How The Best Enterprises Think About Mobile Strategy

If your enterprise is exclusively measuring its mobile success by the number of downloads, you’re missing a large piece of the puzzle: customer experience and engagement.

How The Best Enterprises Think About Mobile Strategy

Like many organizations, you may think that mobile is something the team over there does and not something critical to your everyday business processes. After all, it only represents a small percentage of how users interact with your brand, right? While that is the perception of mobile that seems to exist, that’s increasingly untrue.

This past Thanksgiving, mobile-shopping visits (totaling 57% of all visits) surpassed desktop while driving 37% of online sales, according to Adobe Digital Index (ADI). Over the entire 2015 holiday shopping season, mobile drove 45% of online shopping visits and 25% of sales, ADI also found. The truth is this: Mobile cannot be ignored. Your mobile experience—whether through your mobile site or an app—is becoming ever more crucial to your business’s success.

Competition For Users’ Attentions

While users are increasingly using mobile sites and mobile apps, they statistically spend most of their time in the same five apps. In fact, many apps are deleted by customers after only a week. So if your enterprise is exclusively measuring its mobile success by the number of downloads, you’re missing a large piece of the puzzle: customer experience and engagement on mobile.

So, what do you need to do to get users to download your app and then continue using it?

1. Keep up with the Joneses: If your competitors are offering a particular functionality that is incredibly well-received, you need to be able to offer that functionality as well. While it can take a lot of effort to keep up with leading enterprises, customers expect the best experience every time and will go to the brands that offer it to them. This means your mobile experience can’t be put on the backburner. You need to be constantly working to improve your mobile experience and keep up with evolving industry standards.

2. Personalize your customers’ messaging: If you pick up 10 people’s phones, you’ll likely see 10 different layouts for the lock screens and home screens. People’s phones are incredibly personal. It’s not enough to think about this the way you think about personalizing emails; adding someone’s name to your message is not going to cut it. You need to be able to dig through your mobile analytics to understand how to best customize your messaging. This can be done through in-app messaging, push notifications, and more—but without personalized messaging, your app is unlikely to drive engagement or convert sales.

3. Deliver experiences for people: You’re not crafting an experience for a device or a platform. Instead, you’re crafting an experience for an individual person. To do that, you need to truly understand customers’ behaviors and what drives them to engage and convert. You’ll need to learn whether they never respond to personalized messaging through push notifications but perhaps frequently respond to in-app messaging. You need to understand what times they are most likely to respond and positively receive your messages. This can be difficult—there’s no doubt about it. But leading enterprises are continuously innovating and making experiences more unique. As a result, that’s what customers will increasingly expect from you.

4. Continuously execute testing: In addition to testing what works and what doesn’t from an engagement perspective, you need to be sure that your mobile site and your mobile app work—and work quickly. Often, mobile users do not have a lot of patience for long load times. Even if they are ready to buy, if your cart loads slowly or your credit-card processing takes forever, you can lose that sale at the last minute.

5. Monetization: It’s important to have a monetization strategy for your app that does not disrupt your users’ mobile experiences.

It is not enough just to make your site accessible on mobile. You need to be able to think of your users as people. Their experiences should be personal, efficient, and something that can improve their lives—whether it’s through making their lives easier, saving them time, or saving them money.

To compete with leading enterprises’ mobile strategies, you need to understand—when you boil it down the No. 1 best practice when it comes to mobile strategy is understanding that there is no longer any one-size-fits-all strategy. You must constantly be innovating and improving your mobile experience to reach your customers where they live and work.