Mobile app adoption in the retail and hospitality industries is now at an all time high. Our analysis shows 70% of retailers in STORES’ Top 100 Retailers list and 47% of brands in the Hot 100 list offer mobile apps. The numbers are going up every year, too. Equally as important are studies that show mobile phone usage for retail shopping is heavily weighted towards the in-store experience rather than online purchases .  Consumers are looking retailers’ rich mobile apps that add utility and value to their in-store shopping experience as they research and engage around their purchase decisions and interact with the brand.  Stay ahead of the competition by incorporating mobile app that…

…goes far beyond your mobile-optimized website.

Mobile apps need to take your customers so much further than mobile websites. While using some hybrid mobile web elements within the app are fine for common activities such as viewing a product catalog, mobile apps must do more than repeat a company’s mobile website.  Apps must add value to the customer’s experience, especially in-store.  Without meaningful utility, customers will use your app once before uninstalling.

A retailer’s mobile app should provide consumers with eye catching interactive elements to help them find stores, support their purchase decision, and facilitate customer service processes like filing rebates, optimizing offers, and even making returns.  The higher the utility to the consumer, the more likely they will return to the app again and again, opening opportunities for retailers to engage and influence purchase decisions.

…allows customers to interact with you and other customers.

Shoppers love to talk and mobile apps are ideally positioned to foster a communicative environment for customers to engage not only with you, but with other customers as well. Mobile apps are like store associates in the palm of the customer’s hand, providing answers to questions about a product while in-store based on a product catalog search or barcode scan, behind the scenes videos or customer reviews. Enabling social engagement also lifts your brand to the people in a customer’s social circle, creating new traffic generation and branding opportunities.  Brands are now including check-ins and other store-specific social tools in their apps that simultaneously allow the interactions to flow out to the customer’s favorite social networks.  

…fosters customer loyalty.

Earning customer loyalty requires several interacting factors: a consistently pleasant customer experience, loyalty-based rewards incentives and most importantly, trust. Trust is hard earned, and made more attainable with mobile apps that include customer service enhancing features. A customer who uses your mobile app has likely frequented your store often enough to feel it was worth their time to download your app—reward these customers with an app that ties their visits and purchases to loyalty awards and uses store visit knowledge to set up feedback opportunities by delivering surveys and bounce-back offers upon exit from a store location.  Above all, reward these customers by thanking them for their loyalty. If your customers feel special in your store, then all other competitors have no chance.

…leverages the power of digital engagement at real-world locations.

Mobile apps open  more valuable pathways for customer engagement and purchase influence at brick & mortar locations than ever before.  What better time to communicate with your loyal customers than when you know they’re in or near your store?

Integrating location-enabled technology into your mobile app will allow you to discover when customers are in your store’s vicinity, creating opportunities to engage the customer with timely offers and information to drive store foot traffic.. Once a customer is your store it is the perfect time to tie together what you know about that customer’s activities across your channels to deliver highly relevant incentives and even direct in-store associates to that customer ensuring the highest cart size and order conversion for that shopping experience.   Equipping a mobile app with location detection technology allows for the automatic, personalized delivery of messages to consumers near stores, in stores and even as they exit locations to map time, content and incentives together to target and augment that consumer at the right time and place.  The key is to leverage technologies in the app that provide a highly accurate view of location for opted-in customers, while not draining their phone’s battery, and pair that knowledge with a real-time marketing and engagement system.

Bringing together timely and location-sensitive engagement, information and incentives creates competitive differentiation and real customer value.  Now THAT is the future of all brick and mortar retail.

As Vice President of Products & Marketing at Digby, Eric helps brands tap into the power and ubiquity of the consumer’s mobile device to accelerate cross-channel marketing and engagement at bricks and mortar locations.

While we’re extremely excited to see this increase in mobile adoption, we know that the retail industry still has more work to do. While 100% of online retailers in the STORES’ lists offer a mobile app this year, our analysis also shows that only 70% of retailers in the Top 100 Retailers list and 47% of brands in the Hot 100 list offer mobile apps. This means that 30% of retailers and 53% of brands in the lists are still without apps—while their competitors are increasing customer satisfaction, interaction and loyalty via mobile apps.

