Does Your Mobile Shopping App Stack Up? January 2014 TABLE OF CONTENTS Sheryl Kingstone, Director,
[email protected] Retailers, Brands and Social Shopping Companies Face Opportunities and Challenges With Mobile Customer Retailers, Brands and Social Shopping Companies Face Opportunities and Engagement 1 Challenges With Mobile Customer Engagement Apps Win the Hearts of Mobile Consumers 2 Yankee Group’s Mobile and Connected Devices Forecast & Monitor, October 2013, shows the staggering pace at which mobility is growing: There are already more than Looking Beyond Download Data 195 million smartphones in use in the U.S., and that number is expected to grow to 250 To Improve Customer Engagement million by 2017. The figures for tablets are equally impressive, with the current base of and Loyalty 2 80 million expected to grow to more than 280 million by 2017. With the exponential adoption of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, delivering an optimized Putting Mobile Shopping Insight mobile customer experience is the ultimate game-changer. Successful players must into Action 3 understand and anticipate shifts in user behaviors, desires and attitudes to optimize the experience and seize revenue opportunities. Yankee Group sees four top forces Conclusions and Recommendations 9 driving further investment in improving customer engagement (see Exhibit 1): • New kinds of consumers. With 5 billion connected customers by 2015, influence, power and behavior continues to shift. According to Yankee Group’s 2013 US Consumer Survey, September, 60 percent of respondents say they frequently use their mobile device for entertainment, 61 percent say their phone is highly important to their social lives and 57 percent say they use it to stay up to date on the latest information.