As the fifth biggest e-commerce retailer in the UK with a highly rated mobile app, thetrainline.com shares lessons learnt along the way

When Mark Holt, CTO of thetrainline.com arrives at Waterloo Station in the evening he wants two things from his mobile or watch app – yes, they have a watch app!

He wants it to know:

• that he is homeward bound - the personal
   
• which platform he’ll be departing from – the contextual

“Frankly, the fact that my app doesn’t know this today... annoys the hell out of me,” says the man responsible for mobile product and technology development at the UK’s fifth biggest e-commerce retailer after Amazon and eBay. Although he is quick to add that “the future of our mobile app is absolutely personal and contextual”.

It may not be perfect yet, but for companies honing their mobile strategy there are undoubtedly some lessons from thetrainline.com’s 5-star app which is number 1 or 2 in travel on both the App Store and Google Play.

Holt, who was speaking earlier this month at TDS Europe in London, had some practical advice. EyeforTravel extracted his four top tips:

1.     Take a bottom up approach: A typical strategy map will display the words ‘product’, ‘process’, ‘people’ - usually in that order. You have to focus on every single one of these levels but people should always come first.

2.     Hire and empower a dedicated and durable team: The trainline.com has a dedicated team for mobile and dedicated team for web development. These teams contain all functionality needed to create, for example, an award winning app - from a dedicated product manager to data and analytics people, visual designers, marketing whizz kids, app store optimisers and more.

“The team is the most important thing and we drive them obsessively with two KPIs – conversion and retention - and nothing else,” says Holt.

3.     Forget the fluff, it’s time to be obsessively ruthless: By Holt’s own admission, thetrainline.com wasted about seven or eight years on the fluffy stuff, which customers didn’t really want. Today, however, it ruthlessly prioritises what the customer wants by using qualitative and quantitative insights to drive product development.

“We’re obsessed with tagging. We tag to ‘nth’ degree inside our apps. We know every click, every touch, every scroll on a screen and we look at this obsessively, really digging into the data,” explains Holt. It’s also important to know where the customer is coming from – be that organic traffic or in sent traffic, for example.

4.     Mine the funnel and test: Every two weeks the team looks into the conversion tunnel in order to understand, for example, where people are dropping. They then create hypotheses to understand why and use data to validate this. Holt cannot recommend A-B testing tools highly enough. “When you introduce something new, it’s so important to validate whether you have released something that is of value to customers,” he says.

5.     Get customer feedback: The firm’s office is near Farringdon Station so they regularly send staff out to show the app to real people. Customers are brought into the office at least once a week to feedback on both the mobile app and the web experience.

“We talk through problems a customer might have, the journeys they are doing and how they would like the app to work,” says Holt.

It’s not just product and user experience people that they have in the room, but developers too as “they need to be able to innovate just as much as the marketing people”.

It’s more important than ever to empower your customers but also all members of the team.Don’t miss out the opportunity to attend on of EyeforTravel’s upcoming events where you can expect to hear more top trends and tips from senior executives from across the travel sector