Internet penetration in Southeast Asia (SEA) is on the rise. According to a combined study conducted by Google and Temasek Research, 3.8 million new users are expected to come online each month in SEA, making it the fastest growing internet region in the world between 2015 and 2020. Most of these internet connections are expected to originate from mobile phones. According to a MoEngage study, at present, over 90 per cent of SEA’s population connects to the internet through a mobile device. Moreover, the daily time spent on the internet is about 4 hours and 56 minutes per day. As such, SEA is fast emerging as a mobile-first region. This has been made possible by the availability of increasingly affordable smartphones. This, coupled with improved network speeds and cheap data rates, has led to mobiles becoming the primary medium for people to connect to the virtual world.

Given the amount of time spent by people on their mobile phones, it is expected to drive SEA’s growing e-commerce market in the near future. In fact, as a study by App Annie suggests, m-commerce has grown to become critical to the future of retail. The study also highlighted that global shopping app sessions grew by 65 per cent between 2016 and 2018 and consumers spent close to 3 billion hours on shopping apps in 2018 alone. This was more than double the time spent in 2016.

However, there is still a long way to go before m-commerce reaches its peak and mobile emerges as the one platform that caters efficiently to all consumer needs.

A look at the emerging trends in the m-commerce industry, the factors affecting the success of mobile applications, the best practices that service providers should follow to retain mobile app users and the way forward…

Emerging trends in m-commerce in SEA

In this age of technology, brands are increasingly deploying new-age tech solutions to make their product offering smarter and more user friendly. Brands are increasingly experimenting with augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and gamification to enhance the shopping experience and drive sales online. According to a recent Worldpay survey of more than 16,000 consumers across eight Asia-Pacific (APAC) markets, 95 per cent of respondents used VR or AR technology in the past three months. Although most such brands operate in China, a similar trend is expected to be replicated in the SEA region as well.

Factors affecting the success of mobile applications

According to a recently conducted study by MoEngage, various factors influence a user’s decision regarding app usage. These are as follows.

Utility: Many times, users find that apps do not live up to the promises made at the time of installation. For some, ease of performing an essential action such as subscribing to a service, creating a playlist, or purchasing a product on the app is the determining factor.

Security and data privacy: Given the primacy conferred on the protection of privacy today, consumers prefer to be selective about the data and access they will share with an app. If the app keeps on constantly requesting access to the users’ social accounts, their PII information, or sends invites and updates to their contacts without approval, theyare most likely to hit the uninstall button.

App’s performance: While users love to install new apps, device memory is limited. Hence, they prefer apps that require less space, load faster, and do not cache too much data on their mobile devices. Besides, many users prefer apps that are stable and do not freeze or crash upon rigorous use. Users also tend to uninstall apps that run in the background and consume too much data while doing so.

App’s user interface: Push notifications are a great tool to engage users and boost retention. However, if not used in moderation, push notifications can result in uninstalls. Users uninstall apps that send them too many notifications. Irrelevant content through in-app messages and notifications is also a major cause for users uninstalling apps.

Best practices to retain mobile app users

Today, users can find a plethora of mobile applications catering to their various needs and requirements. The choices are immense. While this brings various benefits to users, it poses a range of challenges for service providers who have to constantly devise new strategies to retain their users and battle stiff neck-and-neck competition.

The following are the key areas where service providers can play to retain their users and minimise the churn rate.

Understanding users and their needs – It is critical to have a clear-cut understanding of users and their needs. Any service offering should be developed based on these insights. Service providers often make the mistake of overdoing things. In their effort to cater to a range of user requirements, they lose sight of what was the first basic need that they sought to address. As a result, they completely deviate from the initial pain point that they promised the users they would solve.

Personalise – According to MoEngage, it is very important to know one’s customer at an individual level. Attention to small details like addressing the customer by name or ensuring a human tone to the marketing message contribute to customer engagement. The baseline is to treat them as people, not just as customers who pay money.

Deliver more than asked – The report also highlighted that it is essential to create moments of engagement in a constantly distracted customer’s mind. It is essential to predict their needs and serve them efficiently. Proactive service is a sure-shot way to build trust. The focus should be on creating a unique experience that serves customer needs. A unique experience is created when an app is able to predict what the user might want and delivers it before it becomes a reason for the consumer to leave the app.

Know your product/service – Data is indeed the new oil. In order to ensure maximum retention on their platform, service providers should leverage users’ data fed into their platform’s servers. In addition, they should derive insights from their customer’s service usage patterns and customise offerings accordingly.

The way forward

Going forward, the adoption of a well-defined and structured mobile strategy will play a critical role in ensuring the success of a brand’s e-commerce business. Among various factors, providing a user-friendly interface on the mobile application will be key in determining the level of footfall the app sees and how many of its users an app is able to retain. According to a recent market report, mobile users typically search for specific information and are more likely to perform pre-purchase research on mobile devices. According to Google’s Consumer Barometer, 91 per cent of mobile searches in Malaysia lead to further action, be it looking for more information or purchasing a product or service. In Singapore, this figure is 84 per cent. Thus, it is important to make sure that once customers land on an app looking for a product or service, they are able to navigate seamlessly through the application and get what they are looking for. This is essential to convert such customers into repeat customers – those who revisit the app at regular intervals to purchase the service.