Mobile devices have become an indispensable part of our lives, transforming how we interact, shop and engage with the world. Despite this dominance, many brands struggle to create and execute a cohesive mobile strategy, leading to fragmented customer experiences and missed revenue opportunities.
EMARKETER & Airship partnered to survey 120 global B2C brands on their mobile strategy and identified three steps to enhance the end-to-end customer experience, increase loyalty and maximize ROI. Read on for an overview:
The Challenge: Fragmented Mobile Strategies
The report reveals that many brands are plagued by a lack of centralized ownership and alignment in their mobile strategies. Nearly half of B2C brands have multiple teams managing components of their mobile strategy, while only a small fraction have dedicated teams. Aligning goals and priorities across departments is challenging, and many struggle with a lack of mobile expertise. This lack of coordination leads to inconsistent customer experiences, which can harm engagement rates and revenue generation — the top two measures of mobile success.
Source: EMARKETER and Airship “Mobile Strategy Survey,” November 2024.
A staggering 90.3% of brands acknowledge that a fragmented mobile marketing strategy is a major obstacle to success. This results in missed engagement opportunities and difficulty measuring campaign effectiveness across platforms, which can lead to brand dilution among targeted customer segments. The consequences of a disjointed approach are significant.
The Opportunity: Embracing Coordinated Mobile Strategies
Despite these challenges, brands recognize the importance of a coordinated mobile strategy. An overwhelming majority are actively pursuing a more integrated approach.
Mobile revenue is driven primarily by ad revenue or commerce. Increasing either revenue stream depends on driving visits, which is impacted by goal alignment across channels and the availability of data. Goal alignment ensures the mobile experience is smooth for customers. If they’re looking at an email about a news article on their phone, for example, the link in the email should land on the page in the app or website that shows the full story or video. Part of goal alignment is ensuring availability of data. If a customer shares preferences on the website or email, those should also be shared with the app (e.g., email newsletter preferences can be used to personalize in-session content on the website).
Many brands are leaning on customer experience teams to create organizational alignment. These brands are more likely to be mobile-forward. Over half (51.6%) of brands with dedicated customer experience teams have designed the experience around mobile devices, compared with 19.7% of those without dedicated teams. Brands that prioritize customer experience in their mobile strategy are more likely to see improved customer satisfaction and business results.
Key Steps to Achieve a Coordinated Mobile Experience
Orchestrate the Customer Journey: Brands should create seamless customer journeys across all mobile touchpoints, designed to accelerate time to value. This can be achieved by organizing mobile strategy and design, and creating shared objectives. It also includes coordinating experiences between web and app, and across channels, to reduce noise and create the unified experiences customers demand.
Capture Customer Preferences: Enhancing customer understanding through a combination of zero- and first-party data is crucial for personalization. Gathering zero-party data can unlock richer personalization, with customers spending on average 38% more when their experience is personalized. Additionally, brands using zero-party data see a lift in open rates and purchase frequency, according to Airship customer research.
Secure Owned Channel Opt-In: To combat rising customer acquisition costs, brands should focus on reducing paid media spend and converting existing customers to owned channels. With owned channels, brands have direct access to communicate with customers. And when customers are opted-in, they are more engaged with the brand and have higher conversion rates. For retailers, opted-in customers convert from browse to checkout more frequently and make 13-39% more purchases. For non-retailers, opt-in is equally as valuable. Opted-in customers return to the app more frequently and they convert more often (e.g., listing an item for sale or viewing an ad).
A Coordinated Mobile Strategy is Table Stakes
A well-defined mobile strategy is no longer a luxury but a necessity. Brands that fail to prioritize mobile will fall further behind the competition. By unifying mobile strategy ownership, aligning the organization around common goals, investing in the right data collection tools and focusing on customer experience, brands can improve customer satisfaction, drive business results and thrive. Now is the time to put a robust and coordinated mobile strategy in place.
Originally published on airship.com.