Matt Asay is Vice-President of Mobile Strategy, Adobe
Today, far too many enterprises have yet to develop effective mobile strategies. This is one reason that even the best mobile apps currently result in more browsing than buying.
There is both art and science to building engaging mobile experiences, experiences that result in increased customer loyalty and business. Ultimately, they always come down to a convergence of the physical and digital worlds.
If You Build It…
In the initial rush to “be mobile,” companies built apps. Lots of them.
But the end goal isn’t to have an app. The goal is to have consumers actually using them, not merely installing them. Far too many brands think their work is done when a consumer installs the app and don’t pay nearly enough attention to engaging the user. This is understandable – building engaging apps is hard.
But consumers don’t care if it’s hard.
It turns out that consumers, according to Forrester, “expect experiences to provide services aligned with their needs and abilities, in the right context.” We’ve become accustomed to Uber knowing where we are and how long it will take a driver to reach us; to Delta knowing that I’m at the airport and want to check the upgrade list; to Facebook showing me the updates I actually want to read, and burying updates from pseudo-friends I don’t.
This chasm between what consumers want and what mobile marketers provide them is vast. Just look at how we shop.
Browsing, Not Buying
On the one hand, it’s great that roughly 50% of all online shopping traffic around Thanksgiving 2014 was mobile, as Asymco analyst Horace Dediu highlights. But the downside is the huge fall-off when it comes to actually purchasing something using a mobile device. Of that same online traffic, roughly a quarter of it resulted in a purchase. What gives?
Credit: Forrester Research
Granted, this is an improvement. As ADI data shows, 29% of sales on Thanksgiving Day came from mobile devices, up from 21% in 2013. Mobile devices drove 27% of sales on Black Friday, 3% more than last year. But it still reflects apparent discomfort with buying on a mobile device.
Thinking through this delta between mobile browsing and shopping, Dediu posits:
The fact that mobile shopping is not equal to mobile spending is due to the convenience factor of mobile. It’s more likely that users will spend idle time scanning for bargains or tracking down ideas from friends but wait until they are at home to make the final purchase decisions in front of a computer.
The Convergence Of Digital And Physical
Mobile is the experience of physical and digital worlds, converged. The challenge for businesses is to sync them at the most opportune moment. Which means, of course, that our littlest of devices present the biggest of data challenges.
Solve that, and you win.
This article originally appeared on Adobe’s Digital Marketing Blog.
