Whether we’re out to lunch or window shopping, mobile is playing a bigger role; it’s more than a distraction from your date or vibration in your pocket. It’s our tether to the world – from text alerts and app-driven push notifications to mobile-enabled websites and social media streams. And more often, it’s an up-sell being added when we agree to have our receipt sent to our email or our phone.
It’s an effort toward convenience (and “being green”) but there are certainly some considerations for marketers when enabling mobile at the point of sale.
When it comes to automation, sleep with one eye open.
Marketers know this in terms of automated marketing messages, but it’s also a key point to consider when you’re automating a transaction. For example, I recently visited an ATM and learned that emailing me a receipt is now the default action. I would have rather been asked for my preferences than told how this transaction was going down, especially since the transaction receipt actually defaulted to my spam folder.
Think like a sequential user.
How many times have you listened to a voicemail and replied via email? Or sent an instant message to someone before you call them? When it comes to mobile at the point of sale, you’re doing just that: taking a dialog that started in person and moving it into the digital or mobile space. The customer journey is starting with the smile behind the register and switching to the email receipt, return policy and plug for future interaction in the digital space. Marketers need to carefully consider the entire conversation, not just what is communicated in each channel. It’s about mapping the customer journey from an omni-channel perspective, mending gaps and making sure the experience is one worth coming back to. Unless you think like the user, across all the channels, your approach will have failure points in the customer journey.
Pad the landing.
If you’re going to send a receipt to my phone, make sure the receipt is mobile-enabled. Are you sending it as a text or as an email (that I’ll probably check from my smart phone anyway)? Does it read clearly? Do I have an opportunity to download a copy of the receipt for return purposes? One of the biggest mistakes in launching a mobile campaign is not preparing a mobile landing site. Whether it’s a single page or an entire site, if it looks bad, takes too long to load or lacks relevant content, your abandonment rates are about to jump.
Tapping into consumers’ lifeline is a bold move for marketers and one that comes with great risk because there’s a lot of transparency and the marketer has to find the fine line between convenience and annoyance for the consumer. But it’s possible to do successfully if you listen, get strategic and develop the platform with the same follow-through you’ve applied to your single channel solutions.
