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1 How mobile leaders connect with customers in context How mobile leaders connect with customers in context Seven steps to master the mobile experience DEMAND MORE FROM MOBILE

How mobile leaders connect with customers in context

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When did you last check your smartphone? Minutes ago? Seconds ago? According to eMarketer, the amount of time people spend on a mobile device is growing 14 times faster than the time they spend on desktops.

But here’s the thing: mobile isn’t really about devices at all—it’s about people.

The mobile device is the medium for delivering experiences to customers that are relevant to the context they’re in right now. And it’s knowing that context (and acting on it in real time) that makes all the difference.

But how do you deliver the best experience to individuals who are on the move—and do it at enormous scale with huge diversity? It’s not easy, but it’s vitally important to the future of your brand. And with a mobile leadership mindset, it can become a reality.

In this ebook, we’ll look at the key characteristics of that mindset, and show how you can build a structure, a team, and a technology platform that help you:

• Target mobile customers with relevant, context-based content

• Create mobile experiences that build stronger relationships—and deliver better commerce results

• Use meaningful data to make your content more powerful and effective

• Plan for the future, with a scalable, flexible platform ready to take on whatever comes next

We all know mobile is huge. And it’s only just getting started.

“There are three billion connected people on the planet. The next billion will be mostly mobile only.”

–Harvard Business Review

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Mobile opens up a new world of opportunities, but taking advantage of them is easier said than done. Without the right people, processes, and technology in place, mobile can go very wrong, very fast.

Mobile has an execution gap

For many marketers, there’s a gap between what they want to do with mobile and what they’re actually doing.

While there’s a lot of talk about focusing on the customer, for most the focus is still largely on the device—or on a responsive, adaptive device experience. What’s needed is a real understanding of every customer in the context of how they’re interacting with you (both now and in the past), where they are, what they’re doing—as well as what device they’re using.

And that’s difficult to do without integrated data from every customer touchpoint—data that for most businesses sits in isolated silos today.

Mobile technology moves super fast

The bewildering pace of change in mobile technology makes it difficult to know where to place your bets. Today’s sure thing will quickly become tomorrow’s also-ran.

It’s essential to create mobile experiences that can flex and scale to meet new customer expectations without getting held back by old technology.

The mobile challenge

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Mobile is just one part of the customer experience

The reality is people interact with companies in many ways, through many channels, during the course of their individual customer journeys.

To completely understand your customers, and the paths they take on their journeys with your brand, you need a complete view of every customer interaction across every channel.

Mobile success is hard to measure

Multichannel customer journeys mean that mobile suffers from an attribution problem.

Customers may use mobile devices to research products or enhance their experience, but if they buy on desktops or in-store, how do you attribute the role played by mobile in making the sale?

And if you don’t understand the impact mobile is having—how can you optimize the experience to increase conversions in whatever channel customers choose?

Mobile piles on complexity

As customer behaviors have changed, a mobile functionality arms race has led many companies to deploy numerous point solutions (often managed by completely different teams) to try to keep up.

This has compounded the complexity in marketing departments (as well as IT departments) and made it even more difficult to get the single customer view needed to deliver the best experiences.

That’s why it’s essential to build a team to manage the ongoing mobile process, rather than having multiple teams managing multiple mobile projects.

The mobile challenge

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The mobile leadership mindsetWhile the laggards will see mobile as a channel and focus on the device, the leaders will understand that mobile is a consumer state of mind.

Mobile leaders won’t manage mobility projects. They’ll build ongoing process based on deep customer insight, smart data, context-driven content, and Constant optimization.

Think like a mobile leader

• Treat mobility as a process, not a project

• Future-proof the mobile process to easily incorporate new technology

• Commit to digital experimentation and testing at every stage

5 How mobile leaders connect with customers in context

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Think like a mobile leader

Put customers at the heart of the strategy

• Understand customer needs and requirements

• Consider how all touchpoints link together

• Map customer journeys to identify dead ends and conversion paths

• Integrate UX for consistent customer experiences

Apply a smart approach to data

• Integrate data from all customer touchpoints

• Know the relevance of all data

• Have a single view of every customer

• Select content experiences based on detailed customer insight

• Track interactions across all touchpoints

Understand the mobile context

• Deliver content based on customer context

• Understand how customer behavior changes during the journey

• Manage experiences as rigorously as you manage sales

Measure, learn, and optimize

• Analyze results at an aggregate and an individual level

• Use KPIs gathered from all mobile channels

• Constantly look for ways to optimize the mobile experience

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Start with the customer experienceEverything hinges on the customer experience, and that’s where your planning should start.

