Marketers

Testing Your App Through the mCommerce Funnel

Becky Doles

Learn how to optimize your retail mobile app at each stage in the mCommerce funnel.

Mcommerce funnel

Retailers are facing a puzzle. Marketers know that an increasing amount of online browsing is shifting to mobile devices, and yet, growth in retail mobile sales hasn’t followed at the same pace. If consumers are spending more and more time on their smartphones and tablets, why isn’t that translating into significantly higher mobile sales?

There isn’t a simple answer to the question, but there are two well-established variables that are contributing to the behavioral trend. First, mobile is impacting cross-platform sales, so that even when consumers aren’t buying on mobile, they are using those devices to browse products, do research, and otherwise engage with retail brands.

Second, the mobile experience hasn’t been evaluated and optimized for sales in the way that retail websites have. Consider the sales funnel and how shoppers move through the process of discovering a product, delving into further details, and ultimately making a purchase. At each of these stages, you need to optimize your mobile apps in the same way you tailor your website to direct consumers toward making a buy.

At the top of the mCommerce funnel, the goal should be to increase reach and ensure that the mobile experience is designed to attract wide interest. In the middle of the mCommerce funnel, you should be working to engage and inform your audience. And finally at the bottom of the mCommerce funnel, you want create a seamless flow for checkout and also include a trigger to create a positive feedback loop with consumers (a thank you note, targeted offer, etc.).

After studying mobile apps with a great many retail companies, we’ve found that different app elements are important to test and optimize at different points in the sales funnel. You can’t know up front the answers to what works best with app users, but you can test assumptions and learn through those tests what drives the best return on investment.

Author
Becky Doles

Becky is the Senior Content Marketing Manager at TUNE. Before TUNE, she led a variety of marketing and communications projects at San Francisco startups. Becky received her bachelor's degree in English from Wake Forest University. After living nearly a decade in San Francisco and Seattle, she has returned to her home of Charleston, SC, where you can find her enjoying the sun and salt water with her family.

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