Mobile commerce is big. And getting bigger. It has only been six years since Apple introduced the iPhone, arguably the first shopping-friendly smartphone–though even that didn’t happen with the first generation. And today we are spending billions of dollars shopping and buying on our phones. Next up: Mobile Personalization!
“The runaway hit for retail this year will be mobile commerce. The best way to leave money on the table is not to have a commerce-enabled mobile site and application.”
-Mobile Commerce Outlook 2013
“Over the next five years, total mobile sales are expected to grow 33% annually to $31 billion [from $8 billion today], making up 9% of online sales in 2017.”
-Forrester Research
According to BI Intelligence, by January 2013, 29% of mobile users had made a purchase with their phones. According to Internet Retailer, Walmart estimated that 40% of all visits to their internet shopping site in December 2012 were from a mobile device. And this is happening despite the small screens and the often difficult-to-navigate mobile sites that exist today. Imagine what mobile personalization can do for this small screen.
There are a few retailers who are doing mobile commerce right. Amazon leads in this area. They not only save all your information and sync it across your digital devices, they also make checking out a breeze. And on top of that, they offer mobile personalization for your shopping experience, which makes for a very easy and pleasant exchange; you almost WANT to give Amazon your money.
But how about retailers who don’t have the time (and money) already invested in building an e-commerce (and m-commerce) powerhouse? How do these retailers take a bite of the growing mobile pie?
First and foremost, you have to optimize your website for mobile. Without a mobile-optimized website, no one will shop on your site using their smartphone. Everything else is secondary.
But let’s say you have a mobile-optimized website. You even have an app for iOs and/or Android. How can you rise above all the noise of all the other retailers trying to get the consumer’s attention? The most effective (and least disruptive) way to do this is mobile personalization: making your customer’s mobile experience as relevant as possible for him or her.
Imagine shopping on that tiny screen and you are immediately shown products that are relevant for YOU. You don’t have to try to fat-finger your way through several incorrect screens to get to the item you want. I would certainly be less frustrated and more likely to purchase if I didn’t have to spend my valuable time repeating steps just to try to give a company my money. This is what mobile personalization gives you.
Technology exists today to bring all the data you have together to paint a picture of each of your customers. Powerful algorithms are applied to these customer pictures to determine the most relevant products, offers or messages for each of them. Then if you have a mobile-optimized site, it’s just a matter of displaying the most relevant content in front of each customer. And before you know it, mobile personalization has helped you take a bite out of that mobile pie.
can help you integrate your data (and even gather some), personalize your content and deliver that content for display on your mobile site. Find out more!
