Research by eMarketer estimates there are now 30.9m smartphone users in the UK – that’s 60.4 per cent of all mobile phone users. Meanwhile, tablet ownership has increased 282 per cent in the last two years alone. At present, 20 per cent of all online sales were made on mobile devices in the first quarter of 2013, compared to less than 1 per cent in 2010. We are talking about a generation that has grown up with the internet and smartphones, so this is hardly surprising to hear but why is it that only a handful of retail brands are treating “mobile first” initiatives as an emergency?
A few weeks ago we presented at Mobile Marketing’s Mobile Retail Fashion masterclass, and as part of the prep, we discovered that of the brands attending, only 38 per cent had mobile optimised websites and only 8 per cent offered cross-platform engagement. Added to this, recent Adobe research revealed that 41 per cent of marketers don’t currently have a mobile strategy, and just 3 per cent are a mobile-first organisation.
Mobile as an industry is evolving at pace every quarter reveals new trends, statistics and innovation to contend with, so brands need to make a consistent investment in order to maximise the potential sales on handheld devices. For brands who do not take this seriously, it will be the equivalent of a retail store closing its doors for three days of the trading week. Putting it like that sounds crazy right? Retailers are throwing away money by not investing in mobile. The more they learn about mobile, the more theyll be able to extract value from it.
Mobile strategy
To be fair, brands still feel a great deal of uncertainty and confusion when it comes to adopting a mobile strategy. Brands are questioning whether they should dive into emerging technologies and social-local-mobile. Beyond this, there is the challenge of navigating the rapidly-growing mobile space, which remains complex and somewhat fragmented. But it’s going to be hard to get right without good direction and sound strategy. Furthermore, many companies lack the motivation to take mobile seriously because their competitors are not doing so, yet.
Of course there’s no point in diving head-first into mobile without taking the time to understand how your customers engage and how they use mobile. Brands must know how to provide tailored experiences to the right audience in the most ideal context, time and place. Some advertisers have been slow to react and take advantage of reaching their core audience on their primary screens. This can perhaps be blamed on out-of-date preconceptions about mobile – that you can’t engage a user on a small screen, that it provides a poor customer experience, and that there is no tracking.
Due to the demands around mobile, many companies are in the process of assessing and updating systems and their infrastructures to ensure that they can offer a tailored, 360-degree experience for mobile users. Providing a unique mobile customer experience truly enhances the relationship that the customer has with the brand. This is now what customers are beginning to expect and what brands need to survive and thrive in this data-driven, socially minded era of marketing and commerce.
Not only does the business need collective buy-in to this shift, but silos need to broken down and people pro-actively up-skilled. This affects the whole business. When brands start to see their competitors gaining advantage, they will open their hearts and minds to a mobile-first approach, and soon reap the benefits.
Think, live, breathe mobile
Mobile-first does not simply mean doing lots of tactical mobile engagement as a priority. It means, thinking, living and breathe mobile. Evaluate the future of your business in a mobile world and establish what does that mean to employees, customers, service, locations and logistics to name but a few. If you take care of all that with mobile at the heart of the business then sales and customer satisfaction should follow.
Ignoring mobile is not an option. The fact remains that consumers are mobile-ready, and it is absolutely critical for brands to rank mobile at the top of the list of priorities. Mobile-first? Maybe that should be double first.
Chris Minas is the founder of Nimbletank