It’s vital to put in the groundwork to understand the context of every interaction with your brand and identify the experiences customers will demand, based on their history, location, and needs.

Then you’ll need to apply what you’ve learned to close the mobile execution gap—optimizing the mobile infrastructure, enhancing the mobile experience, and building mobile loyalty.

8 How mobile leaders connect with customers in context

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Mobile experience

Once the mobile web basics are in place, you can start to develop more effective mobile apps. You can also begin to use more advanced technology, such as iBeacons and location-based marketing to enhance the experience of customers as they interact with your brand at home and on the move.

The goal is to evolve to real-time, personalized experiences based on contextual data. So you can deliver the best experience to customers whether they’re on the move, in-store, at an event, or waiting in an airport.

Mobile loyalty

Once you start collecting and analyzing detailed, integrated data about your mobile customers, it’s possible to use mobile to increase engagement and loyalty.

When you know the customer’s context, you can combine location data with insights into past behaviors, preferences, and needs to deliver relevant, personalized offers and messages that prompt further interactions.

10 How mobile leaders connect with customers in context

1 Start with customer experience

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On poorly optimized sites, it’s barely possible for customers to even find the information they need, let alone find it quickly. Great mobile experiences (and great commerce results) come from giving customers fast, convenient access to what they need.

The first step for mobile leaders is to use their understanding of all the touchpoints on customers’ mobile journeys to make some basic improvements to the fundamentals of the mobile experience:

• Improve mobile discoverability: Streamline navigation and search and optimize the layout of responsive sites

• Enable mobile preferences: Remember wish lists and login details to reduce clicks and frustration with mobile web interactions

• Reduce mobile transaction friction: Offer one-click payments and highlight regular purchases

Mobile infrastructure

Planning the mobile customer experience

• Ask where customers are getting their information

• List all the touchpoints customers have with your brand

• Outline the buyer’s journey and state of motion

• Establish UX and content components

• Map the data flow to and from the device

• Collate all currently available data and mobile analytics to see what’s being used

• Highlight opportunities for real-time customer interactions

• Establish metrics that will demonstrate experience successes

1 Start with customer experience

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Mobile leadership in action

Chester Zoo, UKChester Zoo is one of the UK’s busiest leisure destinations, attracting 1.6 million visitors a year. That’s a lot of people, carrying a lot of mobile devices. But how could mobile be used to improve ticket sales, enhance the visitor experience, and promote the conservation messages that are the zoo’s primary focus?

1 Start with customer experience

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Phase 1: Mobile optimization

The zoo’s digital agency, Code Computerlove, used Sitecore to create an award-winning mobile site to deliver a great experience before visitors arrive at the zoo. The new site didn’t just win awards, though—it also helped increase mobile ticket sales by a massive 233%.

Phase 2: Mobile experience

With the basics in place, a new mobile app was created, also powered by Sitecore, to enhance visitors’ experience at the zoo.

The zoo’s mobile app provides visitors with mini-games and activities to enhance their visit, as well as up-to-date information on animals and notifications of events, such as feeding times.

The app also uses location-based information and iBeacon proximity technology to aid navigation, and Bluetooth notifications to encourage people to explore the exhibits and the zoo’s conservation messages.

Although technology is central to the app’s success (20% of visitors use it, significantly more than the industry average in the UK of 4%1), it’s also based on a deep understanding of the customer experience—in this case, during a literal journey around the zoo.

Phase 3: Mobile loyalty

So what’s next? Well, the zoo has some ambitious plans for driving customer loyalty through its mobile experience.

The zoo will use Sitecore to understand who’s using the app and why they use it. The goal is to be able to personalize content based on the motivation of the individual customer using the app. For example, by providing accessible information for kids or more detailed information for adults who’ve demonstrated an interest.

The app will also be used to engage people after their visit by pushing conservation messages, as well as incentives to come back to the zoo.

And, of course, constant testing will enable the zoo to continue optimizing the site and the app, and further enhance the mobile experience.

1 ALVA Benchmarking Survey

1 Start with customer experience

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Consumers are mobile in many senses. First, they’re mobile in the way they use different devices on the move. But they’re also mobile in the way they interact with your brand across many different channels, from web and mobile apps to email, social, print, and commerce.

