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4 ways to leverage mobile to better connect with customers

If you imagine your mobile-optimized website as one of the doors to your business—and you’re like most retailers—more people walk in that door than any other to your business.

August 5, 2016

By Peter McLachlan

If you imagine your mobile-optimized website as one of the doors to your business — and you're like most retailers — more people walk in that door than any other.

Mobile is the busiest storefront for most retailers today, as people spend 51 percent of their time online on mobile devices.

Our smartphones and tablets are our most intimate and personal devices and our constant companions. Pew Research Center reports 90 percent of cellphone owners carry devices for large portions of their day. Given the shorter attention spans of today's customers, these dynamics have completely redefined how they move through the sales funnel.

On their first visit to an online retail site, 16 percent of consumers skip stages—leaping directly from awareness to purchase—and almost 30 percent enter mid-funnel, fresh from purchasing on another site or from a link on social media.

In this environment, where strategic omnichannel marketing is more important than ever, smart retailers are paying close attention to how the mobile journey influences purchasing decisions.

Incorporating mobile into retail

Mobile can improve the customer experience in a variety of ways. Using mobile, retailers can help customers accomplish goals faster and help them find what they'e looking for more easily.

What's more, you can surprise and delight them with a seamless experience that recognizes past shopping behavior. The ability to leverage individualized data allows you to reward repeat customers with customized content and targeted promotions via mobile.

Here are four ways retailers can incorporate mobile into the consumer's online retail experience to provide a consistent brand voice across all channels.

1. Invest in systems to track digital influence on in-store sales. Whether building your own or partnering with a solution provider, consider investing in systems that will help you understand the kind of influence your digital marketing spend and digital properties are having on in-store sales. From location analytics to e-receipts to in-store analytics, these systems are getting steadily less expensive and less risky to deploy.

Nordstrom, for example, invested millions in its digital platforms to improve customer engagement by providing online inventory, loyalty program tools, and opt-ins for sale notifications. And its efforts paid off—20 percent of the retailer’s total sales are now generated online.

2. Support customers' in-store goals with mobile. Your brand's mobile experience should also support your customers' goals in brick-and-mortar stores. If you know what they're looking for, use mobile to suggest other useful items they might purchase. If not, make inventory browsing simple to help them find what they're looking for—you can even direct them to the right place with a virtual floor plan.

Context is everything on mobile, so it's important to understand when a customer is browsing in your store as opposed to at home on the couch. With 48 percent of smartphone users researching product data while in store, you can't afford not to assist them in the process.

3. Reach out with valuable information. Actively reach out to customers with information you know they would find valuable. If someone is in the mall on a Saturday afternoon, it's a good time to let him know the item left in his cart is available at the store within the mall and can be picked up without paying for shipping.

Push notifications on mobile devices provide an avenue of communication that wasn’'t previously available. These notifications can even include a link to complete the sale on the mobile device to streamline the process for both the customer and your retail employees.

4. Get personal. Mobile phones are deeply personal, making beacon technology and apps great ways to greet customers who opt in by name.

A recent study found that while nearly half of consumers don't want to share personal information and 62 percent don't want their locations tracked, nearly as many say they want offers tailored to their needs or targeted geographically. So don't be creepy—make sure you get permission to use beacons, and explain what you will do with the information you collect and how you'll protect your customers’ privacy.

People crave relationships with their brands of choice, and building relationships means altering your actions and behavior based on whom you're interacting with. Because a customer's digital identity essentially manifests through his or her mobile device, it should be the retailer's primary communication channel.

Mobile devices provide the type of rich contextual data and personal connections brands could only once dream about. This means marketing with mobile is practically mandatory—a no-brainer, if there ever was one—and retailers who best leverage this technology today stand to see the most growth and revenue tomorrow.

Peter McLachlan is the co-founder and chief product officer at Mobify, a mobile customer engagement platform. He has grown the company from a three-person startup to a 150-person organization with offices in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K.