It’s been declared “The Year of Mobile” for so many years that we’ve forgotten what it means, but it’s time to call it. The industry has revolutionized and the dust has cleared. Mobile commerce sales have tripled since 2012. That’s 30 percent of all e commerce sales, and it’s expected to rise to 43 percent of all e commerce sales by 2019 — which means a brave new world for retailers.
Companies need to figure out how best to meet the needs of customers who want the ease of buying goods and services on their phones — and that means deciding whether to throw your spend behind optimizing your mobile website or investing budget in creating a branded mobile app.
The argument was that not only are apps faster and easier for users, but they keep customers loyal to your brand. When a customer has an app for a specific category, it was argued they were more likely to stick with it rather than download and use others.
Recent research shows that apps aren’t hogging the spotlight quite as much as their evangelists would have liked you to believe. When you dig deeper into stats about app usage on phones, it turns out that 8 out of every 10 minutes a user spends in apps on their mobile device is dedicated to their three favorite apps. Mobile web is actually driving two times the site traffic of apps, and only 20 to 30 percent of a retailer’s mobile sales come from their app.
Once you’ve got an app on a customer’s phone, you’ve got the home screen advantage. Convenience, speed, and stored settings top the benefits that consumers list for apps, followed by incentives/rewards, personalized content, and access to “better deals.”
Apps improve direct marketing access, which, when used thoughtfully — via notifications for location-based deals, sales, discounts, and coupons — can dramatically increase conversions.
There are a wide variety of reasons to create a slick mobile site, and most of them are driven by discovery.
60 percent of consumers use the mobile web exclusively to search for information to inform their purchasing decisions.
Mobile devices drive local searches. 80 percent of “nearby” searches happen on mobile devices, “near me” searches have grown by 33x in the last four years, and 88 percent of mobile users search for local information from their devices. Mobile users actively search for local business information, and search engines focus on ensuring local searches are as relevant as possible.
The debate rages on: mobile web versus mobile app. When you drill down, it comes down to the best way to support casual users, loyal users, and users who haven’t yet found you.
Courtesy of VentureBeat