With a single view of the customer across every channel you can see how mobile fits into their journey. But that means understanding how they behaved in every interaction with your brand.

By integrating previously siloed data from different touchpoints, you can begin to get real-time customer insights, regardless of the diversity of channels, devices, and geographies involved.

And when you combine these contextual insights with the sum total of all your knowledge of the customer’s past interactions and behaviors, you gain a powerful ability to shape every mobile experience—in real time and at scale.

If the knowledge of every email opened, every web page viewed, and every tweet retweeted is aggregated and analyzed together, it’s possible to build a complete picture of individual customers. And that means you can start to deliver genuinely personalized experiences, no matter on what channel your customers choose to interact with you.

2 Build a single customer view

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Your customers are mobile—across devices and channels—so delivering an experience that’s relevant to them in the context of where they are and what they’re doing must be a holistic process, not a one-off project.

When mobile is a project—rather than a process—data, experiences, and content (and the teams responsible for them) can become siloed. It makes it impossible to gain a single view of the customer and adds unnecessary cost and complexity.

Focusing on standalone mobile technology and content means you can’t interact with customers in a consistent, engaging way. Ideally, content should be created once and used everywhere, regardless of channel.

With the right technology platform, it’s possible to reuse content in multiple channels. It’s also possible to combine social listening with web analytics and marketing automation to ensure that all the content you deliver, on any channel, is far more relevant and contextual.

From a mobile perspective, app development often adds further silos and unnecessary complexity.

3 Don’t create more silos

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Many organizations also have multiple, siloed teams developing mobile apps on different platforms. So when an app needs to be changed, various teams need to be drafted to work on it. And the time and cost of writing, managing, and updating all this code can soon start to grow out of control.

Mobile leaders keep it simple by having one team writing one set of code and using it across multiple platforms. Plus, when these apps are supported by a robust content management system, it’s easy to separate the app logic from the content, so you don’t have to unnecessarily recode every time the app content changes.

3 Don’t create more silos

Introducing Xamarin

A key partner in the Sitecore® ecosystem, Xamarin offers an OS-agnostic application development platform for mobile devices.

• Write apps once in C# and Visual Studio and deploy in any OS as a native app

• Dramatically reduce development time—and time to market

• Compiled for native performance, your app will run faster and deliver the full device experience

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The traditional approach to mobile web design is to create responsive sites that just collapse content to shrink the page and fit the available screen real estate on the device.

But today’s mobile consumers expect more. Instead of relying on responsive web design, it’s time to rethink the entire experience for mobile customers.

That’s where adaptive design comes in. An adaptive approach allows you to deliver a unique customer experience based on the type of device being used and take advantage of specific device functionality.

Mobile leaders use a hybrid approach of responsive and adaptive elements to deliver great customer experiences that don’t just shrink a desktop site to fit, but are optimized for the way mobile customers interact with the brand.

They combine responsive and adaptive design with contextual insight to deliver relevant, personalized content based on where the customer is, as well as what device they’re using. And they can even adapt that content while the customer is in motion and switching between devices.

4 Don’t shrink—rethink

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• Easy development

• All channels

• Centralized updates

• Easy development

• Device-specific content

• Centralized updates

• Access to device features

• Device experience

• Access to native API

• Faster app performance

• App Store distribution and payment

• Device experience

• Access to native API

• Faster app performance

• App Store distribution

• Centralized updates

• Singe code base

Responsive web Adaptive mobile web

Platform-specific native apps

Cross-platform native apps

• No access to native APIs

• Browser experience

• Native UI

• Content re-use

• No access to native APIs

• Browser experience

• Native UI

• Device-specific development

• Decentralized updates

• Multiple code bases

• Additional development costs

Pros

Cons

4 Don’t shrink—rethink

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Mobile leaders use a platform that allows them to quickly add new devices as they appear and simulate the experience they’ll deliver based on all variables, including browsers, screen resolutions, HTML5, and JavaScript. And when new variables are introduced in the future, the platform is designed to bring them on board with ease.

When you no longer have to worry about managing the complexity of adding new devices, you can concentrate on managing the customer experience. You can deliver the right content, in context and in real time, to every customer—on mobile, or on any other channel they choose. And because you don’t have to bet the bank on any one mobile platform, costs won’t spiral out of control when everything changes.

Predicting the future with Sitecore

Preview emulators in Sitecore show how your content can be displayed on any new device using adaptive elements in the site design.

