Commentary

Going Mobile

We recently commissioned a study that looked at what online marketers say that they want to do … and then at what they’re actually doing. Some of the results were surprising; but the most astonishing piece of information of all was this: Marketers are slow to adapt to mobile devices and incorporate them into their marketing efforts.

In fact, respondents claimed that mobile advertising is a priority for 2013, yet nearly half said they are not optimizing emails for mobile delivery and viewing. Which seems to be just—let’s use the word—crazy.

There are a lot of reasons email marketing isn’t moving quickly into mobile, but the point is that, by not doing so, marketers are missing out on arguably the most important aspect of their jobs: staying in touch with and pleasing their customers.

Or, in other words, CRM.

One of the chief complaints of customers everywhere is the time it takes to resolve issues. To get back to them after they’ve sent an email. To respond to a query. That has always been an issue since long before online marketing, but the advent of mobile devices and their ubiquitous use has made it even more of an imperative. 

We live in an increasingly speeded-up world—in my book Chatter Marketing, I refer to the internet as working at the speed of thought—and our expectations have increased along with the speed. If a webpage doesn’t load quickly enough, we abandon it. If we have to go through too many steps to order something, we choose a different vendor. As we become accustomed to more and more speed, we start feeling that it’s a god-given, obvious right to have immediate gratification.

And who doesn’t want immediate gratification?

Certainly, customers using tablets and smartphones are looking for it. They’re standing in line at the grocery store, sitting in a park watching their toddler playing in the sandbox, taking a break between meetings, waiting for a movie to begin. These are people who have time available that’s measured in minutes, and they don’t have time to scroll across your website because it’s too wide to fit on their small screens. They don’t have time to look around the small screen to locate where the signup button is or the link to the order form. Websites and emails alike need to fit perfectly into the devices on which they’re being viewed for them to be useful.

And don’t kid yourself. Just because a customer has ordered from you in the past doesn’t mean that you’ve taken vows together at an altar. If your interactions with that customer aren’t ready for primetime on their mobile device of choice, there’s a good chance that your competition will step in to fill that gap.

There are some very simple changes that marketers can make to optimize their emails—in particular—for mobile; they’re mostly common-sense approaches to design and copy issues. Copy needs to be more succinct, more direct, the call to action clear. 

And while this all sounds like selling, it’s actually the best possible customer relationship management, because it’s doing precisely what salespeople have always done: made the customer as comfortable as possible. What happened to the adage that “the customer is always right”? Do we add, “except when we think it’s too difficult to optimize for mobile devices”?

No, we’re supposed to be where our customers are, in order to give them the best possible service. If a customer indicates that she’d prefer to be contacted by email and a marketer persists in calling her, what does that say about the marketer? That he’s about to lose a customer, for one thing!

Yet even when faced with the plethora of mobile devices that are being used by everyone's customers these days, 58% of online marketers are still not optimizing their websites, emails, and special offers for those devices. These devices are where they hang out, how they access information, how they communicate.

And if your business isn't easy to access and your calls-to-action easy to use, you can bet that your customers will find an alternate merchant who does meet those requirements. It's not rocket science. 

CRM and ROI go hand in hand … and these days, they’re going mobile!

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