To drive both traffic and re-engagement, luxury cosmetics brand Lancôme launched a Progressive Web App (PWA) with Mobify to deliver a fast, app-like experience on the mobile web.
- 17% increase in conversions
- 53% increase in mobile sessions on iOS
- 8% increase in conversion rates on recovered carts via Push Notifications
Challenge
Lancôme saw mobile traffic eclipse desktop traffic for the first time in 2016. Despite a growing number of mobile site visitors, mobile conversion rates didn’t match those for desktop. While 38% of shopping carts led to orders on desktop, the mobile web conversion rate was only 15%. This disparity revealed that consumers were experiencing significant obstacles when trying to purchase on mobile. As the mobile web became a core focus area, Lancôme struggled to build a fast and engaging experience for their mobile web shoppers.
Can’t we just build an app for that?
At first, Lancôme considered building an e-commerce app for mobile, but decided that an app only made sense for customers who visited regularly. They understood that shoppers on Lancôme’s mobile site behave differently, and wouldn’t return to an e-commerce app weekly, let alone daily. Lancôme wanted to build the right user experience (UX) on all of their devices. The company needed a fast-loading, compelling emobile experience, similar to what they could achieve with a native app—but one that was also discoverable and accessible to everyone via the mobile web.
Solution
Instead of minimally updating their underlying site, Lancôme looked to PWA technologies to provide an immersive, app-like experience. They took advantage of service workers to deliver reliable performance on unstable networks and push notifications for re-engagement. Their best-in-class PWA achieves a performance score of 94/100 on Lighthouse, an automated tool for improving web page quality.
With the new PWA, the time until the page is interactive fell by 84%, compared to their previous mobile experience, with a corresponding 15% decrease in bounce rates. Lancôme saw their mobile sessions rise by more than 50%, and conversions increase by 17%. The new strategy also delivered a much better user experience across platforms. iOS is extremely important for Lancôme—65% of all users landing on their PWA are on iPhones. With their new PWA, Lancôme saw a 53% increase in session length and 10% bounce rate decrease among iPhone users (despite the fact that the “Add to homescreen” menu item, push notifications, and offline caching were unavailable due to lack of iOS support for PWA of service workers).
Lancôme’s higher engagement rate resulted from the new site’s increased download speeds and user-interface improvements. On Android devices (which support service workers), Lancôme also took advantage of re-engagement technologies such as push notifications, which became very popular with users: Over 18,000 shoppers have signed up for alerts since the site launched in October 2016. The notifications look the same as those on native apps, and arrive even if the browser is no longer running. Lancôme sends four or five alerts a month for exclusive promotions and product releases. 8% of consumers who tap on a push notification make a purchase, which is much higher than the desktop website conversion rate. Lancôme also has great success in using push notifications to reconnect with shoppers who’ve abandoned their carts. The new strategy has delivered an 18% open rate on mobile, and conversion rates on abandoned carts have increased by 8%.
All told, the PWA has been a tremendous success, helping the beauty giant make great strides into the mobile web.
Results
Overall
- 84% decrease in time until the page is interactive
- 17% increase in conversions
- 15% decrease in bounce rate
- 51% increase in mobile sessions
iOS
- 53% increase in mobile sessions on iOS
- 10% decrease in bounce rates on iOS
Push
- 8% of consumers who tap on a push notification make a purchase
- 18% open rate from Push Notifications
- 12% increase in conversion rates on recovered carts via Push Notifications