Further research of the retailers included on the lists indicates:

• 100% of the top 20 revenue-producing retailers from 2012 are now offering branded mobile apps for customers. (This means these retailers are doing something right, and branded mobile apps are a part of that!)
• 78% of fast food and 75% of casual dining brands have mobile apps
• 77% of big box retailers have a mobile app
• 59% of specialty and 58% of grocery stores have a mobile app
• Value brands received the lowest percentages, with only 10% having a mobile app

Look ahead!

While retailer-branded mobile apps continue to increase in popularity with shoppers, they are only the first step to providing loyal customers with a targeted, real-time shopping experience across all store locations. In the coming weeks, stay tuned for further analysis into which of the Top 100 brands have location-based marketing capabilities as a part of their mobile app experience.  Early results indicate:

• Three out of the top five retailers’ mobile apps ask for location services
• Four out of the top five retailers’ mobile apps ask permission for push notifications
• None of the top five retailers’ mobile apps offer targeted location messaging

I don’t develop, monitor or place QR codes, and I’m not going to pretend that I do. Rather, I’m going to speak from a consumers’ perspective.
First of all, I’m a huge proponent of the concept that if you’re going to do something, you should do it right. Since mobile is, by all intents and purposes, still a “new” medium, I think that brands are still in the mindset that since competitors are doing it, they should do it too, whether or not they actually know what they are doing, or why.

But I honestly cannot remember a QR campaign where something did not go wrong. Granted, it’s not fair to say that every single mobile execution, whether it is a mobile site, app or banner ad, is perfect, because they are not, but I feel as if QR codes are in a failure league of their own. Even technology aside, most ads that employ bar codes just stick them in the middle of the ad like, well, a big black spot. Since most brands don’t know how to use them yet, it’s as if they just call up a company, hook up the code to the company Facebook page and stick it on any ad they are running in recent magazines. Which, if you know anything about marketing, is not how ads work.

The thing about QR codes is that they are pretty mainstream now. Even when I visit the sleepy suburb in southern New Jersey where I grew up, I see QR codes populating ads in the local newspaper. That said, customers do know how to use them, but I don’t think that brands are using them well enough for users to catch on, or want to catch on.

QR Code 101 traits including mobile optimization post-scan, putting codes in locations that allow usage (i.e. cell phone service) and actually making sure that the codes work do not seem to be the case with the majority of executions. Instead, they are put in subways (can’t scan them, no Internet connection) or on billboards (I’m not going to stop in the middle of the street to scan a billboard). Even if I do scan a code and do get connected, the content is often so small that I have to play the pinch-and-zoom game, or so big that I have to turn my phone sideways, and then right-side-up, and then move the screen around, and an entire myriad of directions until I get frustrated and give up. In a perfect scenario, it’s a brand’s optimized Facebook page. But, even then, so what?

I’m not saying that the idea of QR codes is poor. I think that have the opportunity to provide interesting multimedia content for consumers and allow marketers a chance to see if people are actually looking at their billboard, or their newspaper ad, or paying attention to their shop windows. However, a working, interactive, interesting code is hard to come by, and the fact that so many of them are dysfunctional does not help consumers frequently employ them.

If you have a great print ad complete with a QR code that looks as if it’s part of the execution, I might give it a shot. However, if it’s stuck on a subway platform ad like it doesn’t know how it got there, I’d rather save my cell phone battery.

Rachel Lamb is the manager of brand and social content at EVINS Communications, a marketing consultancy and public relations firm based in New York. Rachel oversees all agency and client deliverables for proper verbiage, tone and voice, in addition to running all official agency social media and its content site, Aperture.

On the other hand, mobile is not the web, it’s different and the engagement model must take into account the different use cases. The web was essentially designed to support stationary use cases and does not contemplate the requirements of people who move around or the time pressures these consumers face.

