By Matt Asay, Adobe Marketing Cloud
The numbers will give you pause. In the retail industry, 60% of apps are used less than 10 times and the abandonment rate exceeds that of health care (55%), media and entertainment (54%) and financial services (54%). At the same time, survey data shows that 45% of consumers only use one to two shopping apps on average.
It’s a tough market not only for brands with an established mobile presence, but also for those looking to break in. In light of these numbers, it begs the question: Do retailers need an app in 2017?
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I’m here to convince you that not only do they need an app, it will be an increasingly critical channel for brands moving forward.
Quality Over Quantity Is The Goal
Most of the time that consumers spend on their mobile devices will be within social and messaging apps; it won’t be a retail app and there’s no problem with that. The goal for a retailer is not to monopolize time and make the top 10 list, but to leverage the app to nurture an ongoing relationship with the most loyal users.
Think of the mobile website as an entry point, attracting new users and those who shop casually. For the most dedicated shoppers, encourage them to download the app; perhaps it’s a promotion or access to something exclusive. Once they are there, retailers will find that a small base will contribute disproportionately to the bottom line. Find ways to make shopping for this group easier and tap into this captive audience to build brand ambassadorship. For example, retailers can go beyond shopping and consider a more editorial-focused strategy, where app users get relevant content delivered to them (Alex & Ani does this via daily musings).
Think Mobile-Only And The Audience Will Reciprocate
Many retailers tried — unsuccessfully — to translate their web sites into app containers, hoping that people would just buy. The only problem is that consumers are impatient. If simple things like pinch-and-zoom aren’t executed cleanly, the app goes in the trash. We see this evidenced through high abandonment rates.
As a starting point, retailers must scrub their minds clean of their desktop experience. Mobile-first is not enough; think mobile-only. If consumers only had a smartphone to buy your products, how would that experience feel? Brands thinking like that have cleaner navigation, a cart experience that doesn’t dislocate shoppers, images sized properly for smaller screens and the like. This mindset also enables use cases that serve shoppers in moments of need. Take Walgreens for example, an Adobe Marketing Cloud customer. Not only can you shop, their app makes prescription refills and photo services a breeze.
In short, retailers are no longer competing with each other but with best-in-breed. Consumers nowadays can hail transportation, transfer money or even get a date through apps, and for the most part, those experiences are clean, intuitive and simple. The same expectation exists now for the retail industry.
Context Is King (Or It Could Be)
Mobile is fundamentally different in that it travels with consumers, and the ability to capture contextual data and action it in-store or across other engagement channels has the potential to truly transform businesses. However, it’s not widely leveraged and brands are challenged with identifying the right use cases.
Imagine a fully immersed experience where at the moment a shopper walks into a store, large-screen displays interact with them to suggest items, while a store associate is alerted and can pull up past purchase data. Also imagine a situation that is digital only. Retailers can identify communications — be it on social, mobile, desktop Web or otherwise — that drove customers into stores within a certain time period. That group can then be leveraged to target specific offers, improving the chances for higher conversion.
Like many technologies that have come before it, location is one that will require a cultural and mental shift within organizations. Retailers have an opportunity to reinvent the way people shop, but it’s not one-size-fits-all and there’s no one strategy everyone can copy.
Matt Asay is vice president of mobile for the Digital Marketing business at Adobe, responsible for charting Adobe’s mobile strategy and extending its lead as the mobile marketing leader. Prior to Adobe, Asay held a range of roles focused on mobile, Big Data and cloud computing. Asay is an emeritus board member of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and holds a J.D. from Stanford, where he focused on open source and other IP licensing issues. Asay writes regular columns for ReadWrite, TechRepublic and InfoWorld.
