N Brown is a top ten UK clothing and footwear digital retailer, with a home proposition. The company is based in Manchester and designs, sources and creates many of its own products for its brands which include JD Williams, Simply Be and Jacamo. With a 160-year-plus history, N Brown is a company built on heritage, having evolved from a catalog business to a fully digital retailer.
N Brown’s addition of social proof messaging on its apps drives conversion rate uplifts
Key KPIs delivered by Taggstar
10%+
increase in add-to-bag on Jacamo
11
message types used
The Challenge
N Brown is one of Taggstar’s longest-standing customers. The two companies have worked in partnership on real-time social proof messaging since 2017. The retail giant understands the value of social proof and the benefit of continual optimization and experimentation in driving results. It has seen the benefit of real-time social proof messaging in improving its conversion rate by reducing choice paralysis and increasing the urgency to purchase in tests which have previously focused on its websites and mobile. In this most recent test, N Brown wanted to understand the impact of real-time social proof messaging on its apps during peak trading in the run-up to Black Friday 2024.
Previously, a full journey A/B test on JD Williams saw a 2.9% uplift in conversion rate and the company wanted to see if it could achieve similar results by using real-time social proof messaging on its apps, where its most engaged consumers interact with its brands.
The Solution
N Brown tested real-time social proof messaging across the PLP, PDP, Bag and Save for Later (SFL) pages of its Android and iOS native apps across its three flagship brands – JD Williams, Jacamo and Simply Be. The A/B test lasted three weeks (21 days) in November 2024, ahead of Black Friday.
11 message types were used, including ‘Selling Fast’, ‘Trending’ and ‘In Demand’.
“Across all brand apps, we saw consistent and clear significant uplift from users on a PDP adding to bag after Taggstar messaging was displayed, which is proof of the huge impact of social proof messaging on conversions.”
Chris Grant, Head of User Experience
The Results
The results showed significant conversion rate uplifts in metrics, including general conversion, add-to-bag rates from PDP and add-to-bag rates from SFL.
Up to 13% CR uplift was seen across the brands.
In addition to improving conversion rates, the test also showed that the addition of real-time social proof messaging on the apps helped to provide significant uplifts in add-to-bag rates. The number of add-to-bag instances from the PDP increased most strongly for JD Williams, which saw over a 7% increase in add-to-bag rates on iOS. Jacamo witnessed just over a 10% uplift in add-to-bag on Android and iOS.
Chris Grant, Head of User Experience at N Brown, said: “Across all brand apps, we saw consistent and clear significant uplift from users on a PDP adding to bag after Taggstar messaging was displayed, which is proof of the huge impact of social proof messaging on conversions.”
The test also measured the impact of social proof messaging on each brand’s Save for Later (SFL) page. The results showed that fear of missing out (FOMO) messaging was particularly effective at driving purchase intent. The company saw up to a 12% uplift in add-to-bag rates from Save-for-Later (SFL) pages across JD Williams. On iOS, uplifts ranged from approximately 5.5% to 12%, while on Android, increases ranged from around 3% to 7.5%, across JD Williams, Jacamo and Simply Be.
The Future
“As with experimentation on our websites, this test showed the value of social proof in boosting our conversion rates and reducing our bag abandonments,” said Grant. “With customer engagement highest on our apps, the test showed that social proof messaging helps to engage customers further on our app platforms. It worked particularly well for our established customers who may need a further nudge to purchase.”
N Brown is considering a heritage app brands rollout.
The future will also see additional testing of the impact of social proof messaging, including analysis of different message types and screen size display
Marjorie Leonidas, CEO at Taggstar, said: “N Brown is one of our most established customers. Their success comes from their understanding that social proof messaging is a tool that must be constantly optimized and pushed for best results. Its test results show that even on engagement-intensive platforms such as apps, social proof messaging can help to drive customer engagement, conversion rates and add-to-bag rates further, delivering substantial revenue uplifts as a result.”
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