By Dheeraj Pandey, IQR Consulting
Your retail store may have launched a mobile app or perhaps even a mobile site which is increasingly becoming significant for driving sales. This trend is increasing and increasingly most e-Tailers have started offering discounts on mobile transactions and inducing customers to download their apps. This trend will only continue and will accelerate dramatically over the coming years- this is very reflected in the app download at app store — In 2009 app store had just over 2.5 million downloads but in 2014 it shot up to 138 million downloads, and is expected to increase even further reaching 268 million by 2017.
In year 2014 for the first time Americans used smartphone and tablet apps more than PCs to consume content, as reported by CNN. Retailers too have started focusing more on mobile application development, and one can see them charting out a mobile strategy for themselves. Needless to say, mobile is becoming the primary channel of accessing content for many, and very soon it will become the primary channel of sales once the consumers gain confidence in the security of payment transactions over mobile devices. Penetration of mobile commerce is only growing and so is the transaction data and the opportunities of analytics in this Greenfield channel of doing commerce.
Advertisement
Mobile apps capture a lot more data about the customer transaction than the tagged pages of the web site, the data is far richer and opens up possibilities of entirely new kinds of analytics which were not possible earlier. One of the distinct advantages these apps offer is the ease of price comparisons. With the right apps, you can check the products you’re looking at in the store to see if you’re getting the best price there, whether you should head to the store next door, or wait until you get home to shop online.
A simple analytics of whether the customers are making price comparison, how much time they are spending on price comparisons can give valuable insights to the retailer. Integration of mobile channel with other systems makes it very easy to generate real time reports. Within seconds of user interaction, data gets surfaced in the report, allowing the retail store to take action quickly on the information available. If there is increase in demand for a particular item- the mobile analytics system can trigger the “stock up” option. The retailer can also track the number of users by app version, the screens customers are active on, as well as their geographical location.
Let’s take the case of a retailer who has recently launched some new marketing campaign targeted to specific regions to get people to install the app. It will be valuable to monitor the real time success in acquiring users, where they are coming from, and how they engage with the content of the mobile site. At a later stage the focus of mobile analytics may become deeper and might involve: a) Evaluating the success of different campaigns; or b) Finding out the best app design for the transactions.
We are just at the beginning of the mobile analytics revolution. The act of using mobile analytics to drive sales will be most successful when we are able to identify the users for whom the primary channel is mobile and then to market them in the most effective way.
Dheeraj Pandey is a Senior Consultant at IQR Consulting, a provider of data analytics solutions to retail and financial services firms. He provides analytics, business intelligence and quantitative research for the retail and financial industry, and his research on consumer behavior has been selected for presentation at several international conferences, including INFORMS (The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences). Pandey’s main areas of interest include behavioral sciences, data modeling and social media marketing.
