In a previous post — Mobile Esentials, my 4 rules — I outlined four general topics publishers should consider as they develop a mobile strategy. In this post I’ll review the first five of my 10 Rules of Thumb.
1. Be careful with generic stats — People will try to talk you into spending lots of money on mobile by appealing to stats like sales of mobile devices vs. desktop computers, or total web traffic on mobile devices, or time spent on mobile devices. There is no question that digital habits are changing, but these things don’t necessarily affect your business.
Remember what these stats really mean. They include people who look up actress names on their iPad while they’re on the couch in front of the television, or people who walk into traffic while watching a cat video. This kind of usage is probably not an opportunity for your business.
2. Pay close attention to your own behavior on various devices — What do you do on your mobile devices? Think about that from time to time. Do you sort your email on your cell phone, but deal with the important stuff on your desktop? Do you use your tablet to check the weather (because it loads really fast), or read recipes and listen to Pandora while cooking, but you’d never fill out a form or do anything productive on it?
What is the benefit of each device to each task, and why?
3. Don’t confuse anecdotes with data — There’s a well-known story about the New York socialite who said Nixon couldn’t have won the election because none of her friends voted for him. You’ll run into the same problem with mobile.
Learn from your own behavior and listen to what others do, but don’t confuse that with actual data. Learn to distinguish the qualitative and the quantitative, and don’t allow your business to be ruled by your individual quirks, or the habits of the people in your office.
4. Get your own stats — You may have a huge need to optimize your emails for mobile, but your website might be doing just fine. Take a hard look at usage statistics. Divide your web stats by device, then …
- Look at time of day and the day of the week to see if your users are in the office or at home.
- Look at time spent on the site and average page views to see how engaged they are with your content.
- Look at your bounce rates.
Don’t get snookered by generic stats. See what your users are doing.
5. Go mobile in stages — “Going mobile” doesn’t mean you have to get everything perfect and then do a huge, comprehensive re-launch. There are lots of different things to do, and you can do then in pieces.
You probably don’t have one website. Even if you only have one domain, you might have several different functions going on. You have articles, forms, e-commerce and customer care pages. You have free content and paid content. And on the other side of the server you have content creation and curation.
Consider each of these things and do a cost/benefit analysis. Which one is going to give you the most return?
In the next post I’ll review the last five rules of thumb.
This series of three posts includes …