Mobile Shines Through in Holiday Predictions Report

To put the find­ings of the Adobe Dig­i­tal Index Hol­i­day Report into two words? Mobile growth

Putting them into a few more words than that? The future of the mar­ket­place is rapid­ly mobi­liz­ing. When you think of your cus­tomer inter­ac­tions, when you think of your mar­ket­place, a mobile pres­ence has long been manda­to­ry, espe­cial­ly for any com­pa­ny inter­est­ed in har­ness­ing the mas­sive uptick in activity.

Specif­i­cal­ly, ADI has found that all across Europe, mobile pur­chas­es are up a whop­ping 38 per­cent– in some places, like Den­mark, that num­ber tops 50 per­cent. The mobile mar­ket is increas­ing­ly diverse, offer­ing con­sumers numer­ous avenues to explore dig­i­tal retail, and far from frac­tion­al ones at that: analy­sis pre­dicts the UK will lead the pack with almost 25 per­cent of its entire online hol­i­day sales com­ing from mobile pur­chas­es, and many key mar­kets are rest­ing clos­er to 20 per­cent, includ­ing the US.

Now that we’re in the mid­dle of the hol­i­day sea­son, how can we under­stand and be a part of this? Well, some of these trends are his­tor­i­cal. Less and less are con­sumers equat­ing their phones with inse­cu­ri­ty. In some ways, one’s phone may ulti­mate­ly be trust­ed as the most secure out­let for finan­cial trans­ac­tions, fit­ting for a device that is per­haps the one thing we fear los­ing more than our wal­let. The process is rapid­ly com­ing full cir­cle, in fact, with count­less retail­ers back­ing new forms of mobile wal­lets like Apple­Pay. This process, if it proves to be as dis­rup­tive as many of Apple’s ear­li­er advance­ments, will for­ev­er bind con­sumers’ pri­ma­ry mobile devices to their finan­cial accounts. The busi­ness impli­ca­tions of this hard­ly need to be explained.

The first thing we must do, on an orga­ni­za­tion­al lev­el, is to dis­card the stale idea of “mobile worst”. The tech­nol­o­gy, the hard­ware, the exper­tise and the desire on the part of the cus­tomer are all there for us to strive for mobile best, to make our net pres­ence speak loud­ly to our con­sumers across all chan­nels. We can embrace this process, or we can watch as it hap­pens elsewhere.

The obvi­ous exam­ple is Face­book, of course. Here we have the most com­plex social media por­tal yet invent­ed, and yet its app ver­sion cap­tures every­thing com­pelling about it in a per­fect­ly bal­anced pack­age. How has Face­book prof­it­ed from this trend? With one-third of its user­base now mobile-only, Face­book now makes two-thirds of its ad rev­enue from mobile sources. It’s inter­est­ing, and prob­a­bly no coin­ci­dence giv­en the ADI find­ings, that anoth­er great exam­ple of opti­miz­ing the expe­ri­ence for mobile users comes from an Adobe cus­tomer in Den­mark, Danske Bank– one of the first com­pa­nies in Den­mark to think strate­gi­cal­ly about mobile and invest in get­ting the mobile web and app expe­ri­ence right. By uni­fy­ing their data sources and reduc­ing the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence gap between chan­nels, Danske’s new mod­el earned them the uplift they need­ed to stay ahead of the competition.

The upshot of all of this is to apply this think­ing to your own busi­ness! No mat­ter how many of your cus­tomers are con­nect­ing to you via mobile now, that num­ber is going to increase. And the oppor­tu­ni­ties are end­less. App use is the norm for mobile cus­tomers. A vast array of users you could have pre­vi­ous­ly only reached through the inter­face of their cho­sen web brows­er are now hun­gry for an inter­ac­tive, engag­ing cus­tomer expe­ri­ence on a per­son­al device.

And this presents your busi­ness with some chal­leng­ing deci­sions to make. There are the obvi­ous steps: cre­at­ing ded­i­cat­ed mobile apps, respon­sive web­sites, pri­or­i­tiz­ing mobile cus­tomer expe­ri­ence instead of mere­ly treat­ing it as an after­thought, but how to lever­age your effort in these pur­suits is, for many, unchart­ed ter­ri­to­ry. The key to suc­cess, though, is found in con­tin­u­al­ly iter­at­ing the expe­ri­ence and test­ing your inno­va­tions against the met­rics pro­vid­ed by your ana­lyt­ics. Your mobile pres­ence is more than just a require­ment, it’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty. Cus­tomers will find the avenue that speaks to them, and it will inform their behav­ior in the hol­i­day sea­son and far beyond.