Count On, and Plan For, Even Greater Expectations from Mobile Users

I’m hardly the first son-in-law to shake his head at something his wife’s mother said, but I could be the only one to do so as a result of hearing:

“How come I can’t stop my Angry Birds game on my iPhone and continue where I left off on my iPad?”

It’s a great question, made greater by the fact that it was posed by an 87-year-old.

Upon more thought, I’m convinced that there is no way that my experience is unique. Why? Expectations of mobile users, whether they are young kids or octogenarians, are increasing as fast as the pace of innovation.

Consider this:

Amazon says that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost the company $1.6 billion in sales each year.

And Google has calculated that by slowing its search results by just four tenths of a second they could lose eight million searches per day. This would lessen opportunities for brands and significantly reduce Google’s revenue.

The upshot?

Optimize for mobile, or else. Users look for top-shelf experiences. Under deliver and many will leave for a competitor and never come back.

Furthermore, employees also have unmet mobile expectations. According to several studies, including a recent one conducted by ArcTouch, relatively few employees are satisfied with their company apps compared to their personal, non-work apps.

How do we meet, or even beat, those expectancies? With more collaboration between marketers and their IT counterparts.

For an example of marketing and IT teaming up to top mobile users’ expectations, I’ll point to the JetBlue mobile apps built by POSSIBLE Mobile. These apps have received high reviews from users and are said to be seamless and convenient while also representing a huge breakout in an industry known too often for inconvenience and frustration.

The JetBlue mobile apps make traveling more enjoyable by providing the appropriate features you would expect from the digitally-minded airline. A joint production between the airline, ROKKAN, and POSSIBLE Mobile, the JetBlue apps offer air travelers a paperless mobile boarding pass to expedite the travel journey.

When you launch the JetBlue app on a smartphone or tablet, the first screen always has relevant information based upon where you are in your JetBlue travel experience. Booking an upcoming trip? Check the home screen for local weather and other destination information. Time to check in? Retrieve your mobile boarding pass directly from the home screen.

Unfortunately, the excellent user experience that comes with the JetBlue apps is not always present in the apps we download.

According to leading app analytics firm Localytics, about one in four new app users will abandon an app after a single launch. In fact, two out of three users will have deleted an app before their 11th session.

Customers value and demand high quality apps. When leaving a one-star review, 50 percent of the time the user mentions the app’s stability and bugs. When leaving a five-star review, 60 percent of the time the user mentions speed, design, or usability.

The differentiator for brands is best-of collaboration that positively affects business outcomes. So how can we get there?

“There is nothing fundamentally different between marketing and IT,” David Chan, Director of the Centre for Information Leadership at City University in London, told Computer Weekly. “It is about the culture of the organization. If the departments work together, you shouldn’t have a problem.”

But how should we collaborate? Thoughtfully, with minds open, and through the sharing of understanding across functional departments.

Of course, the mobile user doesn’t care how the sausage is made. He or she, be it seven-years-old or 87, only wants, even demands, a better and more personal experience.

It is vital that more collaboration occurs between marketers and their technology counterparts, resulting in fewer silos, smoother processes, and better apps that drive loyalty and sales.

As Forrester says, mobile moments are the battleground to win, serve, and retain customers.

“I think expectations of consumers in the app environment are very high, and if you don’t get it right, it’s so glaring,” Paul Sweeney, U.S. Director of Research at Bloomberg Intelligence, told Adweek.

Missteps are noticeable, even to old eyes. We have to do better. My mother-in-law is watching, and she is demanding answers.

-

Article first appeared here - https://possiblemobile.com/2017/04/count-plan-even-greater-expectations-mobile-users/

Persuading Mobile Users Through Innovation

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs said that innovation separates leaders from followers. Serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis says, “You have to have a big vision and take very small steps to get there.”

The pace is in dispute, but the need for brands to advance technologies and find new ways to engage with the near always-on wireless user is universal.

