While responsive design is a great first step for mobile, tablet and web customers, it fails to optimize for the mobile use case. Mobile shoppers in particular need a mobile experience that recognizes their intent, cross-channel behavior and location. Doing so can increase their happiness and more importantly, their revenue per visit and mobile-influenced revenue. This ebook looks at what it takes to create a responsive experience and concludes with a series of questions to help determine if going that route should be a priority.

1. 01
Responsive
Experiences

2. 02
Ever carry your laptop into the
store to research products?
Relevancy and Responsive Design
How about typing a
dissertation on your phone?
Would you do your taxes
on your iPad?

3. 03
Of course not. Context matters.

4. 04
The device — the very “platform” — you use in each case
depends entirely on what you are trying to do, as well as
when and where you are trying to do it. Whether you call
that “use case” or common sense, the point is, people need
the experience to match their intent and device. Adopting
responsive design may help a site look great on any size
screen. But what the users really need is a “responsive
experience”.
According to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive
on behalf of SOASTA, about 9 in 10 Americans associate
negative feelings with brands that have poorly performing
mobile experiences. Most commonly, they feel…
http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/topics/branding/brands-with-poorly-performing-
mobile-experiences-annoy-consumers-30528/
annoyed
75%
frustrated
69%
distrust
19%
anger
13%
disrespect the
brand
69%
with some also expressing…

5. 05
The challenge of creating relevant experiences for users
is a daunting one. The average business has a lot of
products and many different ways for visitors to find
them, including many channels representing thousands of
possible queries, campaigns, ads, emails, etc.
And while marketers and merchants think about channels,
cross-channel alignment and omni-channel experiences —
the consumer thinks about their goals
— shopping, saving time and learning.

6. 06
Manually creating responsive, relevant
experiences is more work than an army
of marketing pros could possibly do.
But we are in the era of the customer
and they will settle for nothing less than a
delightful, relevant experience, especially on
something that is their most personal device.
Against the backdrop of big data, if you can’t
present users with information that is relevant
to their immediate needs and desires, all
other efforts are for naught.
Google: 61 percent of mobile users are likely to leave if they don’t find
what they are looking for right away

7. 07
Responsive design — adjusting a user’s view of a site to
fit their desktop, tablet or mobile device — is becoming a
best practice.
For example, if you want to watch your favorite TV from
your smartphone, you want the same content you would
find on the TV, laptop or iPad. You want that content
optimized automatically for the device you are on, but
that’s the only response the site makes to suit your needs.
For many sites, responsive design makes a lot of sense.
It makes managing the site far simpler for the marketing,
merchandising, ecommerce and IT teams. After all, then
they only need to update one place for the change to
push to each and every platform.
Responsive Design

8. 08
But what about the consumer’s different use cases?
What about relevancy ?

9. 09
Digital commerce introduces tremendous IT variability with different devices, content, use-cases, browsers, platforms
and partners. It is logical to seek to reduce complexity so that digital experiences can be managed effectively.
While there has been an explosion of avenues for a consumer to engage with digital commerce, there has also been
transformational innovation in high performance, cloud computing and applications.
Responsive experiences can and should be delivered leveraging cloud applications that can be plugged into existing
digital commerce platforms — particularly the mobile platforms, which often serve as the consumer’s connector to the
various other touch points and where the consumer’s tolerance for irrelevant experiences is very low. The amount of
data interpreted and differentiation among relevant content delivered requires massive computing power that is only
available in a cost effective manner in the cloud.
Delighting the user without disrupting IT

10. 010
What if you built a beautiful
mobile site…where no one
could find anything?
Mobile visitors have even less tolerance for irrelevant
content than desktop or even tablet visitors. The reasons
why are simple...
They are typing with their thumbs
The screen is very small
They are multi-tasking
Given those challenges, anything that can be done to
a) reduce the effort for mobile users to find relevant
content and b) make the most of that limited real estate,
will result in delighted users.
Relevancy on Mobile
Responsive Experiences = Less Thumb Typing.
Shoppers typing 3-4 characters use auto-completions
for 12-15 character queries.

11. 011
Preventing Frustration for Mobile Users
A mobile user has far less tolerance for badly presented,
space-wasting, or irrelevant content, compared to
someone working from a laptop or desktop with a cup
of coffee in hand. It is vital to take into account the
context related to the device being used. When a mobile
user enters a search term, she might be seeking a local
store to go to so she can purchase an item, rather than
browsing to order something online.
In fact in research conducted by Google, adidas found
that 20% of their shoppers who used the store locator
on their mobile site visited a store
(a click they value at $3.20 each).

