It’s no secret that the rise of computer apps is transforming both the marketing and customer experience. One of the most intriguing developments in app development is in the area of chatbots that not only can send communications to customers but also respond “intelligently” to conversations.

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Christian Brucculeri, the CEO at mobile messaging company Snaps, a developer of chatbots and other marketing technology products for companies. Brucculeri explained some of the background of how chatbots came to be, as well as their usefulness as a marketing tool.

“Typically chatbots represent a conversational interface between a consumer and a machine,” Brucculeri said. “They’re applications that have linguistic structure. It might allow you to ask a question and try to find an answer. They enable one-to-one communication between brands and consumers at scale, and they leverage technology in order to do that.”

Certainly chatbots have close technological relatives we’re already used to, like Apple’s Siri, Google Home and Amazon Alexa. You might call automated phone systems—the kind people love to hate—as a chatbot’s second cousin. But so far these are far from able to use artificial intelligence to understand language, and respond appropriately.

And while the technology can be used for entertainment purposes—think Snapchat or Facebook Messenger, for example—its greatest impact is potentially coming in marketing, Brucculeri told me.

Creating conversations, not messaging

“We work with brands across several industry verticals, including tourism, hospitality, entertainment, media, CPG, retail, quick-serve restaurants and more,” he said. “For example one apparel brand delivers a 30-day workout experience using basic Facebook Messenger. For some hospitality brands, they’re trying to manage their ongoing relationship with consumers and help them manage their rewards accounts.”

In many ways, this sounds similar to most apps we’re used to. So, what makes chatbots a different kind of app?

“Where chatbots get really interesting is in personalizing media and responses,” Brucculeri suggested. “Here, you can really do one-to-one marketing at scale.” Brucculeri said Snaps has developed such chatbots for sports teams, where a fan might receive notices of games, results and highlight videos. In the stadium, a chatbot might help a fan find restrooms and snack counters, based on physical location.

Brucculeri said Snaps is developing chatbots that function on a variety of existing platforms. Facebook Messenger, which launched a chatbot in 2016, may be most appropriate in accessing consumers, he said, but there’s also Kik, WeChat, Slack and many others, each of which may be experience-specific.

Chatbots also can be connected to customer relationship management platforms, such as Salesforce, to deliver notifications at the right time to the right person, Brucculeri said.

“We do CRM integration and user matching to log in and do account management,” he said. The result might enable companies to find new customers, engage with existing customers in a fun way, getting customers to take some form of action, or managing the relationship in other ways.

Improving the customer experience

Customer service, driven by artificial intelligence, also can be aided powerfully by such matching, Brucculeri said. Instead of hitting a bunch of digits to get routed to the right person, the artificial intelligence capabilities of chatbots—the two-way ability to listen and respond appropriately—can improve this experience immensely.

“A chatbot can do this in ways that are more convenient, simple, fast, and better for the customer and probably less expensive for the customer-service function,” he said.

The future of chatbots is an intriguing one, as technology evolves and as the bots themselves get “smarter” and more humanlike in their analyses and responses.

“We’re long on the idea that conversational interfaces will continue to evolve. Whether consumers are texting with or talking to them, automated systems like bots are almost certainly going to have a role in our future lives” Brucculeri said. “We see conversational media becoming the next wave and being potentially bigger than application media itself. I think in three years, people might be talking to bots more than they’re typing in bots.

“But the main idea remains the same,” he said. “Might I one day launch a chatbot on Alexa, Amazon’s voice control system? How about getting some type of visual element to go along with that, such as HoloLens, Microsoft’s holographic headset? Can these things become really rich experiences, far better than just staring at our phones and typing?

“I think some of the form factors are going to change, but I think the fundamental elements are going to be the same, which is conversational commerce. People increasingly will be talking to their computers, and they’re going to get a lot done by doing it.”

This week I had the pleasure of reading a new report from Smart Insights on the State of Digital Marketing 2015 and decided to dig in a bit further with an interview. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Dave or Smart Insights – Dave Chaffey is CEO of Smart Insights, a publisher of planning templates and articles focusing on Digital Strategy with channels on B2B Marketing and Marketing automation. The following is an excerpt from our discussion, I hope you enjoy it.

1) What do you think the biggest change to Digital Marketing for B2B firms will be in the next year?

