Features proven to enhance the app experience
With the latest release of the Poq Platform, we’ve added some new features that will improve the app experience for users and increase engagement.
Predictive search
With the limited space available on smartphone screens and the limited time mobile users usually have, your app home page must be easy to navigate and the customer journey will need to be as frictionless as possible. Predictive search is one way to tackle this issue. With the ability to show category or brand suggestions within search, searching just became easier.
Predictive search has been successful on the web and will likely hold the same benefits, if not have a greater impact on mobile apps. Search functionality is not only used by shoppers at home but instore by those who want product information and reviews quickly, making an efficient search a necessity.
Web has seen those who use search functionality 2x more likely to convert than those who don’t. Additionally, Forrester research found that 43% of site visitors go directly to the search box and are 2-3x more likely to convert. A study by eConsultancy found that a comprehensive search improved conversions by as much as 4.6%, showing shoppers converted 1.8x more when they used intelligent searching. Predictive search is likely to have an equally positive impact on both engagement and conversion within apps.
Recommendations
Product recommendations have a proven track record of improving conversions on web due to the personalised customer experience they produce. Recommendations have been so successful that Amazon dedicates 70% of its homepage to them. The Poq platform now has the ability to show a recently viewed product carousel on product display pages (PDPs).
Consumers often use mobile to research a product and browse before committing to buy and that’s where recommendations play an important role in driving conversions. Users who return to an app will be able to see the items they have most recently viewed, gently reminding them of what they have seen previously and saving them time from searching for the products again. As many as 31% of ecommerce revenues have been attributed to personalised recommendations and Widerfunnel found in one experiment that those using ‘Your Recently Viewed Products’ saw a 6.9% increase in order completions compared to the control group. We can safely conclude that recommendations are an engaging and useful feature for your customers, a feature you can’t afford to miss out on.
Product videos
If you’re already using product videos on your ecommerce website, you’ll already understand the extent to which they can be useful. Now it’s possible to include product URLs in feed play on PDPs on the Poq platform.
Eighty percent of millennials consider video content when researching a purchase decision and 96% of customers find videos useful when shopping online. With users who view video being 1.8x more likely to make a purchase than non-viewers, product videos are proving to be an important aid to engagement and conversion.
Ultimately, product videos help to close the gap between the instore and online experiences and have been particularly successful within fashion. ASOS is already capitalising on product videos within their app to provide an enriching experience, promote engagement and most crucially provide consumers with the opportunity to see their products in context. Google has found that 64% of women agree that seeing images of apparel products in context would positively influence their decision to purchase. Increasing consumer confidence and arming them with more product information will enable them to make intelligent purchase decisions. Product videos have even been shown to increase average order value by as much as 50%.
These latest features enhance consumers’ shopping experiences, by making the shopping journey flow and arming consumers with all the information they need at their fingertips.
If you’d like to read more about how apps can improve the customer experience, download our ebook ‘Apps: The ultimate customer experience tool’
Reported by Samantha Rigg