But how? And what shape does that take?

“If you have a real specific need for doing it and you think it's going to solve a problem, being an early adopter (of technology) is great,” former JetBlue mobile lead Jonathan Stephen told me in an interview for my new book, “The Art of Mobile Persuasion”. http://artofmobilepersuasion.com

“You are quick to fail and quick to being successful. There are others out there who think this can be an enhancement to an experience and maybe those are the ones who don't necessarily jump on the early bandwagon but they continue to see as the technology improves itself, that they will adapt over time and a lot of the kinks will have been worked out. Best practice would have been created and they would have followed those guidelines.

“It really depends on the position that you're in. If you've got the capital to do that kind of investment, by all means I always think that being an early adopter is fantastic but you have to be prepared to fail. You're not going to get it right the first time (all the time). No one ever has.”

Sometimes being second, third or later has its advantages.

WhatsApp, built by former Yahoo employees as a text-messaging alternative, is a cross-platform mobile messaging app that allows users to exchange messages without having to pay for SMS. In 2014, Facebook purchased the company and access to more than 600 million active users for $19 billion.

“I always use the phrase, ‘I may not be early to the party but I always like to make an entrance,’” Stephen said. “Sometimes there are technologies out there and I wasn't the first to get to it but I definitely want to make sure that I get noticed when I launched that technology. It takes a lot of thought. It takes a lot of strategy in terms of what is behind it. It takes a lot of humility to take a step back and realize where you will be successful and where you want there to go.

“There will be a lot of successes and a lot of failures. You learn that over time. But more than anything it goes all the way back to that business strategy.”

Credibility is more important than that new widget, something that Stephen thinks about each time that he walks into senior management with a plan and asks for resources.

“False promises is what creates contention within the executive level,” he said. “You don't want to change the way your business has been running. If your business hasn't been innovative in the past, if the goal is to take your business out of the 1950s and get it into the future where you become this early adopter - it takes an organizational change to do that. You can't force technology upon an organization.”

Curtis Kopf, who recently left Alaska Airlines to drive change at Premera Blue Cross has, has seen – and been part of innovation – in large enterprises including Microsoft and Amazon.

At Amazon, he was part of a hand-picked 14-person team in the U.S., Europe and Asia that scaled and extended “Search Inside the Book,” a discovery tool that searches and displays the full contents of hundreds of thousands of books from domestic and international publishers.

“Every company wrestles with this,” Kopf said of innovation.  “We all come from different places whether you are an airline, a bank, or Amazon.com.  I've experienced the spectrum of companies based on their business model and who they are have different comfort levels and appetites.

“Amazon.com is going to be a company that makes really big bets -- things that may not materialize for five years or seven years, even ten years. Other companies won't view the world that way.”

Everyone, Kopf said, has a place.

“There's definitely a continuum of innovation and then there are obviously companies out there that are category creators,” he said. “Clearly a lot of the companies that we think of innovators weren't first. Obviously Google wasn't the first search engine (in fact, 20 were launched earlier, according to Wikipedia). They just did it in the new and better way. Apple definitely wasn't the first to do a smartphone. They just did it in a new and better way.

“Innovation is talked about so much that it is almost become meaningless. Every company on the planet says that they are innovative. It's part of their mission statement. Obviously as consumers we all interact with these brands and the truth is that they are not all innovative.”

While he was leading change at Alaska Airlines, Kopf and his team had a broad definition of innovation.

“Being an airline we want to make sure since we have 13,000 employees, many of whom are not technologists, that people are clear that innovation is not just about technology,” Kopf said. “We define innovation as solving problems in new ways. Just keep it as simple as that. And then there is a range of innovation from incremental to disruptive.

“Being first is great. There are times that being first could be really important. If you can get it an advantage that you can sustain, there's some buzz and credit that you get from customers by introducing something first. But I don't think innovation in and of itself means being first. It could be taking something that someone else started and doing it in a new way.”

