While consumers spend 85% of their time on a smartphone in an app, they’re only spending 5% of that time using shopping apps, according to a new Forrester Research Inc. report.
Apps are for a company’s best and most loyal customers, and few brands are so valued that their app icons earn a spot on consumers’ smartphones, Forrester principal analyst Julie Ask writes in the study “Your Customers Will Not Download Your App,” which is based on a survey of 1,721 U.S. online smartphone owners between October-December 2014.
“There are a lot of players in this space with apps and fighting for screen time is in fact hard to do,” says Arash Hadipanah, senior mobile product manager at fashion retailer Rue La La, which sells through limited-time “flash sales.” To keep consumers aware that they downloaded the app, Rue La La focuses on interacting with shoppers at the right time, Hadipanah says. For example, Rue La La will notify a shopper that an item in her cart is about to expire, to encourage her to purchase it before the deal is gone.
Despite the competition for consumers’ app loyalty, Ask emphasizes that it’s important to try to engage consumers on their mobiles devices. Even if the shopper doesn’t purchase on her mobile phone or tablet, consumers routinely use all their devices to research products. In fact, consumers use multiple devices in shopping and researching for 40% of e-commerce transactions, marketing company Criteo writes in its Q2 State of Mobile Commerce report.
Flash-sale retailers, which emphasize to consumers they only have a short time to nab deals, are well placed to win a home on smartphone screens for their apps and to generate significant sales from those apps. RueLaLa.com generates 50% of its revenue and traffic from mobile devices, with a large majority of that coming from its app, Hadipanah says. Rue La La’s app offers features not available on its mobile website, such as allowing the consumer to scan her credit card with the smartphone’s camera, he says.
“We have a great mobile website but our app experience is far superior,” Hadipanah says.
Besides focusing on closing sales on mobile devices, retailers should consider how much mobile phones influence in-store sales, Ask says. More than half of young adults use smartphones in-store to help make purchasing decisions, such as by comparing prices and reading product reviews, Forrester reports. Also, 50% of consumers who conducted a local search on their smartphone, such as “handbags near me,” visited a store within a day, according to a study by market research company Ipsos, of 4,500 smartphone consumers in January 2014.
Follow mobile business journalist April Dahlquist, associate editor, mobile, at Mobile Strategies 360, @Mobile360April
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