In the increasingly mobile world of consumer/brand interactions, there are six key questions that today's marketers need to consider if they're going to draw up an effective mobile engagement strategy and build a better, more engaging customer experience, according to Ian Truscott, vice president of product marketing for SDL's Content Management Technologies Division.
According to research carried out by Google and IPSOS, 64% of UK in-store consumers use their smart phones either to research the products they are looking at, or perform price comparisons with other retailers. To put these numbers into perspective, UK retailer Dixon Retail reported in-store revenue of £8.19 billion for their financial year ending June 2012. This means that the in-store, smartphone-wielding consumer contributed over £5 billion to the bottom line of this retailer.
In fact Gartner predict that this year, mobile devices will overtake PCs as the most common web access device worldwide. This means that whoever you are trying to engage with over the web, there is a good chance that a mobile device will be used at some point in a customer's journey.
So, having established that organisations have to do something about mobile, the next question is what? There are a number of options for "going mobile" - should you produce a native app, deploy a responsive design to make your website look great on the small screen or something else? To help answer this, SDL Tridion suggests considering the following six questions when developing your mobile strategy:
Defining the task is critical, as it enables you to decide what content you need to optimize for the mobile device or what e-services you need to mobilize.
Let's take a banking example - how often would you use an app that locates your nearest ATM - compared to how often you check your account balance?
It sounds like a nightmare, so it's important to get an insight into what devices your customers are using, so that you can prioritize against these. This insight could be as simple as looking at your web analytics and seeing what devices people are currently using to complete their online tasks with you.
However, this multi-channel engagement is not just about the experience a customer has over a single channel, whether it's mobile, email, website, Facebook or your call centre. A customer's impression of your organisation and that engagement will also be partially formed as they cross between these channels.
For example, after Angry Birds, email is probably the leading task people use their mobile device for. So, how does your email marketing campaign look if someone clicks on your carefully crafted 'call to action' in that email from their iPhone? Does it direct them to your nearest coffee shop - using GPS and an SMS voucher - or does it show a full webpage? If the customer pinches and zooms enough, will they find a voucher that can be printed?
"Think about why your audience is making the effort to engage with you - especially as they are probably squinting to see that tiny screen! Just make it easy for them and you'll be successful," Truscott concluded.
Categorised as: