Keeping mobile consumers happy is becoming increasingly important, as Yahoo! and Kenshoo recently released new consumer research showing 44 percent of mobile phone users and 50 percent of tablet users are disappointed when a company’s website isn’t optimized for their device.
Edwin Wong, Senior Director of B2B Insights at Yahoo, says consumers are increasingly using all three screens (mobile, tablet and PC) as part of the purchase path, and that 88 percent of smartphone users and 82 percent of tablet users go back to their PCs complete the shopping experience.
“Across every single category vertical, mobile shopping has vastly grown in the past year. While the 
consumer might start on mobile during the shopping process, the large majority go back to PC to do more shopping,” Wong says.
According to the research report, 75 percent of consumers search on their tablets and smartphones for purchase-related information. However, during the 2013 holiday shopping season, when retailers allocated 34 percent of their paid search dollars to mobile devices, only four percent of revenues were attributed back to smartphones.
With 84 percent using a mobile device for shopping at home and 75 percent of mobile shoppers doing more research at home after visiting a store, the need for retargeting across devices is greater than ever.
What marketers are missing
Yahoo! and Kenshoo’s report says that 19 percent of marketers feel their organizations are behind consumer trends when it comes to mobile.
“For the shopping process, mobile is about being an easy access, always-on, constant connection to content. It’s thinking through the purchase process of consumers that marketers need to pay attention to. For marketers, there’s a lot of opportunity to think about the device and the role it plays in the purchase process and how to think through that connection to consumers,” Wong says.
“We’re still in the very early stages of mobile shopping, so I think that as marketers and publishers get smarter with data and retargeting, they will be able to close the deal much more quickly,” he says.
As it currently stands, most marketers aren’t thinking about devices in terms of developing specific keywords or writing specific ad copy that addresses that middle-of-the-funnel consumer, and marketers will need to think through how consumers are using these platforms, Wong says.
“I’m curious to see as marketers get much smarter in engaging the consumer on mobile, will they close deals much quicker because they are delivering the value. Instead of just creating a conversion, they will need to create a connection that gets the conversion,” he says.
Retargeting across devices is also becoming a more critical part of the multi-device marketing equation. The purchasing cycle is elongated because of the mobile device, but that means marketers really need to engage consumers over time through retargeting.
Consumers want consistency
When consumers visit brand sites, two-fifths of them say that if the experience isn’t optimized for their device, it’s going to disappoint them to the degree that they might not visit the site again.
“They’re very disappointed in sites that aren’t thinking about the device. We’re starting to see mobile as more mid-funnel, we need to be optimizing those experiences so that it’s not just a shopping cart that we get the consumer to,” Wong says.
By taking cross-device marketing into account and tying it into marketing plans from the beginning, marketers can get ahead of the competition.
“Digital time spent is outpacing time spent watching TV, and these online platforms give us the opportunity to engage consumers in a much smarter way. It forces us to rethink how and why these platforms are being used, and that’s a good thing,” Wong says.
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