Thought Building A Mobile App Was Out of Reach? Think Again with Campbell Paton

Andy Splichal:

Welcome to the Make Each Click Count podcast. This is your host, Andy Spykel, and we are happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is thought building a mobile app was out of reach. Well, think again. Today's guest is the co-founder and CEO of StoreLab, the no-code Shopify mobile app builder. A big welcome to Campbell Paton. Hi Campbell.

Campbell Paton:

Hi Andy. Great to be here. Thank you very much for having me.

Andy Splichal:

We're excited to have know. I don't think we've ever discussed mobile apps on the store. So let's get right into that. Why should an ecommerce company consider creating a mobile app?

Campbell Paton:

Okay, so in my opinion, every ecommerce company on the planet should have a mobile app. There are three key reasons that we say companies should have them. Number one, they really help with increasing conversion rates. Mobile apps are a much smaller real estate than that of a desktop, so it's easier for conversion rate optimization to happen. And as you know, conversion rate optimization is a science rather than an art. So by able to having a smaller real estate and things like with a pre built mobile app builder, you are able to lock some features away or make an app that's uncluttered in a much easier way than you would a cluttered website, meaning that your conversion rates go up. Our customers generally have a 1% to 2% higher conversion rate through their app than they do on their website. The other thing there is that a general fact of ecommerce life is that faster websites convert better.

Campbell Paton:

Mobile apps tend to be three times faster on average than mobile web just because of image caching. The second reason is down to push notifications. So everyone hopefully is aware of push notifications. Those are notifications that come through to your phone. Push notifications at the moment are the highest converting marketing communication on the planet. They convert 15 times higher than email. They convert nine times higher than text. And the other thing that's amazing about them is they're free to send.

Campbell Paton:

So if you're running a Facebook campaign with retargeting or a Google campaign with retargeting, you have a much cheaper option because you're never paying for cost per click or cost per impression, and they convert at a much higher rate. The gold dust in the app commerce world would be an abandoned cart push notification. And that is the thing that converts 15 times higher than abandoned cart email. The other lovely thing about them is that you're not having to capture user data to send them. So in a normal website ecommerce journey, you'd have to capture someone's email address to be able to send an abandoned cart email. With a mobile app, you are able to just send abandoned cart push notifications if someone downloads it. And the final reason is down to retention. If you can make your app feel exclusive by using app exclusive discounts app exclusive products, we have seen customers triple their retention rate or returning customer rates in 90 days.

Campbell Paton:

So those are the three core reasons why I love apps and why I believe every ecommerce business on the planet should have one.

Andy Splichal:

Interesting. How often do people download? Do customers download a mobile app? I know I have so many mobile apps on my phone. Is there resistance to downloading a new mobile app?

Campbell Paton:

Yeah, I mean, great question. This is one that we hear all the time. I am a small company. I feel I'm too small for a mobile app. I don't think someone would go into the App Store and search for me. Well, that is essentially not the way that we encourage people to download. So what we do is we put a mobile app banner on the mobile web version of someone's website with an incentive. So 10% off if you download through the app.

Campbell Paton:

Free shipping on your first order. If you download the app, a free gift with your first purchase through the app, you're using that incentive to get someone to download the first time. In most layman's terms, what nap does is it takes a customer that's going to buy two or three things a year, and it makes that customer buy six or seven. So it's worth swallowing the cost of a 10% off their first purchase. And the beauty of this is it's right there in the purchase journey. So you're giving that person that incentive when they're willing to buy. We see between 85 and 90% of our downloads to the app come through the mobile app banner. We're not telling customers to go and do big campaigns where they're posting all over their social media saying we've got an app now or sending this out with big email campaigns, it's just not necessary.

Campbell Paton:

Using that mobile app banner is the primary method of getting people to download and it's also a passive method. You put it onto the website and they will download. And the other thing about it is it doesn't interrupt the purchase journey. If I don't want to download the app, but I'd still rather buy through the website, I dismiss the banner and I carry on with my purchase. So that's how we get people to download. Mainly.

Andy Splichal:

We talked about push notifications as being really a great way to increase conversions. If you have the mobile app now, besides the card abandonment, what are some other examples of how you would use that as an ecommerce site?

Campbell Paton:

Yeah, push notifications are an owned marketing channel. So it's like email. If you have new products coming out, you were encouraged to do a push notification. If you are exhibiting at an affair and you want people to turn up to it, you can send a push notification for it. If you have an app, exclusive products app, exclusive discounts coming out, you send a push notification for it. It is a owned marketing channel in a similar way to email, but it is much smaller in terms of copy or text size and they're much simpler to send. The key with push notifications is not to send too many. You don't want people to opt out of receiving notifications.

Campbell Paton:

So we encourage people to start small with one or two a week and then build up slowly.