The paths are diverse, but the end goal for brands remains the same – mobile persuasion that drives sales, engagement, and loyalty.

(article first appeared at http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2015/07/29/persuading-mobile-users-through-innovation/)

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - South Park Says Freemium Is Latin For Not Really

Viewers of Comedy Central’s South Park know that there’s usually an underlying truth in a show that is heavy on satire. Mobile gaming got in the crosshairs recently with the program skewering app makers for a “freemium" modal that South Park says is Latin for "not really".

The show that the goal is to make the user wait but pay for not having to sit through ads and other supposed wastes of time. True? Yes in many cases. But not everyone falls for it. According to Swrve, half of a game's in-app purchase revenue comes from just 0.15% of its players.

Meanwhile, mobile gaming revenues are set to surpass traditional console games by next year: eMarketer.

An alarming 31% admit they have no mobile strategy or simply view mobile as a campaign, says a new CMO Council study. Clearly there’s more work to do in educating.

I'm in your loyalty club, but an offer via text at 6a has me thinking I made a mistake in joining. Heard of best practices and common sense?

Adult mobile users are planning to do 40% more holiday shopping on their devices this year, per study by Burst Media and Rhythm NewMedia.

Weird Al in ads is going to make us shop more at Radio Shack? I'm not buying it.

JetBlue says that it spends two-thirds of its budget on digital.

The iPad still dominates traffic among tablets in North America,with an 80% share, Chitika reports.

I lost zero sleep due to Twitter moving its status box. Others apparently sweat the small stuff.

Mobile will account for 31% of online sales on Thanksgiving, compared to 21% in 2013, according to Adobe.

How quickly things change - Samsung restructured its U.S. marketing team as the mobile division faltered. Is this marketing or product-related?

20% of all the pictures taken in the history of the world have been taken in the last two years, marketer Seth Matlins said at the 3% Conference.

Google & Facebook control 75% of all mobile advertising. Is this a surprise to anyone?

Over 2.5 billion adults do not have a formal bank account, per MasterCard. But more than 1 million of the “unbanked” have access to a mobile phone.

35% of holiday email click-throughs will happen on mobile devices, IBM forecasts.

40% of online adults start an activity on one device & finish on another: Accenture.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - The Like and Tweet Edition

Smartphone users check Facebook 14 times a day. That’s when they are not tweeting.

Anyone other than me think it was a mistake to bring the first new BlackBerry without a physical keyboard? Touchscreen is me-too.

It's not a T-Mobile contract - it's an Equipment Installment Plan. Wasn't this going to be dead simple?

In-app purchase revenue has hit records: 76 percent Of U.S. iPhone app revenue, 90 percent in Asia. Not just any apps - games.

54 percent of retailers see mobile as biggest growth area. The others are destined to fail.

According to eMarketer, Twitter will earn $308.9M in 2013 mobile ad revenue -- more than they earned in 2012 total, from any ad type.

An analyst says that the iPhone 5 got five times as many tweets as the Galaxy S4. Meaning what? Little to nothing.

IDC: tablet sales grew 78.4 percent year over year in 2012. They are expected to pass desktop sales in 2013, portable PCs in 2014.

Apple plans to triple the number of authorized resellers in India by 2015. That could coincide with a cheaper iPhone.

News that an Australian business is charging $5 to "fight" showrooming was trending but it won't create a trend. It more likely will put the company out of business.

From the Wall Street Journal no less came a feature on the Mets PR director it calls a "butt dialer" for inadvertently placing mobile calls.

JetBlue plans to offer fast onboard Wi-Fi free of charge. Hopefully that’s the start of a trend.

HTC is no longer "quietly brilliant" in its marketing. It will be louder. As for brilliant, we'll see.

Young Americans send almost ten times as many texts as Americans over 55. What's noteworthy is that the 55+ set texts.