As a member of the Business Development team for Incentivated I attend a lot of meetings and events where I meet people who tell me why they don’t need to work with a mobile specialist and that when it comes to mobile they have it ‘covered’.
Whilst occasionally these objections will be justified and make rational sense, a lot of the reasons given show a lack of understanding of mobile marketing and what is possible.
The 10 reasons often quoted are:
1. Consumers don't like to pay for things on their phone
2. No one uses SMS anymore
3. Our site works on mobile
4. Our site works responsively
5. Our newsletter works on mobile
6. Our web team can build for mobile
7. Our digital agency has it covered
8. We only need to develop for iPhone
9. We don't have the budget
10. We already have an app
In this first of two blog articles, I hope to quash these and prove that more than ever when producing mobile marketing, it pays to work with experts.
1. Consumers don't like to pay for things on their phone
According to the UK Mobile Media Consumption Report nearly half (47%) of the UK have paid for something already on their phones, whilst 34% have purchased physical goods on their phone. These numbers are only going to go grow over the coming year as more people trade in their feature phones for internet enabled smartphones, In September Domino’s Pizza reported that mobile sales were growing at nearly 50% a year and accounted for a fifth of its online sales
It is not just the paying for items that needs to be considered, but the role mobile plays throughout the sales process and this is where a mobile specialist who understands the many ways mobile can help a business comes in. Mobile assisted shopping, whereby a consumer uses their phone to research prices, look for a deal or get’s alerted to an offer (via branded messaging or mobile campaign activity), is on the rise. Deloitte estimated that £3.5bn of retail sales for Christmas 2012 were to be ‘influenced’ by consumers using their phone at some point during the sales process.
2. No one uses SMS anymore
The text message turned 20 on the 3rd December 2012, and whilst it might be ancient for a mobile technology it is showing no signs of slowing down in its old age. Its simplicity is its strength as it is the only mobile technology that consistently works across every handset and network. According to Ofcom the average UK consumer sends 50 text messages every week and in 2011 we sent 150 billion text messages; almost triple the amount sent five years previously in 2006 (51 billion).
According to the same report text message is now the most-used method for daily communication with 58% of the population texting friends or family at least once a day. A 2010 study by the IAB found that, given the right incentive, 74% of consumers would opt-in to receive SMS or MMS adverts; and that over 90% of consumers will open a text message regardless of the sender within 15 minutes of receiving.
These facts show that messaging (whether SMS, MMS or in app push notifications) is still very relevant as a form of mobile marketing and that it is far from an unused technology, especially when we include the growing use of push notifications for CRM messaging. With over 10 years experience in mobile we have the required links with the networks around the world (the networks will only work with mobile specialists, not digital agencies) as well as having a number of off the shelf modules available for example, our push notification API integrates in to existing apps and allows a simple to use platform to send push notifications via.
3. Our site works on mobile
When someone says ‘their site works on mobile’ rather than ‘we have a mobile site’, it means that the desktop site loads on a mobile phone but does not crash. This is simply not good enough, as consumers have seen sites work well on mobile, so delivering an experience that involves pinching and zooming and fiddling with tricky buttons will only lead to a high bounce rate and push customers to competitors who have embraced mobile.
For a site to properly work on mobile, it has to render properly for that screen, load quickly and have a clear and easy to use navigation (no fiddly buttons), in other words it needs to be built for mobile anything else doesn’t work as it should. According to the Econsultancy Conversion Rate Optimization Report for 2012 only 35% of companies have a mobile site; this would mean that every 2 out of every 3 websites do not actually work on mobile.
4. Our site works responsively
Responsive design is only half the solution as all this does is repackage all the content so it fits on to a mobile screen. A lot of unnecessary data is also being sent (and downloaded) to the phone. The average size of webpage is now just over 1MB , when building for mobile we recommend pages to be no larger than 50kb to ensure that even on 2G connections the page loads quickly enough. People tend to give up on a page around 30s into loading time, so getting this initial speed up is key to building a successful site.
If the site is built using responsive design, the user is probably downloading a page 20 times larger than the industry standard for mobile. 3G connectivity can still be patchy in the UK (especially in a city where tall buildings and lots of users in a cell site can affect coverage) which means your customers could be waiting a long time for the content to load (not to mention the amount of data that would come out of their package).
Using responsive design is only half a solution, in order to deliver a great experience on mobile you need to ensure that the correct content is being sent to the device and that unnecessary content and images are not; this is why the largest companies in the world who have embraced mobile (Google, Facebook, BBC, Tesco, etc) do not use responsive design alone.
5. Our email newsletter works on mobile
Very few companies offer a made for mobile e-newsletter, where the content is repurposed for the device it is being read on. When people say it works on mobile they mean the web version appears on screen. They usually will not have tested this on all devices. Whilst an iPhone will deliver this content as it is seen on desktop a user will need to zoom in to read it while your customers on BlackBerry and some Android devices will see an email without images and have to scroll to understand what you have sent them.
Delivering made for mobile newsletters is not difficult, you just need to know how to do it (and that it is possible), that’s where a good mobile specialist should be able to help.
I'll post answers to objections 6 through 10 early next week!
And if you have any further objections that you think we might be able to address, please do get in touch
