5 Imperatives for Mobile Success
Consumers have grown accustomed to convenient and purposeful mobile experiences, and optimizing and supporting buy-in are just two ways to help marketers achieve them.
Consumers have grown accustomed to convenient and purposeful mobile experiences, and optimizing and supporting buy-in are just two ways to help marketers achieve them.
The mobile mindset has arrived. In fact, consumers now seek – and expect – convenient and purposeful mobile experiences with brands. For marketers, it’s crucial to create timely, relevant, high-quality mobile touchpoints to enhance the customer experience, or else consumers will go elsewhere.
This is of course easier said than done. In fact, marketers often tell me they typically face several challenges when embarking on a mobile overhaul:
The good news: even though marketers are confronted with obstacles as they seek to create better mobile experiences, those road blocks can disappear with the right strategies, people, technology and partners. To help ensure success as you build a high-performing mobile program, below are my five imperatives to support your planning process:
Understand your customers’ needs and build mobile strategies to meet those needs in the mobile moment. A critical starting point is to know your customers and what they seek from mobile as they interact with your brand and your competitors. Create the use cases throughout the customer journey to identify key mobile moments. Engage your users – conduct research, surveys and focus groups to determine what value and benefits they want.
Analyze existing behavioral channel data to uncover trends and glean insights. Determine the assets and gaps or disconnects you have across the customer journey. Once you have collected enough customer intelligence, then craft your mobile strategy which should be aligned to your overall customer experience strategy.
A great mobile strategy must focus on what value you seek to provide to customers in their mobile moments and how an improved customer journey can deliver that value. Finally, don’t feel like you have to boil the entire ocean at once. Start with simple, high value use cases to prove the value and benefits, and then grow from there.
Galvanize the team and gain executive buy-in. You’ll need internal consensus and help to upgrade your mobile experience and secure budget. Persuading an organization to shift investments and resources is a process – but when they do it can be game changing, like Hilton investing $500 million in mobile technology.
Start by crafting a view on how improving your customer experience and marketing/service communications will enhance ability to compete and win – both qualitatively in terms of customer delight and quantitatively in terms of revenue, profitability, loyalty and long-term value. Support your plan with competitor examples, consumer data both within your industry and outside it with best in class programs. Then package up your case and make sure that your vision aligns with the companies and executive team’s goals and objectives.
Evaluate and obtain the technology and people resources you need. At this point you have identified requirements and capability gaps to execute your plan. Here are some considerations when evaluating resource options:
Create meaningful mobile touchpoints. Approximately 90 percent of consumers move between multiple devices to accomplish a goal, using an average of three different screen combinations each day. This fumbling of devices with disconnected data can lead to the abandonment of the experience – and of your brand. When building your customer experience, determine what value and utility can be offered and delivered through a mobile touchpoint.
Test, learn and continuously improve. Set up tests within customer touch points (copy, offers, interval from previous contact) and across the customer journey (frequency / sequence / cadence of contacts, contacts by channel). Then use the test results, in tandem with machine learning and marketing automations, to improve overall performance in a continuous process.
In conclusion – remember that customer behaviors are never static, nor are they universal. What holds true today may not work tomorrow in terms of mobile experience, so be flexible, responsive and open-minded and you’ll soon find you’ll be well on your way to mobile success.