Research by LogMeIn ahead of its 5 Strategies for Building Effective Mobile Engagement webinar here at Internet retailing confirms that consumers are engaging increasing numbers with retailers via mobile and that this mobile engagement has to be understood so that retailers can shift their business models to make the most of the channel.
The study of 5500 mobile shoppers worldwide finds that about 50% of the worldwide population engaging companies at least sometimes using their mobile device, and approximately 20% of people engaging often or all the time while mobile. This is even truer in Europe with as much as 77% of people in some countries using their mobile device to engage with companies either for sales, support, or both.
Channel of mobile engagement for shopping are also different on a per geography basis. The research, as a whole, stated that mobile engagement is about much more than voice interactions. Voice interactions, in fact, were not even the most widely used channel of mobile engagement – especially for commerce related interactions. The country by country breakdown reveals some interesting differences.
Email is the channel most frequently used though the contest is very close in the UK with 56% of respondents in that country indicating that they use voice calls to engage in shopping scenarios while mobile. For the other countries email wins by nearly 40 percentage points.
When it comes to live chat, the French are less likely to use it – perhaps because their preferred text-based method is SMS Messaging. Chat is used by a third of both Germany’s and the UK’s population for mobile engagement. Social media is surprisingly strong, except in the UK where it is only 19%.
However, while consumers are looking to engage with retailers through the mobile channel, retailers themselves have much to learn. Unfortunately the area where all the respondents – regardless of nationality – seem to agree is that the perceived quality of mobile engagements across industries is, frankly terrible, according to LogMeIn.
On a seven point scale, the best any industry could muster in a top-two-box analysis was a paltry 63%. No business can effectively compete when not even 2/3rds of their customers rate their mobile engagement interactions as “Satisfactory” or “Very Satisfactory”.
“The UK across industries does better, but it’s still not stellar performance. Germany and France are downright awful while Italy and Spain aren’t much better,” says the LogMeIn study. “It is interesting to see that certain industries do better or worse depending on the country in question. Mobile engagement with schools, for example, is far better in France and the UK than any of the other countries. Spain is below the line for the most part except for one highlight – Shipping and Logistics firms.”
One interpretation of these findings is that mobile engagement has a way to go. And while that is certainly a valid perspective, another way to look at this is that across every industry and across every country, there is an arbitrage opportunity; nobody is getting mobile engagement right so the first to do so can enjoy the spoils of victory.
LogMeIn has identified five key strategies that retailers need to adopt to reap the rewards of the mobile engagement that consumers are keen to have. And this is going to form the basis of the webinar on 17 June at 2pm. For more details and to sign up, click here.
