By the Numbers: Why your market research strategy needs mobile

Editor's note: Dave King is executive vice president of mobile solutions in the Vancouver, B.C., office of Oslo-based software firm Confirmit.

If you want to gather meaningful insight from your customers, should you consider mobile an essential component to that plan?

When discussing surveys on mobile devices, many draw a parallel between the current rise of mobile and the introduction of online surveys more than 10 years ago when online began to replace paper and telephone surveys.

While similarities do exist, this comparison involves one major difference: the transition to online surveys was something marketing researchers consciously chose to make or avoid. Unless online was offered as an option to the respondents, it wouldn’t be available to them. If no alternatives were provided, respondents had no choice about what channel to use.

This is a different case with today’s mobile-enabled respondents. With the massive growth of mobile data usage you can’t be sure that the survey links you send out will be opened from a desktop. Many respondents will open the links from a mobile device, so if your survey is only designed to render on a desktop, the overall survey experience for mobile users won’t match up.

Therefore, in many industries, mobile has transitioned from a nice-to-have to a must-have in order to provide a progressive, comprehensive marketing research strategy.

For making mobile a successful component in your market research strategy, consider some of the following reasons why mobile can no longer be ignored:

Because mobile is everywhere. Mobile devices are proliferating, particularly in emerging markets. This allows survey creators to reach key demographics that were previously difficult or impossible to access, including young people, busy businesspeople and people in markets such as India, China, Latin America and developing regions of Africa.

Not only is it everywhere, but the reach of mobile will continue to grow in 2012:

• At the end of 2011, there were six billion mobile subscriptions, estimates the International Telecommunication Union (2011). That is equivalent to 87 percent of the world population. And is a huge increase from 5.4 billion in 2010 and 4.7 billion mobile subscriptions in 2009. 
• Last year, the smartphone audience in the EU5 (U.K., France, Italy, Spain and Germany) achieved a significant 44 percent increase to 104 million subscribers, representing 44 percent of all mobile users.¹
• The U.S. saw an even stronger increase of 55 percent to 98 million smartphone subscribers and for the first time surpassed feature phones in terms of new mobile acquisitions.²

If you choose to ignore the dramatic increase in adoption rates and fail to implement a mobile strategy, you’re going to exclude a significant customer segment that prefers to respond to surveys via mobile devices.

Because user experience matters. How often do you have time to sit down at a desktop computer to respond to a lengthy survey? If you’re not currently optimizing surveys for touch-screen mobile devices, are you damaging the overall user experience?

User experience should not be underestimated. Mobile must be personal, relevant and timely or consumers won’t engage.

As markets and technology evolve, and participation rates decline, gathering data from time-starved consumers is a real challenge. Researchers use numerous approaches for gathering customer insight – telephone interviews, face-to-face, Web surveys, mail-in surveys, roundtables and online forums, to name just a few – and all work to some degree for giving a company a look into the opinions and thoughts of its customers.

Mobile adds a new layer of agility that other research methods lack. For time-crunched respondents, surveys can be completed during downtime, while running errands or waiting for a meeting to start. Surveys optimized for mobile devices usually allow users to save answers until later. This feature appeals to users who will ultimately complete subsequent surveys. In general, user enthusiasm will be higher, since those who feel they’re getting more done on a device won’t see the survey as overly interruptive to their days.

Time isn’t the only piece of user experience; survey design should also be optimized for the mobile user experience. The wide variety of handsets, displays, applications and functionalities has generated a certain level of inconsistency, therefore it’s no easy task to produce a survey that will display in a similar way on the various devices that your customers are currently using. To ensure that mobile technologies can be optimized fully, companies should: use short surveys, a quickly-emerging industry standard; detect participants’ mobile devices in order to use the right display mode; show questions in a manner that’s engaging for the respondent.

Because it gives you more useful information about your customer. For companies that want to gain a holistic view of their customers, mobile research offers very specific benefits that allow businesses to develop a conversation with customers, creating a shift from monologue to dialogue.

Multimedia capture is an essential part of this. As companies compete to gain deeper, more relevant insights, photos, audio and video all offer new ways for customers to be entertained and engaged while providing rich feedback.

Geolocation, which enables researchers to determine where the respondent is located (with the individual’s consent), is another specific benefit associated with the mobile channel. This allows companies to develop more targeted location-based engagement opportunities and generate many useful applications such as customer segmentation based on territory, store location, influence maps, etc.

Another obvious benefit has to do with the ability to capture customers’ opinions in the moment, closer to the point of purchase or experience with less bias, recall issues and influence from the brand. For researchers, this can mean more accurate data, more truthful opinions and more engaged respondents, which translates to higher quality feedback for companies.

Another way of adapting

Marketing research evolves constantly and adding mobile is another way of adapting to that change. With mobile research, you must excite, involve, listen and entertain if you want to maintain engagement; mobile users will disengage faster than from any other medium.

While mobile provides many new opportunities for researchers, it seems that relatively few MR companies are actively incorporating smartphone-friendly approaches. Only about 15 percent adjust their online surveys to make them suitable for smartphones and many companies (approximately 30 percent) have no policy for smartphones. Another 30 percent are happy to allow participants to take their surveys on smartphones but do not bother to modify them.³

Companies that fail to incorporate mobile in the near future will no doubt be left behind, while those that recognize the worldwide adoption of mobile, consider user experience and understand the new advantages that mobile can offer will reach their station destination more profitably and faster than the competition.

References

¹ ComScore, “2012 Mobile Future in Focus” Report (February 2012) 7.

² ComScore, 7.

³ Tim Macer and Sheila Wilson, “Confirmit Annual Market Research Software Survey 2011” (March 2012) 11.