for actual gain.
A/B testing is a great way to optimize the user experience. Here are some great ideas on what to A/B test to improve your users flows for retail:
Pay special attention to your new user flow. Make sure that your new user experience is enticing users to engage and keep on coming back.
The best way to do this is to A/B your new user flows while tracking:
- One, seven and 14-day retention;
- Log-in rates;
- Screens viewed in a session;
- Session times; and
- Revenue metrics.
It also is important to A/B test your home screen:
- Test the holiday creative from the first tip and try different angles for holiday messaging. For example, test “We have the perfect gift for Mom” against “Take a break and treat yourself to something.”
- Test when to prompt users to log in and which combination of registration options increases their likelihood of actually signing up.
- Test any onboarding tutorials or flows that you may have.
3. Give Users The Offers They Want…Immediately
a. Use behaviors to predict that your customer is looking for. For example, below is the home screen of Nordstrom’s app.
A typical behavior is to go to the category I think is best suited for me. So I click on women, then shoes. I browse around for a while and then I decide to check out sales. Now that the app knows that I’m looking for women’s shoes, a really smart app will start showing me deals on women’s shoes.
Alternatively, if I go to recommendations first and click on a shoe, the app should use my expressed interest to show me similar items when I’m in a different section.
b. Use what you know about your customer to send better messages.
A lot of retail stores ask for gender when signing up. Here is Nordstrom’s app’s sign in page.
Many retailers have a substantial amount of information about their customers but don’t use it in the context of the app. This is typically because connecting information from your servers to the app can be hard. But if you can make this work, you can create custom messages for customers based on the information you have about them. Send women in Miami ironic messages about getting ready for a freezing winter while showing them images of bikinis. Give men in Minneapolis prompts to buy last-minute snow gear.
c. My personal pet peeve is clicking on an ad because the image they used was of something I liked and then not actually being able to find that item. This is an easy problem to solve for. Simply use a deep link that connects the ad to a specific item on your site. If your user is on a mobile device, the site should prompt him/her to see the item in your app.
Yelp does a great job of this:
4. Be Flexible And Competitive After The Holidays
Amazon is constantly testing different prices. Here’s a great analysis of Amazon price changes during the year. This ramps up even more during the holidays and through January. Amazon tests its pricing to stay competitive in the moment.
Pricing changes can be difficult to do because of Apple’s rules, but you can still stay agile and react to your competition’s promotions. Last Mother’s Day, we had a customer who was running a sale in their e-Commerce app. Two days before the big day, their team found out that a competitor was running a nearly identical deal but at a lower price point. Since every retailer is looking to dump inventory after the holidays, it’s important to plan for agility so that your positioning is competitive.
Lynn Wang helps mobile product and user experience managers outpace their competition by leveraging fast, focused, and codeless iteration. She’s a force of nature at Apptimize, whose visual editor combines real-time A/B testing and customer-centric metrics to help mobile product managers improve their iOS and Android apps faster.