Andy Splichal:

Now I think conversion and more specifically battling to improve conversion rate, it's a big obstacle in a company's growth. I've never before discussed increasing conversions on mobile app. I'm curious. I mean there got to be. But what are ways that you found to increase conversion with a mobile app?

Campbell Paton:

Number one, if you're using a good app builder like ours, if I can toot my own horn for a second. We have designed our experience for the customer to convert. So we have researched into the size of the buy now button, research into how you open the descriptions, how you interact with your product photos. All of that has been researched to try and generate the highest conversion rate possible. If you are building your own mobile app and you are curious about increasing conversions, you really have to do sort of a test and learn method with traffic coming over to your app. Do things like increase the size or change the color of the ad cart button, increase or decrease the size of photos, change where the descriptions are, change where postage or returns information is on the home page of the app, which is a very important part of the screen that someone logs into. You can put offers on there. You can have banners at the top of the app with a particular offer that's coming up.

Campbell Paton:

You put new products on there, you try and make it exciting. The science of conversion rate optimization is tweaking and changing in small ways to try and encourage someone to give them the information that they need to buy, and then the shortest method of adding to cart and buying.

Andy Splichal:

Can you a b test with a mobile app?

Campbell Paton:

With our apps, you can a b test things like, you can a b test your products and where they fit on the app. But in terms of changing our own conversion rate, no, we lock that away from you because we put a huge amount of time into that. If you have your own app and you're developing it, I encourage you to look at things like a company called Hotjar. That is a heat mapping tool that allows you to see where people are clicking. It also allows you to see screen recordings of what people are doing when they're on your website or on your app. In that way, you are easily able to view these things and then treat your tests like your high school chemistry tests. Write an aim, note down your metrics, note down the things that you're trying to change. And then a period of time with things like Hotjar, you are able to a b test with ours.

Campbell Paton:

You can a b test content, but you can't a b test the process because we have already done that for you.

Andy Splichal:

Now, what are some of the common mistakes you see in others? Ecommerce mobile apps using it as a.

Campbell Paton:

Set and forget tool mobile apps are not set and forget if you are not changing your app content. If you are not sending any push notifications, you should not expect to have good conversion rates or conversion rates that will stay steady over a period of time. There are sort of two main nuances to using app commerce. One is to update your content with new products and new offers. And the other thing is to write and treat push notifications like your email marketing campaigns or your Facebook or Google campaigns. These are marketing app commerce should be another tool in your digital marketing toolbox. It's not just there to be left alone and expect to recover lots of carts and revenue, even though it will do that. The best apps are the ones that are being updated regularly with new content, photo content, video content, blogging, as well as fantastic products and offers.

Andy Splichal:

Now you guys are available store lab that is just on Shopify, is that correct?

Campbell Paton:

We are, yes. So currently, today, now we only service Shopify customers. We are looking to add woocommerce, squarespace and wix in the early 2024. But yeah, today we are just on Shopify.

Andy Splichal:

And if you had a crystal ball, I always like to ask this, but how do you see the future changing for ecommerce the next twelve to 18 months?

Campbell Paton:

Sure. Well, I mean, I know I'm biased because I'm here to promote app commerce, but there's certain things that we've seen from both Android and Apple in terms of trying to shove people more towards apps than in other directions. If you keep up with their release notes, you will noticed about a year or so ago now Apple released app clips and Google has released instant apps. What these essentially are is the way to think about is app streaming rather than app downloading. If you're on Google on your phone and you were to Google a company name and scroll down the Google search engine results, you will see in some of the big companies like Nike or Adidas a option to open an app clip as their first result. So when you're clicking on these things, it will stream the app to you. It allows that customer or that user to scroll through the app and use it without downloading it to their phone. The app clip will then stay on their user's homepage for about 24 hours and then after that they have a choice of keeping it or it disappearing.

Campbell Paton:

For us, we see in the mobile world Google and Apple together doing more things to push people towards apps because they are a better user experience than using the mobile browsing experience. Especially what Apple hates is people downloading Google Chrome to their Apple device because it misses out features from their Apple phone. So yeah, what I see is, and I know I am biased, but people moving more towards using mobile apps on the mobile device than trying to use the browsers.

Andy Splichal:

Is there a way to optimize apps? For know you'd said a lot of those. It's the first thing. How do you do.

Campbell Paton:

So what we really encourage is someone to go onto the Apple App Store and enter your company name. It's usually pretty eye opening for people when they go put their own company name and they don't have an app into the App Store, they will see their competitors, Apple and Google are pushing apps in terms of SEO. So if you're speaking about pure SEO in terms of Google search, apps don't necessarily help too much. You can get Google to index your app, but it's a smaller amount of real estate, a small amount of content. So from a sort of on page optimization perspective of keywords, it's not going to help that much, but you will see lots of users on it from a pure app commerce sort of SEO in terms of improving where you rank in terms of other apps on phones for things like say I was a shoe company, I wanted to peer at the top of the search engine if someone searched shoes on the Apple App Store. Easiest way to do that is with reviews and with usage. If you up those two things, you will move up. There's only a certain amount of sort of keyword optimization you can do within your own description.

