Why App Users Convert More Than Web Shoppers: Data from The North Face & Anthropologie

[00:00:00] Ian Dewar: We have this tool that now can, can make the customer’s discovery process, I say better. I think the future of where apps really add value is this ability to to intertwine content storytelling, brand messaging with the ease to product discovery, and then obviously making that checkout process as quick and easy as possible.

[00:00:29] Brian Quinn: Hi, and welcome to another episode of Home Screen Advantage. My name is Brian Quinn, President and General Manager at AppsFlyer. This is a show where we talk to some of the world leading omnichannel marketers about how they’re incorporating apps into their business. Today we have a great show with Ian Dewar.

[00:00:48] Brian Quinn: He’s a freelance consultant and strategist who has worked across some of the top retail brands and apps like the North Face, Anthropologie, and the VF Family of Brands. Ian brings an incredibly refreshing and unique perspective into the world of apps, not only looking at apps as an acquisition vehicle.

[00:01:11] Brian Quinn: For new customers, but really thinking about the brand’s promise and the experience that the app can uniquely deliver to these customers. Ian, it’s great to be with you here today. I find your story starting as a bicycle tour guide and now becoming a retention architect of some of the most prominent retail apps very compelling. Tell us a little bit about that, that journey for you. 

[00:01:43] Ian Dewar: Yeah, BQ, thank you for having me on and, and, and it’s true. I, I got offered a summary internship at Citibank doing economic analytics, and I got offered this job leading by tours around the can Rockies and, and I. I chose the bicycle, and that may not have been the best career move at the time as a 22-year-old, 23-year-old, but, but what it did is it led to this, this ascension of, of active travel. 

[00:02:02] Ian Dewar: I went to the North Face and, and North Face of VF is where I spent 10 years. Started in there focusing on loyalty, but really taking the same experiences from the kind of bicycle tour guide and, and, and building customer experiences. I moved from there to Anthropologie about four years ago. For the last four years I’ve been running. Analytics, insights and loyalty at, at Anthropologie and, and, but, but ultimately the, the idea is, is how do we create product and then show that product to customers that improves the experience that they wanna have in real life and not just create product for them to.

[00:03:17] Brian Quinn: It feels like a lot of loyalty programs for retailers are rewarding their customers for spending more money, but you are, you’ve taken a different approach to that, right? And, and leaned into the brand promise and experiences. I think, in fact, you, you incorporated sort of national park check-ins into that program in North Face. Tell us about that. 

[00:03:39] Ian Dewar: So as we built this program. There was always a transactional component to it. And, and part of that is, is we felt like we needed to create a, a reward and an incentive for customers to continue shopping with us, but the, the reward opportunities went beyond simply spend a hundred, get a thousand points, get 5,000 points, and get $10 in in the mail.

[00:04:03] Ian Dewar: It, it went way beyond that where we wanted to do really two things. We wanted to create opportunities for customers to get points for non transactional behaviors, non shopping. When we launched the program, and once we had it available across all of the United States and, and even into Canada in all of our stores, in our outlets online, we then went back to our app and, and built a, a, a geolocation check-in.

[00:04:28] Ian Dewar: And, and effectively what we did was give customers points for attending North Face sponsored events where we created all of these touch points, including to your point, all national parks. So there’s what I think, 58 national parks at the time in the United States. And so we geolocated against the all, all national parks and we chat, we put a check location and that allowed us to, to give customers a way to earn more points through activity.

[00:04:57] Ian Dewar: The idea was, was not as much as this was gonna be a driver to national parks as more, more so that we’re taking things customers are doing anyways, that relates to what we, what we want them to engage with as, as part of part of obviously what North Face sells. But, but as part of North Face’s never stop exploring ethos. Reward the customer for doing that. 

[00:05:23] Brian Quinn: Tell us how did it come together internally with that alignment? Because I, in a lot of organizations, the using the app and some of these programs to build like a brand loyalty and affinity goes against sometimes driving short term e-commerce returns. And you have performance marketing spending a lot of money in the mix, and they’re looking for certain outcomes.

[00:05:43] Brian Quinn: So was this just sort of like, understood, we’re gonna do this and then the, he, the math worked out on the back end and, and these kind of experiences did, drove your top customers or can you tell us a little bit about that? 

[00:05:55] Ian Dewar: I think there’s always a challenge of, of, of marketing versus sales and I feel like I was fortunate at, at the North Face, and the same thing is true at actually at Anthropologie with, with respect to events that there was already a, a culture or an acceptance of, of, of in real life events as, as something that was a great way to build brand equity. There’s always some pushback. I I, I certainly remember having conversations with, with say the store management team saying, if you’re gonna do this run in Georgetown or this run in Central Park from our New York City store, what are you doing to get the customers back to the store at the end of the run to buy something they don’t have to buy?

