7 Lessons for Mobile Mastery
Mobile has become the touchpoint with customers and battleground with competitors – are you winning?
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Go anywhere, and you’re bound to see people staring into their phones. They might be checking email, watching videos, playing games, scanning Facebook and, of course, shopping. It’s critical companies engage customers on mobile devices.
Too bad many companies fumble mobile initiatives. One out of three marketers said their mobile services were merely scaled-down versions of their PC services, says Forrester. More than half of U.S. online adults said they feel frustrated and annoyed when visiting a website that isn’t mobile-friendly.
Just about every brand wanted its own mobile app, not a mobile website. Marketers envisioned legions of consumers downloading the app and putting it on their phone’s home screen – the most valuable real estate in digital. Then we learned only a handful of popular apps were mobile stars, while the rest faced dwindling active daily users. Today, only a third of marketers incorporate mobile apps into their campaigns, while 56 percent rely on responsive mobile sites, says Episerver. This has made mobile sites the third most popular marketing channel behind desktop websites and email.
Given the importance of a mobile website, you’d think companies would use responsive design and reap the benefits of search engine optimization. Not so, Episerver says. One in five ecommerce sites still relies on mobile redirects. “The sheer variety of products, devices and screen sizes in use makes it ever-more difficult to build an effective mobile redirect that does not limit usability or disrupt the customer experience on certain platforms,” Episerver says. “It is for this reason that we expect to see near-complete adoption of responsive design within the next 12 months.”
When Pokemon Go swept the nation last summer, many pundits felt this was the dawn of mobile augmented reality (AR). But both AR and virtual reality (VR) have had little adoption since, and less than 10 percent of marketers have incorporated them into campaigns. Nevertheless, one in five consumers say they would like to see AR or VR in their shopping experiences, such as trying on virtual clothes. “In their current state, both AR and VR remain gimmicks for retail,” Episerver says. “But is there anything wrong with that? The tipping point for adoption of these tools is not only in making them genuinely useful contextually, but also in making them a fun and immersive experience.”
Consumers were supposed to visit brick-and-mortar stores with their phones in hand to research products, compare prices and navigate aisles. The mobile phone promised to blend the physical and digital. But this didn’t happen. Only one in five consumers used their mobile phones while out shopping, Episerver says. Instead, consumers want an online-only shopping experience coupled with better home delivery services.
People love their phones, and marketing messages should be just as personalized to their owners. But 62 percent of marketers aren’t incorporating personalization, and only 28 percent are using triggered emails to re-engage customers. That’s because personalization requires skillful handling of new tools and customer data. “It is possible to combine assisted segmentation and contextual data collected from customer interactions to autonomously deliver true 1-to-1 individualisation online and in-store,” Episerver says.
What’s more important, shopping convenience or brand loyalty? Most marketers believe it’s the brand, but they’re wrong. If the digital experience wanes, as in a slow-loading or non-mobile website, customers will go elsewhere. In Episerver’s survey, 37 percent of consumers said speed and convenience are key factors in triggering a purchase. “Similarly, 43 percent will leave a site if it’s slow to load – even if it’s one of their favorite brands,” Episerver says, adding, “The truth is that loyalty is dead in the era of customer experience.”
CMOs and CIOs haven’t seen eye-to-eye for decades, as both jockey for ownership of the digital brand. Episerver found that almost half of marketers have to contact the IT department weekly in order to perform basic marketing tasks, such as changing content on the website. But the power pendulum is swinging in favor of marketers, thanks to cloud services geared toward non-techies. “We predict that in 2017 this disconnect will finally be overcome, with marketers and CMOs taking full ownership of their brands’ retail sites and lead collaboration with other departments,” Episerver says.
CMOs and CIOs haven’t seen eye-to-eye for decades, as both jockey for ownership of the digital brand. Episerver found that almost half of marketers have to contact the IT department weekly in order to perform basic marketing tasks, such as changing content on the website. But the power pendulum is swinging in favor of marketers, thanks to cloud services geared toward non-techies. “We predict that in 2017 this disconnect will finally be overcome, with marketers and CMOs taking full ownership of their brands’ retail sites and lead collaboration with other departments,” Episerver says.
Episerver, a marketing tech vendor, recently unearthed a few nuggets in its annual survey on mobile trends. Here are seven important lessons that will help companies master the digital touchpoint with customers.
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