How to Create Mobile Experiences that Keep Customers Engaged

Last week, Mary Meek­er released her hot­ly antic­i­pat­ed Inter­net Trends report, and one find­ing should serve as a wake-up call for brands in the retail space: con­sumers now do more than half of all their dig­i­tal brows­ing via mobile.

Mobile shop­ping has become one of our most com­mon pas­times, which means that brands can no longer think of their ecom­merce expe­ri­ence as pure­ly func­tion­al. A straight line from search to pur­chase isn’t enough to build a rela­tion­ship with customers—they must focus on keep­ing peo­ple engaged for as long as pos­si­ble, and that comes down to cre­at­ing a com­plete mobile experience.

Cus­tomers want a per­son­alised ecom­merce offer­ing curat­ed prod­uct dis­cov­ery and 24/7 rec­om­men­da­tions. They want some­thing fresh and excit­ing. They want mean­ing­ful and con­sis­tent expe­ri­ences that cre­ate a deep con­nec­tion with­out sac­ri­fic­ing the con­ve­nience and ease-of-use that makes mobile shop­ping so attrac­tive in the first place.

John Lewis is one retail­er that under­stands the impor­tance of deliv­er­ing excel­lent dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences. As one of the UK’s longest stand­ing brands, John Lewis faced the chal­lenge of match­ing its online offer­ing to its in-store expe­ri­ence. By turn­ing to dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies to focus on con­vert­ing cross-chan­nel customers—those who shop online and in store—the retail­er has been able to boost loy­al­ty and con­tin­ue build­ing one of England’s strongest brands.

John Lewis even found a way to let mobile cus­tomers “test dri­ve” fab­rics when shop­ping for fur­ni­ture. Using Adobe tech­nol­o­gy, the retailer’s con­sol­i­dat­ed thou­sands of prod­uct images and sped up page load­ing speeds, which in turn allows shop­pers to browse rough­ly 112,000 dif­fer­ent fur­ni­ture offer­ings and see how their dream sofa or chair would look in real life.

John Lewis’ con­tin­ued suc­cess at a time when depart­ment stores around the world are strug­gling should serve as a reminder that brands can’t rest on their lau­rels. Expe­ri­ence-dri­ven busi­ness­es sim­ply per­form bet­ter. Indeed, research by Adobe and For­rester revealed that Expe­ri­ence Busi­ness­es in the media and enter­tain­ment indus­try gen­er­at­ed 2.4 times more traf­fic in 2017 than in the pre­vi­ous year.

Mary Meeker’s find­ings about the impor­tance of mobile expe­ri­ences may not be earth-shat­ter­ing, but they do high­light that change is no longer option­al. Its crit­i­cal to busi­ness sur­vival. To find out more about how retail­ers are evolv­ing to become Expe­ri­ence Mak­ers, click here. And click here for the full tran­script of Mary Meeker’s Inter­net Trends Report.