[00:06:40] Ian Dewar: So finish line on Thursday. ’cause they run on Thursday. 

[00:06:42] Brian Quinn: Yeah. 

[00:06:43] Ian Dewar: And, and that was a, that was really convincing people that we were building a stronger sense of brand identity and a better connection with the brand was something that, that we really had to work on over time. But what, what we tried to do was, was take our events that we were already or already spending money on and, and ultimately.

[00:07:05] Ian Dewar: Make them more accessible to our better customers or, or, or all of our customers, but, but especially our loyalty members. And, and, and we do the same thing at Anthropologie with our sort of top spending Anthrop customers is as we got to events that we knew would fill quickly, we started to invite our better customers first.

[00:07:22] Brian Quinn: Yeah. And tell us exactly how the app drove those experiences. 

[00:07:28] Ian Dewar: Better customers are more likely to download the app. Right? As you start to think about what your, your initial app user base is, is there going to be the people who like the brand the most? Right? The people who like the brand the most are looking for the, the, the most opportunities to engage with the brand and an app.

[00:07:43] Ian Dewar: This app presents a, a quicker way to see new product, quicker way to, to look for events, has a calendar in it. Customers are going to want, who want that information, are going to use the app more. When we added the checking component to the app. We saw a, a pretty nice uptick. And, and the in the intention was yes, we wanted to give customers a way to earn rewards, but we also wanted that customer to open the app and see it.

[00:08:08] Ian Dewar: The, the opportunity when you’re finished with the check-in is yeah, hopefully then that customer goes to the, what’s new tab or what’s new for me? Or, or, or looks at their card and is reminded. ’cause ultimately the goal is to get customers to, to yes, buy more product. But, but I would say, and everywhere I’ve worked has had the same, the same attitude.

[00:08:29] Ian Dewar: The our goal in getting customers to buy more product is, is to buy more relevant product they want to use. And I think that, and certainly a lot of brands would say that, but I, I think that the idea of really thinking about what the end use and, and, and adding to, to consumer emotional value is a big part of, of North Face band specialized Anthropologie that that we don’t wanna sell people product they’re not gonna use.

[00:09:00] Ian Dewar: And so what I think the app does then is, is by creating these other engagement opportunities, you’re giving the customer the reason to go back and get more familiar with everything that’s on the app. And it becomes that brand extension versus mobile web or, or. 

[00:09:20] Brian Quinn: Let, let’s switch to Anthropologie because different business, probably less events with athletes, but, but also physical retail.

[00:09:28] Brian Quinn: And you guys p pioneered something called in-store mode with the Anthropologie app and allow, I’d love you to explain it, but, but before you do, tell me about the thinking of wanting to get your app users to engage with the app while in the store experience and kind of the thinking behind that decision. 

[00:09:46] Ian Dewar: As we built out Anthropologie app and thinking about like how it augments or, or improves the retail shopping experience. There are a few things that I think are, are, are must haves, right? And as we think about, think about the omnichannel experience and I, I, I hear marketers all the time talk about we want to build an omnichannel experience, starts at home, moves to the phone, moves to the app in the store, with the app, back to home, anywhere the customer is.

[00:10:14] Ian Dewar: We’ve created this line that you draw like a customer journey from, from start to finish and, and, and while we wanted certain things to carry over, I think the bigger piece is, is creating experience that the customer wants to have and, and if we have a customer who exclusively shops on that, great. I think that the, some must haves, I think it is, you start to think about from a retail perspective is you have to carry your cart over from, from, from desktop to mobile, web to app.

[00:10:40] Ian Dewar: Like you shouldn’t have to go back in and, and, and have to rebuild a card. If you log in, you should have all of your variation, your, your order history should be visible across all touch points on your, on your account, in app, on web, in store, like the, and, and I feel like that is, that’s something that I’m surprised when brands can’t do that today.

[00:11:05] Ian Dewar: And you, you go to the store and say, Hey, I’m looking for a pair of jeans, like the ones I bought last time, but I don’t remember which style they were. I ordered them from you. Can you look it up and tell did I buy 501s. Did I buy 531s? What did I buy? For stores to not have that available seems like a huge miss.

[00:11:26] Brian Quinn: In that scenario, what, what went wrong? 

[00:11:27] Ian Dewar: The systems were built separately. When e-commerce got built, that there was, there were these sort of silos of data that that just never got integrated. To the point where a customer could shop in store and have one ID and then could shop online to use a different ID phone numbers were always the traditional store identifier, and email was always traditional e-comm identifier.

