Why mobile experiences will make or break your holiday sales
Surveys and research have shown us that people increasingly do their shopping on mobile. And Marketers know that unless our mobile experience lives up to customers’ expectations, they’ll end up going elsewhere to make their purchase.
The challenge is that we’ve become impatient shoppers and frankly, we have so much choice that we don’t need to waste our time with brands that can’t deliver what we need quickly and easily. This is especially true at this time of year when we’re trying to land the best deals during holiday sales or are rushing to buy a last-minute present.
And yet, mobile shopping experiences have stagnated in recent years. Recent Adobe research found that two-thirds of consumers in Europe feel retailers haven’t improved their mobile offering since 2016, with one in six saying they actually find mobile shopping to be too stressful. We increasingly use our mobiles to browse and compare products before making a purchase, but our journey often stops there. What this means is that retailers are missing out on a major opportunity.
There are obvious limitations to the mobile purchasing journey – a smaller screen, no keyboard, the annoyance of having to type in your personal details while fighting off your phone’s auto-correct suggestions – but brands can overcome these by building a smoother and more convenient experience from the ground up.
This comes down to three crucial elements – dynamic content, alignment between platforms, and data.
Use dynamic content to bridge channels
Often, the biggest barrier to delivering a high-quality mobile experience is a logistical one – it takes time to create, produce, and publish content for a whole new channel, especially for brands that sell hundreds of products (or more). To overcome this challenge, companies like TUMI and Phillips have turned to dynamic content that automatically adapts to different platforms.
TUMI invested in Adobe Experience Cloud for a number of reasons, but one of its primary aims was to deliver a mobile experience on par with its web experience. With software capable of resizing content for every format, the company no longer has to create a different set of mobile-friendly images and video for each product it sells. In addition to saving time and money, TUMI can now roll out new products more quickly because it no longer has to store them in a warehouse for weeks while new promotional content is being created.
This final point on content velocity is crucial. Creatives and marketers are being asked to work more closely together to develop and roll-out more content, and to do so faster than ever. This requires tightknit integration between content and customer experience teams, in addition to a dynamic content approach.
Align your experience across platforms
Mobile is a different channel, but it’s not a standalone experience. It might be tempting to treat it separately but remember that customers don’t see any distinction between the online, mobile, or in-store experience a brand delivers. To the outside world, all of these combine into a single set of services offered by the same company.
One company that understands this is Dixons Carphone, one of Europe’s largest consumer electronics retailers. Dixons had a strong heritage in bricks-and-mortar, but its customers today expect an online and mobile experience to match. To reach its digital audience with new products more quickly, the company invested in Adobe Experience Cloud, allowing it to roll-out campaigns 5x faster and create flash sales for major sales events (like Black Friday) in less than a day, all while delivering the same level of personalisation online and via mobile that it has built its reputation on in-store.
Then there’s Phillips, which needed to align its digital presence across 79 markets and 38 languages. The company’s 1 million pages receive more than 1.4 billion views each year, and it was a major feat to measure, manage, and update all these properties, not to mention making them available on mobile. To achieve this, Phillips brought everything together onto a single integrated platform, allowing it to easily adapt its experiences from a central system.
Data: learn from your customers and adapt quickly
The key to delivering great experiences on mobile (or any digital platform) is to better understand what your customers need and how they interact with different channels. This comes down to data, and the ability to quickly turn data into insight that goes on to inform your customer experience. Only by collecting, analysing, and learning from how customers react to its services can a brand create experiences that are truly tailored to the right people.
It’s equally important to ensure you can turn data into insight quickly. ASOS is one of the world’s most successful online retailers for this reason. The company uses Adobe Analytics to analyse its web and mobile performance and internal workflows, and to ensure decision-makers can gain access to crucial data in minutes. Not only does this drive faster ways of working, it also ensures ASOS continues to improve the user experience across its web and mobile sites.
The sales opportunity for brands gets more exciting each holiday season, and this year is no different. European consumers are expected to spend nearly 25% more this November and December than they did in 2018, and most would make all their purchases online or via mobile if they could. Add to this the rise of shoppable experiences on Instagram or Pinterest, and it’s clear we are just scratching the surface of what’s possible in the digital space.
Click here to learn about how Adobe Experience Cloud fuels moving mobile experiences. And visit our customer showcase to see how retailers across Europe are adapting to a digital audience.