12. 012
What about the mobile experience in the store?
Over 70% of consumers use their smartphones while shopping and the majority who use their smartphone in a store
actually visit that store’s website. They are looking for product breadth, size, color and price parity. Only a responsive
experience can adapt, knowing that unlike the desktop or tablet, this consumer is physically present.

13. 013
What about mobile visitors who aren’t looking for a store
— they’re looking for a product?
Given the frustrations that can come from having to perform repeated searches on a mobile phone, users might leave
the mobile website in frustration before they find what they want, which is a huge lost opportunity for companies. This
means there is little room for error. A company presenting products simply must get them right. They must provide
results relevant to what the consumer is seeking, and do so very quickly — whether from an actual search or from
contextual or social signals the consumer is generating in their digital thumbprint.
When a customer visually ‘taps’ their way through a site, the revenue
they generate per visit, on average, increases by 25%.

14. 014
Your customers are cross-channel. Is your mobile experience?
Our research shows that a large percentage of shoppers browse the same ecommerce sites on their desktop,
tablets and mobile devices. These are your most loyal shoppers. You know them well and can treat them right
— showing them products they’re most interested in based on their past behavior and current intent.
Don’t make them jump through hoops — with logins and app downloads — when you can actually connect their
cross-channel behavior to personalize their experience on the mobile site.
50% of customers
who engage with a
retailer’s desktop and
mobile site visit the
same category page on
both devices.
34%view the same
product page.

15. 015
Is your mobile site a
palm-sized personal shopper?
What if you could use a cross-channel shopper’s behavior
to identify the brands, product categories, colors, sizes
and price preferences. You would have some pretty
powerful data that could help create a truly responsive
experience for that shopper ­­— showing them individual
products and groupings of products that could really
appeal to that shopper’s tastes.
That type of responsive experience turns a
smartphone into a personal shopper, guiding the
customer to their own curated products.

16. 016
Just changing the look and feel of a conventional website is not
enough to meet the special needs of a mobile user. It is vital to
be intent-aware in determining the content delivered to a mobile
user because of the differences in their intent, ergonomics and
size of the device, and even inventory in nearby stores.

17. 017
Learning Enhances Relevancy for Auto Suggest & Complete
In order to automatically suggest products on their
site for easier consumer discovery, eCommerce
merchandising teams typically need to create a set of
category structures and attribution tags that are mapped
to their guesses of what users are searching for as they
begin to type. The approach is time consuming, yields
poor results for the would-be-customer and fails to
learn over time based on the user’s behavior and and
an ever changing catalog.
It is very hard to improve functionality in this area
without a continuously learning big data application
driving the improvements. Why not learn from the actual
queries the customers express on the www, tablet and
mobile versions of the site in order to continuously
optimize the auto suggestions?
As for the results themselves, they should also evolve
to meet the personal behavior of the consumer, an ever
changing catalog, consumer tastes, as well as that
individual’s history and preferences, without relying
on manual tags.
The site needs content and context-aware
machine learning.
There is a 40% increase in RPV for customers who
engage Responsive Experience functionality on
mobile sites.

18. 018
The burden of enhancing relevancy for auto suggestions
and predictive search results is ideally suited for a
big data app with machine learning. By continuously
optimizing based on the interaction with its previous
suggestions, the right big data app can convert keystroke
data into a greatly enhanced user experience.

19. 019
The role of data in responsive experiences
By now, you’re seeing that data driven, responsive
experiences can improve the customer experience and
ecommerce revenues. But to truly leverage the power of
data, you’ll need to use more than just the data within
your four walls.
Consumer intent, semantic language, and social media
engagement are all expressed on the broader web, not
just your own websites.
Are you using big data from outside of your organization
to create responsive experiences for your customers?

20. 020
How can you tell if your site needs “responsive experiences”?
• Is time on site significantly lower for mobile than www?
• Is the abandon rate significantly higher for mobile than www?
• Are site search users on your mobile site converting?
• What is the repeat usage of your search functionality?
• Is mobile traffic increasing while RPV fails to keep up?
• Do click paths on mobile indicate that users are lost or frustrated?
• Would using your mobile site in your stores help the shopper in any way?
• Are you “learning” from user behavior - either with your team or with machine learning?
• Beyond learning, are you taking action?

21. 021
Responsive Experience in Action
BloomReach Mobile helps ecommerce sites provides responsive experiences that delight consumers and increase
mobile and mobile-assisted revenues. To learn more, check out our:
s BloomReach Mobile website s Case Studies
s Video demo

22. BloomReach created the world’s first Web Relevance Engine dedicated to exposing the best content on the internet to the right consumers seeking it on search
engines and social platforms.
BloomReach, Inc. 82 Pioneer Way, Mountain View, CA 94041 Contact Us
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