Campbell Paton:

But encouraging people to review your app while making a purchase is the easiest way to improve your sort of app. SEO, if you will. Sorry if that answers your question and.

Andy Splichal:

Does store lab, it works with that as far as you help your clients on how to get those reviews and such, of course.

Campbell Paton:

So there's two ways of sort of working with us. One, you can come build your app and do it completely organically. You don't need to talk to us at all. It's a self service solution. We've built it in the same language as Shopify, so it's very easy to install and build and launch and use. The other way of working with us is where you have an account manager and that person will help you with all of these issues with writing push notifications, with content, with writing the best app descriptions for your search engine results pages, all of those things. We also have guides on all of that for everyone, regardless if you work with us or not.

Andy Splichal:

What about AI? Have you incorporated AI into your processes at all?

Campbell Paton:

AI is on the way. So there are three phases to our AI that we're looking at rolling out. The first one is introduced. So as one of the main facets of apps is sending push notifications. Push notifications are text content. By using something like chat, GPT or other forms of text providers, it's easy to send out loads of good push notifications. We are building that into our app currently. We're also going to bring out AI based self optimization for those push notifications.

Campbell Paton:

So there is times of day when push notifications convert higher. There are days in the month when push notifications convert higher. Certain people will respond to different push notifications based on the things that they have purchased in the past. All of those things are coming to us too. And then the final phase I'm going to keep secret until we've got it out because I don't want anyone else to steal our amazing ideas. But there is something pretty big coming from the third phase.

Andy Splichal:

All right, fair enough. So let's talk about your journey. You are the co founder of Storelab. How long has Storelab been around?

Campbell Paton:

So we've been around just over four years at this.

Andy Splichal:

You guys, where are you based out of?

Campbell Paton:

We're based out of London.

Andy Splichal:

Out of London. And in your journey, when you've been setting it up, one of my favorite questions, has there been any business books that you could attribute to your loads?

Campbell Paton:

Predictable revenue? Start with why blue Ocean strategy. All those three I count as some of the best books I've read. From a more personal note, atopic habits by James Clear. It's an absolutely fantastic book in breaking bad habits and starting good working habits. Those four, I say, probably are my core.

Andy Splichal:

And do you have a favorite success story of one of your clients over the years that you could share?

Campbell Paton:

Of course. Yeah. So we do work with companies that generate millions and millions of dollars a year. But my favorite story is a lady called Carol. Sorry, Angela from rock those curves. Rock those curves is a plus size fashion store. When I first spoke to Angela, she was doing this sort of store as her side hustles. It was a hobby for her.

Campbell Paton:

She was making a few thousand pounds a month. And she came to me and she said, my customers, in no way will they use apps. They're over 55 year old women. I don't believe that they will. We managed to convince her to sign up with us on our professional plan. We gave her a bit of a trial and helped her with the setup process, and we've made her over a quarter of a million pounds in ten months of working with her, or eleven months of working with her now. So we've seen that growth in that journey. She has left her job, she's working for herself.

Campbell Paton:

She's just built her own warehouse and has got loads of customers flying in. And we have supported her. I mean, we can't take the credit for all of it, but we have absolutely helped skyrocket her sales through the mobile app and through some other digital marketing efforts that we've done with her. But she's one of my favorite stories because it was an absolute. I don't believe this will work for me, but I'm entertaining this conversation because I know apps do something to where we are now, where her sales are up over 3000%. She is absolutely flying at the moment.

Andy Splichal:

I'm curious what percentage of her sales are coming from the app now versus her website?

Campbell Paton:

About half. About 50 50.

Andy Splichal:

And on the flip side, are there any challenges that you struggle with, with getting results to clients.

Campbell Paton:

Absolutely. There are a few things, there are a few barriers. So one of the main barriers is getting your developer account set up. It is a fiddly process and it's annoying. You have to apply for a developer account from Apple and Android. It can take two weeks for that to come back. If you've entered your information wrong, you then have to submit the accounts again. So if you have a launch date in mind, I would firmly encourage people to leave at least a month before that launch date to try and get the apps, the developer accounts at least sorted.

Campbell Paton:

So that's the first thing. The other thing is that I was saying earlier, 85% to 90% of people come through the mobile app banner. So you need to be happy with having the mobile app banner and the incentive. A poor incentive and not using the mobile app banner. If you are not Nike or adidas or Sheehan or a massive brand, people are going to struggle to find and download your app.