Take Uber as an example. Without mobile, this company does not exist. Uber has made it effortless to order up a black car, taking into account the contextual requirements of the mobile consumer including time sensitivity, location and convenience. It misses the point to try and use Uber from a desktop or laptop computer – it’s not just mobile first, it’s mobile only.

This begs the question of “why do we instinctively apply comfortable ways of doing things when completely new methodologies are introduced?” Why do we insist on looking at the New World with the Old World lens? Let’s borrow an insight from Maslow’s famous “Law of the Hammer” which generally states that “If you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail”. If you’ve been hammering nails for the last 15 years and someone showed you a screw without showing you a screwdriver, wouldn’t you first try to crush the screw with a hammer? It looks like a nail but at some point you would realize that it has a different value proposition than a nail, and the day you realize that you have to “turn it” to take advantage of that value is your “AHA” moment. It’s the day you “found your Uber” (more on this in a minute).

Recently, I’ve come across so many retailers who built their “native” mobile applications as a very small wrapper around their mobile web experience. This was highly practical and cost effective: why have different checkout experiences for the mobile web site and the mobile app? Testing two flows is expensive and tedious. And the web already solved for every engagement opportunity you would ever need, right?? Mobile is just a smaller screen access point to all these wonderful engagement opportunities, right? Sadly, my company made the mistake of helping retailers go in this direction (although convincing retailers, who operate on razor thin margins, to build out in both directions was futile). Finding native iOS and Android developers is really expensive and this approach seemed to solve multiple problems.

What does this “wrapper” approach buy you? Cost savings, that’s about it. Your customers get an experience that is wholly un-differentiated from your mobile web site. They will download your “native” branded app (at least everyone inside your company thought it was “native” because the app had to be downloaded) and realize that everything they can do with it can be done from the mobile web site. Hence, transaction volume will be low, and a strong business case will be made for ditching the “native” app and focusing on the mobile web experience.

This is no different from “hammering a screw”. It’s wrong, wrong, wrong.

Back to Uber. It’s an entire business that is delivered on the mobile platform with an elegant architecture that leverages the best of the mobile device and the cloud. It leverages the local storage of the device to store customer and payment credentials. Because of this the application uses connectivity surgically during the business process, minimizing round-trips to accomplish simple tasks. It uses the device-resident location based services. It uses the cloud to “process orders”: in Uber’s cases this means dispatching black cars, processing payments and managing user and driver accounts. All of this delivers an amazing, utterly transformative user experience.

So for the retailers out there I issue a challenge. What’s your Uber? What are the new consumer engagement opportunities presented by mobility that cannot be accomplished any other way?

Are you still hammering screws with your web-based hammer?

Jeffrey I. Cole, the Director of the Annenberg center succinctly states the situation: “Online privacy is dead.  Millennials understand that, while older users have not adapted.”

Cole is correct.  My generation understands that whether or not we lock our data tight against secure Facebook pages, hidden Twitter accounts, or personal email, information always has a way of getting out, whether by legal or illegal means.  This unavoidable fact forces my generation to be less serious about our concerns of privacy.  We turn our fears on their head by offering data voluntarily, placing us in control of what we share and forcing the receiver to offer something back in return.

The above-mentioned survey proves these feelings through statistics:

• When asked if they would provide their location to companies in exchange for coupons or deals, 56% of the 18-34 year old group said yes, compared to 42% of those 35 and older.
• More younger consumers—51%—would share their personal information with companies if they received something in return than would those 35 and older—40%.
• Younger consumers also are more active on social networks. Of those surveyed, 48% of 18-34 year olds say they visit a social network several times a day compared with 20% of consumers 35 or older.
• The survey also found that 25% of younger consumers were OK trading some of their personal information in exchange for more relevant advertising, compared with 19% of those 35 and older.

The exciting thing about these statistics is the potential for a truly unique experience offered from brands for their consumers.  Instead of unlocking information through unsavory means or extremely detailed analytical research, all brands have to do is just…ask.