ca. 30 Minuten
nach Wunsch auch mit VideocallWith the rise in mobile commerce over the past few years, the way in which consumers have interacted with brands has evolved considerably. It is no longer a case of asking whether mobile marketing is important, we know it is! It's now a question of using data to understand how consumers behave when using different types of devices and what their preferences are.
The need to do research on the role of different devices in your customer transactions in order to adapt your business strategy accordingly is evident. But how do you actually do it? What kind of questions should you ask yourself? What facts do you really need to know for your business in order to make the right adjustments? We are going to lay out key questions that will help you to come up with a better understanding of how the usage of mobiles or tablets has impacted your business at various stages – covering marketing to revenue proportions and return patterns. That way, you'll be able to establish and execute a strong strategy that is fine-tuned according to your customer's preferences and behavior.
Okay, let's go!
Step 1: Traffic
Online shopping with a smartphone has become a normal part of life. Searching, comparing prices, checking evaluations – most of these things happen on a mobile device nowadays. According to the last Demandware Shopping Index there is a world wide trend showing that mobile shopping trumps "traditional" online-shopping in terms of traffic. A large chunk of the actual purchasing process, however, still happens via PC or Laptop. This only goes to show how important it is to understand how your customers use what device during their journey. We suggest asking yourself the following questions in order to get a better picture:
- Which devices are customers using to come to my site and in what proportions?
- Which marketing channels are they coming from?
- How does their behavior (Average Pageviews, Average Time on Site) differ?
Step 2: Conversion
Once you understand the dynamics behind what device drives what traffic to your online shop the next question set here focuses on how different devices perform in terms of conversion. As mentioned above, it is highly likely that your conversion rate for mobile devices is lower than it is for Desktop – hinting at the fact that customers prefer to use different devices at different points in their journey. But how much lower is the conversion rate? If it is lower than the industry average it might be a hint, that there is an issue with your check-out process for mobile phones. The Monetate Ecommerce Quarterly is a good source giving regularly updated benchmarks on conversions segmented by device and media for large eCommerce brands. According to their research for Q4 the average conversion rate on mobiles was 1.53%. So ask yourself:
- How are visitors from different devices converting?
- Is my conversion rate lower than the industry average?
- How much are customers spending (e.g. Basket Size)?
- Are my customers buying different products / categories on different devices?
Step 3: Post-Purchase Behavior
The customer journey is not over once your customers clicked on the glorious "buy" button. Especially for the retail sector partial and full returns play a crucial role in the overall shop performance. Hence, you should find the answer to the following question:
- How many customers are cancelling/returning their orders across which device?
Step 4: Profit
Last but not least, you want to gain a better understanding about the role of device types in actually generating revenue for your shop.
- What is the Gross/Net Margin Rate on which device?
- How much profit are we making from which device in absolute terms?
And ... You're Done!
Congratulations! By answering these questions you now have got a full picture that'll help you focus on the right topics for your business, and get you some short-term and long-term gains. You can even use your minubo Mobile Dashboard to help you answer the outlined questions based on your customer data. We created a widget for each question visualizing trends in your customer data making it easy to find the answers that you are looking for. By clicking on the eye you can go into a detailed view to drill down into your data even further or you can configure each widget to your specific needs (e.g. switch to a different comparison period)
Be sure to re-evaluate your data on a regular basis – once a quarter is a good benchmark, but some businesses like to do it even more often than that.
Now it's your turn. What are your methods and tricks in conducting customers research for m-commerce? Leave your comment below!