Andy Splichal:

What's a poor incentive?

Campbell Paton:

Poor incentive? 1% off your first purchase.

Andy Splichal:

That'd be a poor incentive. For sure.

Campbell Paton:

That'd be a poor incentive, yeah.

Andy Splichal:

So what should you offer?

Campbell Paton:

Monetary incentives are always the best. Or the things that we've noticed is drive the most. We would recommend between ten and 15% off, but we understand that that can be tricky for customers, especially with their margins. So if you are able to offer free shipping, try that. If you can't do a monetary based incentive, you can't do a shipping based incentive and you can't do a gift. There are loyalty based systems that you can use too, hopefully that you have lots of loyal customers. And if you use something like loyalty lion, you are able to offer loyalty points for purchases using the app and you are able to offer loyalty points for people downloading the app too.

Andy Splichal:

Now, we discussed a little bit that you have a kind of do it on your own service and then a dedicated account manager where you guys do everything for the client. Which one of those is more popular? And why would a company choose one over the other?

Campbell Paton:

So today, as of now, our professional plan is actually more popular than our diy. To our surprise, we were expecting it to be the other way around. But so far we found that people do like to have the handhold. We do have people that come on and use our professional plan for a few months and then when they're on their feet, they say, actually, I know, I think I can do this. I've seen the strategy, I've seen how it works, and we're very open with that too. So we don't actually withhold features between the accounts. We want everyone to be able to have all features all the time. The professional plan is really for someone that might need a helping hand with it.

Campbell Paton:

They don't really understand how apps work or their benefits, and they just need to see the strategy being run for a few months or they're too busy. And that's the other thing that we get from lots of customers. This is just another you're a maker or a creator, and you've pulled in 100 different directions with what products or your own stock level issues, your staff issues, tax issues, all those things. We want to take all of those things away, all of the trials and tribulations of app commerce, and just do it for you. That's why people use our pro plan.

Andy Splichal:

And what does the pricing look like on each?

Campbell Paton:

Sure. So to do it yourself, it'll cost you $79 a month. And that's it. That's all it will cost. For a pro plan, we charge $999 a month. Got it.

Andy Splichal:

And who is your target market? I mean, is it. Some verticals do better than others.

Campbell Paton:

The main barrier to entry from a mobile app is, is your returning customer rate above 6%? So I was talking about, in layman's terms, what an app does. It will take a customer that buys two or three things and it will make it six or seven. What is very difficult through an app is to take someone that buys zero to one and turn that into three to four. So what I mean by that is, say for example, you are a mattress company and you're selling mattresses. It's very unlikely that someone is going to be incentivized by push notification to buy a second mattress. So the barriers to entry is returning customer rate. And then from there, there are many verticals that work well. Fashion and apparel works really well.

Campbell Paton:

FMCG works really well. Beauty and cosmetics works really well. It's all really down to repeatable purchases and returning customer rate. But saying that, we know we do have high end customers too. Sports equipment stores. We have a diving company or a couple of diving companies that work for us. They sell thousands of dollars of bcds and the regulators of diving equipment, and you get repeat purchases with them too. So it's really down to the barrier to entry.

Campbell Paton:

Like I said, returning customer rate.

Andy Splichal:

And how can an interested listener learn more about working with you guys?

Campbell Paton:

You can come onto our website, Storelab app. That's the easiest way to read more about us. I have a book coming out in the new year called the App Commerce Revolution. That should be out in. I mean, if you come onto our website, I'll give you a free version of the book, or you can check us out on LinkedIn. We post lots of blogs and company updates and things on there, so that's the easiest way to find out about us.

Andy Splichal:

Well, this has been fascinating. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it up today?

Campbell Paton:

No. Just encourage anyone to give apps a try. They are a underused element of the e commerce world at the moment. My background is in social media. I ran a social media agency for a while. I was commercial director of one of the largest in the UK. And the reason I got into apps is because I feel like push notifications are what social media advertising was in the Facebook and Instagram world seven years ago. So don't be scared around push notifications.

Campbell Paton:

App commerce is much easier to get into than you think and give it a try. Yeah, it's been great.

Andy Splichal:

Well, thank you for joining us, Campbell.

Campbell Paton:

Thank you, Andy. Really nice chat for listeners.

Andy Splichal:

Remember, if you like this episode, please go to Apple Podcasts and leave us an honest review. And if you're looking for more information regarding Storelab or connecting with Campbell, you'll find the links in the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business, check out our podcast resource center, available at podcast makeeachclickount.com. We have compiled all of our different guests by show topic and included each of their contact information. In case you would like more information on any of the services discussed during previous episodes. Well, that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing, and I'll talk to you in the next episode.