Retail Mobile App Engagement Benchmarks for the 2019 Holiday Shopping Season

By Surbhi Modi

With the holiday season comes people embarking on gift-buying frenzies for their loved ones. Holiday season in 2019 is projected to enjoy retail sales of around $1 trillion in the US, with 48 percent of the total sales attributed to mobile e-commerce. Holiday e-commerce spending in 2019 will rise 13 percent – more than three times the rate of total retail spending growth.

For Shopping brands, it is critical to understand the customer sentiment for their app usage and find ways to improve the overall customer experience, particularly during this peak season. Many brands leverage customer app reviews and feedback across various channels to perform sentiment analysis. But what are the common themes companies in this industry identify in their feedback? Are there certain behaviors or pain points their customers have in common? How does your brand stack up against the competition?

In this blog post, we’ll help you answer those questions and more by diving into results we discovered by analyzing apps in the Shopping space. Our hope is that by understanding key phrases and the sentiment attached to them from last year will help inform your mobile marketing strategy and product roadmap.

Benchmarking Key Phrases in App Store Reviews

In our recent analysis of the category, we collected and analyzed more than 1.7 million app store reviews for more than 300 iOS and Android apps in the Shopping category. The data consisted of raw text from customer reviews extracted in their native format. Text mining techniques were used to convert textual data into meaningful phrases relevant to the analysis at hand.

We identified key topics and significant phrases at a macro level, based on the frequency of their occurrence in the customer reviews analyzed. Each phrase was then mapped to a three-tier sentiment classification for positive, neutral and negative sentiment directions. With sufficient data, these aggregated measures can act as high-level benchmarks to help a customer gauge the performance of their own app against. For example, topics that have high overall positive sentiment associated with them signify features customers love using in mobile apps. Brands could then invest their efforts in including related features in their app(s) and enhance their UX. On the other hand, phrases with high negative sentiment indicate major areas of improvement and brands could proactively try to address any problems in their own apps before they occur.

App review benchmarks not only help in defining product roadmap for a brand’s app but can also help surface insights on app features and functionality that the entire market’s customer base looks for.

Key Insights from Last Year’s Holiday Season

For the 2018 holiday season, customers shared feedback regarding “customer service” most frequently, and the overall sentiment for this topic was primarily negative.

Based on sampled reviews for this topic, customers showed unhappiness towards not being able to reach customer service for refunds, order status, account information, order placements, and more. Here are a few examples of reviews reflective of these commonalities:

“(I) …read more

Read more here:: B2CMarketingInsider

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