I think content personalization is the biggest opportunity into 2016 for B2B Marketers. Most B2B service marketers know the value of tailored landing pages to drive traffic and capture leads for niche B2B buyer personas. Let’s face it, these options have been around for fifteen years – your question takes me back to a workshop I did for Siebel systems around then, before they became part of Oracle. We were looking at optimizing targeted landing pages through Siebel for different search behaviors even then before some of today’s well-known marketing automation services like HubSpot, Marketo and Salesforce were even established. These types of services and many others have made scalable lead generation affordable for businesses, but I often feel the potential for lead scoring and lead nurture through personalization isn’t being exploited as much as it could.

At SmartInsights.com, for example, our home page and member benefits pages are tailored by role based on their registration – so a marketing manager gets a different message and different content than say an agency manager. We setup our personalization rules in WordPress, but for marketers who don’t role their own there are many plugins and services to support greater B2B personalization, for example BrightInfo, Evergage and Marketizator to name three players. Again this approach isn’t new technically innovative, but it is underexploited. It is getting more sophisticated with automated content recommendations based on profile and content consumption – for example Idio can be used by larger businesses for this.

2) What do you see as the biggest mistakes being made in Digital Marketing by B2B firms?

The most common mistake I see is getting the balance of Content Marketing activities wrong. We all know content marketing is at the heart of digital marketing, yet often content marketing strategies don’t invest sufficient in the right range of content across the buying cycle and by content I am referring to our Content Marketing Matrix which helps businesses review the best types. The CMM also helps you think about the right balance of what Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner called nuclear and primary fuel. You need to invest in that emotion-inducing or shareable content that cuts through otherwise others who have made that investment will win across the channels whether that is SEO, Social media or Email marketing.

Then there’s content distribution… putting the investment into marketing the content you have invested in. Here there must be the right balance between paid, owned and earned media. Paid media, remarketing or retargeting through AdWords, LinkedIn or Facebook helps remind prospects about your services so it’s a mistake to miss this – it gives probably the best paid digital media ROI available. With Earned media it’s about putting the time into influencer outreach – it’s a popular buzz word, but few do this as well in my experience.

3) What one Digital Marketing tactic should a B2B Marketer adopt in the next year?

Simple – Retargeting using paid media as mentioned in my previous answer – if you’re not doing already it’s a great opportunity. If you are, there are new options available all the time, like the recent launch of the LinkedIn ‘Lead Accelerator’. You can review the options on our Content Distribution matrix.

4) What one Digital Marketing tactic should a B2B Marketer stop in the next year?

That’s tricky Paul, because we believe that any tactic can be optimized and most techniques can be made to work. If you’re not getting ROI from digital media that has to stop! But I’ll give you a simple marketing automation technique that any B2B marketer can apply – stop sending out welcome sequences that aren’t targeted, i.e. one-size fits all welcome emails. Since you collect the profile information of a prospect when they subscribe it’s a ‘no-brainer’ to target by role or vertical or need – whatever will give you the biggest uplift and different points in the lead nurturing.

Talking of Marketing Automation, we have a new survey on the opinions on Marketing Automation of B2B marketers in 2015 just launched. We’d love it if your readers can share their experiences and of course they’ll get the research report when it’s completed.

Whether you completely neglected to build a website for your mobile platform or there’s a lacking call to action, there are common mobile faux pas than can result in lost loyalty, brand following and even support.

No matter where you look, brands are all trying to crack the code of having a two-way conversation with their customers wherever they are – be it in-store, online, on a smartphone, on a tablet or on social media. It’s a constant struggle for brands to make themselves be seen and heard above all the noise that’s out there, especially when their “prime” consumers have minimal attention spans and are far less forgiving of faulty, uninspired experiences with brands.

However, brand loyalty online can be much more fleeting than it is offline. Stop and think about some of the online brands that have your devoted loyalty (no matter what sins they may occasionally commit). What Google, Amazon and Facebook all have in common is that they’ve built their entire customer experience across all devices and all channels around customers’ trust and respect. For many of us (myself included), it would take a lot to sway my trust, respect and loyalty away from these three online giants.

When brands commit customer experience sins such as excessively slow page loads, page flickers, and irrelevant messages and offers, the cost can be more than just how consumers feel about and speak of your brand. It can actually decrease their likeliness to click through a brand’s website or mobile site, and lead to a willingness to go to a competitor’s site. That is what we saw in the “Mobilizing the Retail Shopping Experience” research study. One of the most important findings of the study revealed that 39 percent of consumers would leave and visit a competitor’s mobile site if their customer experience expectations were not met. Meanwhile, another 23 percent would return less often if the mobile experience were deemed poor. If that’s just the scenario on mobile retail sites, just think about all of the e-commerce sites and brands that rely on the Internet to drive traffic, click throughs, newsletter sign-ups and purchases. Here are three secrets to help brands have a two-way conversation with their customers online.