[00:11:52] Ian Dewar: I know we’re getting a little technical here, but they built a and, and funny enough, even some digitally native brands that have now decided to open retail stores. Are struggling with the same thing, which Oh, interesting. Which surprises me, right? So you have these tools today that, that, that we say make the omnichannel experience better.

[00:12:10] Ian Dewar: Apps should sit at the middle of that, right? Apps should have visibility to everything you’ve bought in the store, everything you’ve bought online, everything that is sitting in your cart, what’s in your wishlist. But then thinking about this idea around store mode, like why can’t you go into a store and immediately see everything on your wishlist that’s available in that store or everything in your cart that’s available in that store. And this idea that, that, that then the app becomes the starting point for your store journey. You can pick out things. You think you’re going to give clear visibility if it’s in the store near you, and then you can go in, try them on, touch them, feel them, wear them.

[00:12:49] Brian Quinn: Yeah, there, there’s an interesting sort of paradox here in that from a consumer standpoint, the app is the center of their brand experience, like you’ve just said. And we all know that from being consumers and using apps from a marketing and a and a kind of digital perspective, working inside the companies, the app is often very siloed from the rest of the organization.

[00:13:09] Brian Quinn: So, so what’s the strategy? So if you’re, if, if, if you have your best customers spending the most amount of kind of ticket price per per sale price in the app, is the strategy to go get more of your existing customers to use the app? Or is your strategy to go get new customers into the business?

[00:13:29] Brian Quinn: Maybe who are app users of competitors or how do you think about driving the cohort of app users to increase revenue? 

[00:13:37] Ian Dewar: The metric for growth for a lot of, of especially established and, and mature retailers is not customer acquisition. It’s it’s customer frequency. If you can get your best customers to shop with you more often, they’re, they’re going to spend more money.

[00:13:54] Ian Dewar: And if you can get your best customers to spend more money and come back more often, you’re going to actually spend less money on marketing to those customers. And ultimately, that frees up money for business. But the bigger pieces is how do you use all the data that the customer’s already giving you to ultimately increase their one affinity for the brand and, and with stronger affinity for the brand, their breadth of purchase and, and therefore frequency of, of purchase with the brand.

[00:14:24] Ian Dewar: And that’s where I think the app really becomes a super useful tool. And if I had a finite amount of, of dollars to spend on on promoting app downloads. I would focus at least half, if not probably two thirds of that towards getting good customers today that are not using the app to download and, and, and use the app.

[00:14:52] Ian Dewar: One of the things that, that, that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, and it, it revolves around around loyalty and around around brand loyalty, is how do you continue to build a relationship with the customer so that, that you become the, the brand of choice. The idea of, of how does a brand continue to stay relevant with their customers so that instead on a customer saying, I’ve gotta go to a wedding this summer, I’m gonna go to Google and start looking for a black dress, they, they say, I’m gonna go see what Anthropologie has in the black dresses for wedding.

[00:15:32] Ian Dewar: And same thing for North Face. Instead of starting at Amazon or starting at Google, where a lot of people start today, how do they, how do they start at the North face and then work out from that? But taking awareness and then building both consideration and affinity becomes where, where a brand ultimately like grows and, and, and the, the concept of loyalty.

[00:15:54] Ian Dewar: I think traditionally the concept of loyalty was you spend a bunch of money, we’re gonna give you a reward certificate, spend a hundred, get 10, spend two 50, get 50. Or whenever, whenever the reward, whenever the reward is somewhere between 2% and 10% depending on the brand. And then when, when that item you bought needs to be replaced, you’ve gotta credit to go in and buy a new one.

[00:16:16] Ian Dewar: And I think the bigger piece now is, is how brands continue to build relevance in a customer’s life or, or in their share of closet. And how do you, how do you improve how much customers think about your brand as part of their life and, and whether that is part of their outdoor life, part of their cycler life, part of their, you know, home decor and, and, and, and fashion life.

[00:16:43] Ian Dewar: But, but how do you start to become relevant for more things? And so I think traditionally, brands look at their direct competitors, but, but the extension is all the other things that customers are currently spending money on that either the brand makes, so the brand could be making that are that, that continue to like, be relevant in that customer’s life.

[00:17:05] Ian Dewar: And so as a brand trusts you for something that you are really well known for, that’s, I think that that opportunity, right, the opportunity for brands to grow is, is to become more relevant in a customer’s mind. Also have the product that the customer already wants to buy and is already considering buying from another brand.