5 Keep one eye on the future

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Founded in 1975, Pacific Union is one of the leading real estate firms in the San Francisco Bay Area. The company used Sitecore to develop a custom Digital Listing Presentation (DLP) app whose custom iPad format helps listing agents win more business.

Agents can use a web-based “builder” to create in minutes what used to take hours: a compelling DLP in three output media— iPad application, web, and PDF brochure. The DLP showcases high-end properties with more high-tech polish. And that really means something in San Francisco, where technology is ubiquitous.

The DLP allows agents to impress a home seller with a great looking digital sales presentation that includes a comparative property analysis and multimedia-rich information about the real estate agent and Pacific Union. The DLP digitally illustrates the agent’s market knowledge and wows home sellers who are used to being given a print brochure.

The app has been instrumental in helping Pacific Union recruit real estate professionals. Since the DLP’s debut, more than 100 agents have joined Pacific Union. Many of them cite the realtor’s commitment to technology investment as one of their primary motivations for joining.

Mobile leadership in action: Pacific Union, US

6 Make your life simple

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You’ll know what’s being consumed, who’s consuming it, how they’re interacting with it, and through which channel. And when you can drill down to the individual level, you can really begin to turn those insights into genuinely personalized interactions.

It’s also important to take an integrated approach to mobile web and apps. If you build a responsive site separately from native apps, it’s almost impossible to get the single customer view you need to accurately measure mobile success. If your app doesn’t recognize that a customer has used your site, you’ve just lost a lot of valuable, contextual insight.

And you can’t measure mobile in isolation, either. It’s vital to combine mobile metrics with data on email open and clickthrough rates, social interactions, and commerce activity to truly understand the customer’s current state.

Once you know where your customer is—not just geographically, but which content they’ll be most receptive to—you can offer the contextual experiences that lead to dramatically better commerce results.

7 Measure everything everywhere

Measuring every interaction— on every site—with Sitecore

We know that building every site for every sub-brand on Sitecore might not be the right fit for some organizations.

That’s why we’ve designed our technology to be able to retrieve metrics and knowledge from non-Sitecore sites and integrate them into your Sitecore platform.

It means you can aggregate insights from all your sites and apps, regardless of the platform they’re built on, for a single view of every customer across all your sub-brands.

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Developing a mobile leadership mindset means understanding (and acting on) three key principles:

• Your customers are mobile in many ways—they move seamlessly between devices, operating systems, geographies, and channels. The experiences you deliver need to do the same.

• Mobile isn’t an isolated project focused on devices—it’s an ongoing process that’s part of a much bigger picture.

• That bigger picture includes every way you interact with customers—in-store, online, by email and print, on social networks, and in commerce transactions.

The companies that can shift to this mobile leadership mindset, focused on a holistic customer experience, will quickly outperform the companies that see mobile as a standalone channel.

How can you make the shift to this mindset in your business? Start by taking a look at “Mobile insights: Expert answers to 5 essential questions,” a white paper with the latest thinking from Sitecore Platinum Implementation Partners on how to create a winning mobile experience.

Time for a shift in mindset

Why Sitecore?

Mobile leaders don’t do silos— they do integration. And so do we.

Sitecore delivers a complete, integrated platform for creating, distributing, tracking, analyzing, and measuring contextualized, real-time customer experiences.

Sitecore gives you:

• A single interface to manage the entire customer experience

• Solid foundational data to support everything you do

• A robust content management system

• A complete view of how people interact with content on all channels

• An enterprise-grade platform, with a global reach, multilingual capabilities, and an infrastructure that can scale to meet any new demands

7 Measure everything everywhere

DEMAND MORE FROM MOBILE

Mobile insights: Expert answers to 5 essential questionsGet the latest thinking from Sitecore® Platinum Implementation Partners on how to create a winning mobile experience

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About Sitecore

Sitecore is the global leader in experience management software that enables context marketing. The Sitecore® Experience Platform™ manages content, supplies contextual intelligence, and automates communications, at scale. It empowers marketers to deliver content in context of how customers have engaged with their brand, across every channel, in real time. More than 4,600 customers—including American Express, Carnival Cruise Lines, easyJet, and L’Oréal—trust Sitecore for context marketing to deliver the personalized interactions that delight audiences, build loyalty, and drive revenue.

Sitecore.net

Published 02/16. © 2001-2016 Sitecore Corporation A/S. All rights reserved. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand and product names are the property of their respective owners.