What Creates The Distinction Between Customer Acquisition and Experience?
Mobile blurs this distinction.
Consumers do not think in terms of shopping on email or on their phone or from Pinterest. Instead, there is a continuous journey through all of these and retailers need to think in the same way. However, extending the idea of omnichannel to where there is one unified experience is easier said than done.
The way the Internet is structured in changing to address evolving customer expectations. This is exemplified by how the Google search engine is moving away from the static notion of tagging towards being continuously self-learning so it can understand every piece of information out there and to better give searchers what they want.
Mobile is driving much of this change.
Chantal Tode, writing in Mobile Commerce Daily (Oct 10, 2014) reporting on the Mobile Shopping Summit 2014 note that an executive said that retailers should build more unified offerings to take advantage of how mobile is blurring the distinction between customer acquisition and customer experiences. ’The world has moved and the expectations of the consumer has changed significantly and mobile has of course changed that,” Raj De Datta, CEO of BloomReach said. ‘It is a becoming a consumer-centric, mobile-centric world.’
As many of us, he also suggests retailers stop thinking in terms of apps versus the mobile Web, as each has evolved to serve a very specific purpose.
‘In a lot of ways, the Web has become the new customer acquisition channel, the app has become the retention channel – the use cases are fundamentally different. Perhaps the way to think about the app is that the app is the future of your loyalty program and the Web is the future your sales’ he said.
To get started on creating more unified experiences, unifying store and phone experiences, understanding that personalization has to span multiple devices as well as providing a single view of fulfillment and deals.
With more and more people using their smartphones to go online, to look at their social media, to check out the latest video and/or to read their mail and yes, actually making a call, it is an absolute that your integrated marketing core must be mobile friendly.
Mobile today in the world of integrated marketing, is absolutely important. It is the most important aspect of your marketing strategy this year. That is why we say, MOBILENow!