[00:17:25] Brian Quinn: One area that we touched on a little bit earlier is the concept of frictionless, right? A lot of, a lot of omnichannel. Brand marketers, folks in the app world are looking at frictionless, get, let the customer get in, get out, make it, make it a good experience. You’ve mentioned a little bit on like having the app drive more discoverability and, and sometimes getting lost in the app is actually very strategic. So tell us about that, that, that, that, that contrast. 

[00:17:54] Ian Dewar: Customers, consumers, everybody is using the phone for communication, for discoverability, for shopping, for daily life, for calendaring, and, and it’s become this hub of all of your information. And, and I don’t say like young people today, but like younger consumers are doing everything on their phones, right? 

[00:19:09] Ian Dewar: That frictionless journey is, is the customer to enter it wherever they want. Right. I think the future of app for brands is actually, yes, making the shopping and checkout experience easier, but But more than that, making the discovery processes because you have so much information now. 

[00:19:28] Brian Quinn: Exactly. 

[00:19:29] Ian Dewar: I don’t mean that in a creepy way. Like a brand knows everything you’ve looked at, knows everything you put in your cart, knows everything you bought, knows everything you put in your cart and never bought. And, and, and then no things put in your card and looked at and came back and bought again, and know they, they know from looking at other customers what the time to purchase is.

[00:19:50] Ian Dewar: And, and, and so we have all that data today and we have this tool that now can, can make the customer’s discovery process, I say better. So ultimately I, I think the future of where apps really add value that that, and mobile web could do that, but it’s more difficult on, on mobile web is this ability to, to intertwine content storytelling brand, brand messaging with the ease to product discovery and then, and then obviously making that checkout process as quick and easy as possible.

[00:20:25] Brian Quinn: I can see a bifurcation and it’ll, it’ll, it’ll become more apparent as sort of magenta commerce and AI and autonomous workflows become more apparent.

[00:21:01] Brian Quinn: How are you working with that, with your customers today, with these brands? 

[00:21:05] Ian Dewar: One of the things that I’ve been thinking about and, and, and working with, with, especially through Anthropologie, but is, is this concept of, of curated discovery and how do we, how do we show people and encourage people to, to learn more about product that they’ve never looked at?

[00:21:24] Ian Dewar: And, and, and I think that that retail stores that do a good job have figured this out. And, and if you think about it, you go to a retail store, you, you’re going in potentially to look for it. We’ll use this example and you wanna buy a new pair of jeans, you go to a retail store, you look for a new pair of jeans, but you see a best store or a hat or, or, or something else that you like while you’re in the retail store, right?

[00:21:45] Ian Dewar: That, that becomes an add-on. But how do you create that digitally so that, that you are presenting, presenting product in categories to customers? They’re not, that’s not in their consideration set at all today. ’cause either they didn’t know that your brand made that full stop or they don’t trust your brand for it because they’ve never, they’ve never bought that before.

[00:22:08] Ian Dewar: They’ve never worked that before. And, and, and it’s not as simple as just plugging in, oh, you have five boxes on the product rack. Let’s put a new product into some of these boxes. It’s more around how, how do you use customer behavior, customer behavior data to predict the products that that customer is buying elsewhere, that they would, they would potentially buy from your brand if they only knew about it.

[00:22:35] Ian Dewar: And, and that’s, I think the, the, the, the big piece on, on personalization and dis and discovery that is, is not being linked in. And this is where, where AI and, and really understanding that sort of foundation of opportunity being able to, to compile and, and use huge sets of data to make these predictions.

[00:22:59] Ian Dewar: It’s not marketing gobblygook to trick people into buying things that they don’t need. It’s, it’s really adding to utility and, and, and I think presenting more relevant product to the customer. So the customer then says, wow, I didn’t even know your brand made this and I kind of love that. 

[00:24:58] Brian Quinn: Ian, awesome talking to you today. I’ve learned a ton. This has been very entertaining and I, I hope, I hope you enjoyed the conversation yourself. 

[00:25:05] Ian Dewar: Awesome. Thank you very much. 

[00:25:07] Producer: Home Screen Advantage is brought to you by AppsFlyer, the modern marketing cloud for mobile led omnichannel growth. AppsFlyer unifies performance across paid media, owned channels, and in-store experiences, helping you understand and optimize which campaign investments drive real revenue. See beyond attribution to understand customer lifetime value. Optimize journeys from discovery to loyalty improve mobile’s growing impact on your entire business. When every touchpoint connects through your app, you transform fragmented data into confident decisions. AppsFlyer gives you the clarity to accelerate growth. Learn more at appsflyer.com.