As a smart business leader, you’ve read about mobile strategies, you use other companies’ mobile tools, apps and sites every day — but you’re still not sure whether and how to deploy a mobile strategy for your business. Reaching and helping customers using mobile technology is a complex subject.
Luckily, analysts are collecting a ton of data on how businesses develop a mobile plan, how customers use mobile, and why you need to activate your mobile strategy now. As always, data comes to the rescue — and we’ve collected some key data points for you here.
3.4 billion smartphone users: useful customer data is waiting for you
According to the latest Ericsson Mobility Report, released this February, there are more than 3.4 billion smartphone users globally, with expectations that the number will grow to 6.4 billion by 2021, almost doubling today’s figures. For these billions of users, 86 percent of the average person’s time online is on their mobile device. Roughly 79 percent of smartphone owners are using apps every day, as well.
This is changing the nature of shopping. More than half of all e-commerce traffic now comes from mobile devices, according to information gathered by cyber security and intelligence company Radware, and mobile e-commerce is experiencing 48 percent faster growth than traditional e-commerce.
Clearly, every business needs a mobile-first strategy if they don’t already have one.
Look to the data to understand how to deploy your mobile strategy
Having a mobile strategy is the easy part, however; implementing that mobile strategy is where the problems begin. Here are five of the top challenges that businesses face when implementing for mobile—and what businesses can do to lessen the pain.
Challenge #1: Designing for Mobile and Desktop
While mobile dominates web browsing, the first challenge is that not all browsing happens on mobile; 90 percent or more of all users move between devices to accomplish their goals, according to Radware stats, and they use an average of 2.6 devices for an average purchase.
Your business can address this challenge in one of three ways: You can build a dedicated mobile site, use a responsive site that adapts to the device, or go with an app wholly native to the smartphone. The option your business chooses will depend on your business goals, budget, and industry needs, but a responsive web site is typically best for small businesses with limited resources. For firms that can afford it, a mobile app combined with a responsive site is best because apps give better performance and have more native functionality.
Those who don’t relish the idea of a site redesign or who want more control can always choose a mobile version of their site, but this requires more work without much gain over responsive design. There’s a growing consensus that responsive and/or mobile app is the direction forward.
Challenge #2: Ensuring Consistent Performance
Studies show that mobile users don’t wait; performance is crucial. When an app or web site takes more than 3 seconds to load, 40 percent of mobile users will abandon it, according to Akamai. Eighty percent of these people will never return.
E-commerce giant Amazon famously once reported that every 100ms delay in web application load time cost it 1 percent of its sales, which for the company would mean more than $10 billion per year in lost revenue.
Making sure your mobile app or web site performs fast is vital. The way ahead is taking advantage of content delivery networks (CDNs) that cache content closer to consumers, using scalable hosting solutions that effortlessly meet spikes in demand, and ensuring that average load times are short.
Challenge #3: Embedding Made-for-Mobile Features
Web sites built for laptops are ill suited for the mobile experience; even if a business uses a responsive design that adapts visually, it also must address the challenge of delivering the features mobile users need when browsing on the go from a small screen.
Making sites easy for mobile users means easy social sharing, simple payment, and e-commerce systems that don’t require many taps. Embedding features like one-click calling and directions within your app keeps customers in your app instead of having to use external options, which makes for a more seamless experience.
Challenge #4: Enabling Embedded Voice Interactivity
Most web sites and apps are built for clicking with a mouse or tapping with a finger. That’s changing—more than half of teens talk to (not necessarily on) their phones, on a daily basis, as do 41% of adults. Mobile users are increasingly demanding voice-based interactivity since small screens make it hard for complex navigation, and conducting business on the go is easier when not having to look at a screen for long periods of time or hunting for the right menu.
Making an app or mobile web site voice enabled is a challenge. One solution is building out robust in-app communications—both among users and for connecting them with your business.
WebRTC, an open-source technology pioneered by Google that helps businesses include real-time communications in their app or web site with just a few lines of code, helps businesses deliver voice interactivity without a lot of cost or work on the backend. With WebRTC, businesses can easily enable app users to talk with each other. Your business could use this technology to feature calls or even video calls to your customer service representatives as a prominent part of your mobile offering.
According to Tony Zhao, the CEO of video chat company Agora.io “Giving your customers the ability to quickly and easily visually connect to your business within your app or mobile site, to either ask a question about a product or receive customer service, greatly enhances the mobile customer experience. It’s no longer only something major corporations can do. There are now great, and just as capable, options out there for smaller sized businesses”
Challenge #5: Avoiding Network Bottlenecks
Up to 97 percent of mobile shopping carts are abandoned, according to stats by Radware. This is a chilling stat, as is the finding that every 500ms of load time delay increases peak frustration in a mobile user by 26 percent. It also causes an 8 percent decrease in engagement.
Yet, network bottlenecks happen—especially on mobile, where cellular connectivity can vary wildly from moment to moment. This is especially problematic for real-time communications like click-to-call and video, which plays an important role in mobile strategy as we’ve mentioned.
The solution to this problem when implementing a mobile strategy is ensuring quality of service (QoS) guarantees and making sure that all content and communications services are optimized for variable network connectivity. Good hosting and cloud service companies can provide QoS guarantees, and companies such as the aforementioned Agora.io can deliver reliable voice and video by establishing connections through their global network of data centers instead of using the less reliable public internet.
Billions of people are on smartphones, with more to come in the near future. If these challenges have been holding your business back from going mobile, it’s time to take them on and adapt to the mobile landscape or continue to fall behind. Defining a mobile strategy is the easy part. Putting it into practice is where things get hard.
But if you mind these five key challenges of responsive site design, consistent performance, using mobile features, enabling voice, and avoiding bottlenecked networks, then your mobile strategy can be a case study for how best to reach customers in 2016 and beyond.
What challenges has your business confronted while going mobile? How were they overcome?
