Fix Your App Before You Buy More Traffic

That matters because, for many brands, the app is no longer just another digital channel, it’s where a significant proportion of revenue is won or lost.

Domino’s UK & Ireland now takes more than 75% of its online orders through its app. At Co-op, every £1 invested in its membership app and member offers generates £12 in revenue. For businesses like these, mobile is a key part of the commercial engine.

Yet the app is often the least scrutinised part of the growth plan. It gets treated as infrastructure, something that either works or it doesn’t, rather than as a commercial asset with a conversion rate that can be moved, a load time that can be halved, and a drop-out point that can be found and fixed.

The maths that rarely gets run

Customer acquisition is expensive, and getting more so. Media inflation, privacy changes and competition for attention all push up the cost of a new customer. And it’s a cost you pay again next month, and the month after.

Conversion works differently. An improvement applies to every visitor, including the ones you’ve already paid for. It compounds across the year and doesn’t reset when the campaign ends.

So run the numbers.

Take an app handling £50m of transactions a year at a 4% conversion rate, move that to 4.2% and you have made a 5% relative improvement. Same traffic, same media spend, same customers. That is £2.5m of additional revenue, and it keeps arriving for as long as the improvement holds. A 0.2 percentage-point shift in conversion rarely makes it into a board pack. £2.5m of additional revenue should.

Now price the alternative. Generating that £2.5m through acquisition means buying 5% more traffic, then buying it again the following year. Improving conversion is typically a fraction of that cost, and is often a case of finding and fixing the friction causing customers to leave, rather than building something new. 

Put the two side by side and the comparison becomes uncomfortable. A brand spending seven figures on acquisition while losing customers at checkout is paying full price for traffic it then fails to convert. Before buying another pound of traffic, ask what happens if more of the traffic you’ve already paid for converts.

Product investment isn’t competing with the marketing budget. It determines how hard that marketing budget can work.

Where the value actually leaks

In our experience, value tends to escape from four places, and they are rarely the places teams look first.

• Speed.
  Every second between intent and action costs you customers. This shows up at key moments; the basket, the payment sheet, or the search results page. Speed work almost never appears in a campaign plan, but it moves conversion faster than anything else available.
  
• Reliability.
  A crash rate that looks acceptable on a dashboard looks very different translated into failed transactions. Lose someone’s full basket once and you haven’t just lost that sale; you’ve damaged their confidence in coming back.
  
• The journey itself.
  Apps accumulate steps over time; a field added for compliance, a screen added for a feature, a consent prompt that fires at the wrong moment. Collectively, these can add up to the reason someone gives up two taps from the end.
  
• What you can actually see.
  Mobile generates rich behavioural data, but only if it is utilised properly. Plenty can tell you their conversion rate, but almost nothing about where the failures happen. Without that visibility, improvement work becomes guesswork.

These are all product problems, which is precisely why they tend to sit outside the growth conversation and get left to a backlog.

Mobile makes your growth spend work harder

The strongest argument for improving mobile has nothing to do with mobile in isolation.

Marketing creates attention, and the app is where that attention either turns into a transaction or evaporates. CRM creates relevance, and a well-timed message is only as good as the experience it lands people in. Loyalty creates a reason to come back, and the app is where the customer experiences whether that promise is real.

Send a perfectly targeted push notification into a slow app and you have spent budget generating a frustrating experience. The notification may have worked, but the product let it down. The dashboard will simply record a poor campaign result and the real cause never gets diagnosed.

That is why the sequencing is so important; optimising acquisition, loyalty and CRM while leaving the underlying experience untouched puts a ceiling on all three at once. Improve the experience first and the same activity performs better without a penny of extra spend.

Four questions worth asking before the next budget round

If you want a quick read on whether mobile is pulling its weight in your business, these tend to surface the answer fast.

• What is our app conversion rate, and when did we last try to improve it?
  If the answer to the second half is “not recently”, there is likely value sitting there.
  
• Where exactly do customers drop out?
  If nobody can name the top three drop-off points with numbers attached, the instrumentation needs work before anything else does.
  
• What would a one percentage point conversion improvement be worth to us annually?
  Run the number; it is usually larger than people expect, and it reframes what a sensible investment in product work looks like.
  
• Are we optimising the channels that feed the growth engine, or the engine itself?
  Most organisations are honest enough to admit it is the former.

Growth starts with getting more from what you already have

Growth doesn’t always mean finding more customers, sometimes it means converting more of the demand you’ve already created.

That’s why mobile deserves a place in the growth plan, not just the product roadmap. When the app becomes faster, more reliable and easier to convert through, acquisition performs harder, CRM has more impact and loyalty has a better reason to stick.

So before spending more to put customers at the top of the funnel, look at what happens when they reach the screen in their hand.

There may already be more growth there than you think.