Blog, 14 Apr 2022

How to Deploy Headless Native Apps with poq & Salesforce

Jenna Flateman Posner, Chief Digital Officer at SNIPES and Igor Faletski, VP Product – Commerce at Salesforce joined poq CEO, Jay Johnston to discuss increasing Customer Lifetime Value & Reducing Customer Churn with native mobile apps and Salesforce.

Marketing

Jenna Flateman Posner, Chief Digital Officer at SNIPES, reveals the different roles mobile web and native apps play in their channel mix.

With mcommerce now growing faster than total ecommerce, driving mobile performance is often top of mind for retailers. But it can be tricky for retailers to work out where they should be prioritising resources and budget. So poq sat down, virtually, with Jenna Flateman Posner, Chief Digital Officer at SNIPES, Igor Faletski, VP Product – Commerce at Salesforce and poq CEO, Jay Johnston to discuss the advantages, technology and future of mobile web and native apps.

The place that both mobile web and app play in a retailer’s business

“In my view, web and apps are like yin and yang, you definitely need to have both of them for acquisition strategy,” explained Faletski. “I think for most brands, it starts with the web, right? To get traffic from search, from social, from emails, it’s really important to make sure that your experience on the web is fast enough, that it’s modern enough, because that’s where the journey of the shopper with your brand ultimately is going to begin. Then after some time, your shopper is going to be familiar with the brand. And they will want to get even more experiences and even more ways to build loyalty. For example, they may go to a store and they want to connect with cool technology there with augmented reality, virtual reality. So the app is a great way to build on that initial engagement and build an experience for this trusted, loyal audience and do a lot more for them, than the web can do.”

Johnston added, “I love the yin and the yang metaphor, I think that’s really appropriate, because you’re right, it is two pretty distinct use cases.” He continued “I think it’s around 25%, year on year, that things like paid search have been going up. And so all of a sudden, customer acquisition is getting that much more expensive, then it becomes incredibly important to be on the other side of the yang. You want to keep your customers so that you actually don’t have to spend so much time and invest so much money in acquiring them. This is really where app comes into its own, you basically have a walled garden, you have first party analytics, and you have these compelling features that Igor is talking about.”

Falteman Posner summed up the discussion point, “I think we’re all kind of swirling around the same concepts here, it makes a ton of sense. Just to validate, we are absolutely looking at web as an acquisition opportunity. The power performance marketing, without a doubt, gives us an opportunity to reach a wide range of consumers and work to pull them into the SNIPES family, so web is a really good tool for that. But it’s purely a commerce play.”

Falteman Posner concluded, “ Looking at native app, we’re looking more at a three pronged approach to this. There’s ecommerce, but there’s also a concept of creating a sense of community within the app. And so for us, in a phased approach to rolling out poq, that’s really where we leaned in. We thought, phase one, get commerce cranking, then drive some community features. Meaning the opportunity to create, have followers and communicate directly with consumers in the app, and then ultimately have this lead into a really comprehensive loyalty programme that’s designed to get these customers coming back more, spending more and doing all the lovely things that loyalty is designed to do.”

More exclusive insights

Watch the complete panel discussion between Jenna Flateman Posner, Chief Digital Officer at SNIPES, Igor Faletski, VP Product – Commerce at Salesforce and poq CEO, Jay Jonston to discover more insights.