Developing Missguided’s new app: the importance of mobile strategy

The case for retailers building a mobile application has always been strong. Apps can increase engagement with your brand, enhance personalised shopping experiences and even drive a stronger bottom line. 

Furthermore, the financial benefits of app development are well-documented and compelling. Companies have experienced higher conversion rates (CVR) and average basket values (ABV) in the short term, as well as stronger lifetime value across their customer base. What business wouldn’t want that?

However, just launching an app doesn’t guarantee its success. To maximise your return on investment, you need a fully rounded mobile strategy backed by a scalable digital infrastructure, and implementing this is not an overnight process. Digital transformation takes time and expertise to be truly effective – an area AND Digital has a lot of experience in. 

To find out how we support clients throughout their digital journey, join us on 22nd March for our webinar, How Missguided unlocked growth through modernising their digital strategy. We’ll be joined by Missguided’s IT Director, John Rignall, who’ll discuss how they partnered with AND Digital to launch their brand-new app. The session will focus on different stages of their digital journey, contextualised with real-world examples from one of the UK’s leading fashion giants. 

When launching an app, you need an aligned digital strategy to drive delivery. Here are five key factors Missguided focused on throughout their app development journey. 

Unique brand experience

Before a customer even thinks about downloading an app, they need to have some level of brand loyalty. Web journeys can optimise app conversions, but over-incentivising downloads is a short-term tactic. 

Having a clear and differentiated brand identity will persuade customers to download your app. But ensuring they continue to engage with in-app content is the next challenge – one that can only be achieved by providing a unique brand experience through high-quality engineering and strong product thinking.  

Missguided achieved high app engagement from day one, which is testament to the strength of their brand and their application design. At AND Digital, we have significant experience in the customer loyalty space, for example our work with Avios and, more recently, with ASDA on their brand-new rewards app, currently trialling in 16 stores.

Seamless user experience

People have different preferences when it comes to in-app experiences, but one common expectation must be met: integration. Account data, shopping baskets and product lists should be synchronised across web and app. Keychain data is also crucial to limit information input and ensure a seamless user experience. 

Consumers increasingly expect more payment choices and less steps to checkout. Offering buy-now-pay-later or contactless integrations – such as Apple Pay or PayPal – will allow customers to checkout without entering their card details. Providing an integrated experience that resonates with your audience and meets their expectations is vital to the success of your app. 

Personalised approach 

Personalised in-app shopping is also expected by today’s consumers. Previously viewed items and product recommendations help to ensure a good user experience, and are now the norm in modern ecommerce engagements. Recommendations not only offer cross-upsell opportunities, but also help you better understand your customers. Personalisations are only as good as the product data itself, so it’s worth having a strategy in place to refine and maximise this feature for launch. We’ve all seen screenshots of random recommendations – you don’t want to embarrass yourself and your customers by highlighting a feature flaw in an attempt to personalise their experience. 

When it comes to recommendation solutions, you don’t need to start from scratch. There are plenty of good out-of-the-box solutions already available. The key to success is refining the data over time to generate more accurate recommendations for your customer base. 

Fully scaled platform

Slow performance, bugs or, worst of all, crashes are unforgivable within apps. They’re also increasingly unnecessary thanks to modern architecture and strong engineering. 

When customers have gone to the effort of downloading an app, they expect a better experience than accessing your site via web browser. It’s therefore important that quality assurance covers robust testing of responsiveness and the system under full load, so you can take steps to optimise performance. By loading transactions and API calls as fast as possible, you can minimise latency problems due to remote signal strength. And finally, if your app processes customer data or payments, you should conduct security assessments and act on any issues found. 

Flexible architecture

Flexibility was also a key consideration for Missguided – and would be for any fast-moving business. Missguided launches up to 1,000 new products every week, so being able to trade without constraint is paramount for them. Building on modern data architecture was a top priority as it means new styles and offers can be launched in real time. With modern architecture, you can also release new features to continuously improve customer experience in very short timeframes. 

If you’d like to learn more about modern system architecture, and find out how Missguided has been able to scale in a fast-moving market, join us on 22nd March for our webinar, How Missguided unlocked growth through modernising their digital strategy. We’ll be joined by some of the team from Missguided who’ll discuss how they partnered with AND Digital on their digital transformation journey, and highlight the key milestones that resulted in the development of their market-leading app.