How To Fail At Mobile Marketing
By Matt Pillar, chief editor
We’ve been writing and speaking about mobile marketing a lot. The ubiquity of the smartphone, retailers’ healthy adoption of geolocation-supporting technologies, and the rampant development of retail branded smartphone applications designed to engage customers and thwart showrooming have pushed it to the top of the news cycle. A consumer base that’s hungry for mobile access to price and product data while researching purchases and shopping—and one that’s showing a rapidly increasing propensity to take the next step and make the purchase on their smartphones—only fans the flames. In its newly-released 2014 Holiday Retail Spending Report, CFI Group found that 70 percent of consumers have made a purchase on their smartphones in the last six months, up from 59 percent a year ago. Among digital natives, that figure climbs to 76 percent. Much of that m-commerce activity was seeded by retailer-initiated mobile engagement.
Mobile marketing is a manifestation of exactly the kind of consumer-centric commerce we espouse; figure out what the shopper wants (good deals and access to good product data, reviews, and recommendations), deliver it to their smartphone in a highly personal, relevant, and timely way, and in turn, consummate more transactions.
But here’s the rub, and it’s a big one. If retail back office and supply chain systems aren’t prepared for that last part—the consummation and fulfillment of the sale—the mobile marketing investment is worse than a flash in the pan. It’s setting customers up for disappointment.
The potential for mobile marketing success—whether a simple text-based QR code promotion to select customers, on-the-spot proximity-based offers enabled by beacons, or formal mobile loyalty and shopper’s club applications—hinges on integrated, real-time, and increasingly cross-channel inventory and order management systems. If push notifications don’t end immediately when an item is sold out, your mobile marketing initiative backfires in customer disappointment. If a promoted item is no longer available in stores, still available online, but cumbersome to fulfill due to a lack of channel integration, the customer experience is tarnished. When customers receive discount offers on their personal devices for products they recently purchased at full price—which happens all too often when customer purchase history data isn’t tied into the mobile marketing initiative—dissatisfaction results.
In a way, deploying retail mobile marketing is akin to putting the proverbial cart before the horse. In an ideal world, the utopian omni-channel retail management system of the multi-channel retailer’s dreams—or at a minimum, a channel-uniting order management layer—is firmly in place before product-specific promotions are pushed into the personal space of the consumer’s mobile phone. Text messaging has become a mainstream digital venue for personal dialogue. Promises made in that context are taken personally, and when those promises are broken, consumers take it much harder than they do when an item advertised in a Sunday circular goes out of stock.
The aforementioned CFI Group study found that more than half of smartphone users said that as shopping aids, their devices aren’t as helpful as they’d like them to be. That’s on the retailer, because all the compelling promotions and flashy mobile programming in the world won’t forgive a broken product promise.