Don’t treat every customer the same.

Smart marketers realize that painting their entire web and mobile audience with the same brush is no longer a valid strategy. With so much data available about a visitor’s digital behavior and preferences, it’s unfortunate that there are still brands out there with one-size-fits-all customer experiences. Say a visitor is sitting in front of their laptop on a Sunday night and while searching Google for Prada heels, this visitor is served up an ad with multiple fashion sites with a variety of shoe options that will make this visitor swoon. When this same visitor returns to one of the fashion sites, wouldn’t it be more effective to personalize and differentiate the messages and offers she sees? That’s the power of personalization: It not only gets a first-time visitor to click on a home page and navigate through product pages to the final “buy now” purchase moment, but it also gets returning visitors to come back repeatedly for multiple purchases.

Show and tell customers why you’re better and right for them.

While consumers may have been to your site before, they are not experts in every single product that your brand makes and what differentiates those products/prices from competitors. How is it that Amazon can offer millions of products, yet it makes customers feel like it knows the certain products that they may want either by showing products to others like myself who have already purchased, or similar products typically sold alongside the items I just added to my shopping cart? It’s all about being smart and attentive to the customers’ needs and preferences.

Stop talking and listen to your customers.

In this “Age of the Digital Customer,” everything consumers like and don’t like is being tracked socially on places such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. But for brands, the real opportunity lies in the data obtained from consumer interactions on these social media sites. By incorporating Facebook data into the entire digital experience, brands can develop richer, more relevant customer profiles and, in turn, be more personal and targeted in the messaging and offers shown to these consumers. That means the experience becomes more than just a social experience. It becomes authentic, meaningful and sustainable.

As more and more marketers are discovering, it’s impossible to think about any digital or e-commerce strategy without acknowledging the critical importance of the overall Hispanic population on today’s electronic marketplace. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 17 percent of the U.S. population identify themselves as Hispanic or Latino, comprising more than 53.4 million, or nearly one in six Americans. What’s more, the Hispanic sector is the fastest-growing ethnic segment in the U.S., accounting for more than half the growth in U.S. population between 2000 and 2010, rising from 35.3 million in 2000 to 50.5 million in 2010. By some estimates, Hispanics will outnumber all other cultural groups in the U.S. by 2050. In fact, there are more Hispanics in the U.S. than in any other country in the world, save for Mexico.

Just as brick-and-mortar retailers have recognized the growing purchasing power, shopping preferences and influence of this vigorous and fast-growing demographic, online marketers too are beginning to see the value of personalizing and customizing every customer experience to better serve their individual needs. So then I ask myself a simple but very important question: Are CMOS acting like mobile and social “agents” for Hispanic shoppers and giving them exactly what they want (i.e., online content, messaging, images, offers) in the right way on the right channels at the right times and places? It comes down to a CMO’s willingness and ability to listen to and observe what customers are doing online, what types of sites they are visiting, what types of keywords they are searching for online, their purchasing behaviors and the like. The failure to listen can have the most negative consequences on brand engagement, loyalty and most important, online and mobile sales.

Think in experiences, not channels.

According to the Terra Third Hispanic Digital Consumer Study by comScore, Hispanics have actually outpaced non-Hispanics in the adoption of smartphones, increasing from 43 percent in 2010 to 57 percent in 2012. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), 46 percent of online Hispanics over the age of 18 regularly shop online, compared to just 43 percent of general market online users.

Even more interesting is that Hispanics tend to use their smartphones to research and make purchases more than non-Hispanic consumers in every category. In fact, Hispanics are highly likely to leverage social, mobile and other online resources in their buying decisions, and in fact, are even bypassing the traditional PC-online route in exchange for the convenience of “always on, always connected” smartphones and tablets. As Walgreens CMO Graham Atkinson stated so profoundly at the Forrester Customer Experience Forum East in New York City last month: “Omni-channel is an experience strategy, not a fulfillment strategy.” To put that in simple terms, customers don’t think in channels; they think about the experience as a whole. Does the mobile site look like a duplicate, yet shrunken, version of a brand’s online site? Do the images and pages on a brand’s mobile site take more than 7 seconds to load? Is the brand’s Checkout button large and easy to find? Does the home page feel cluttered and make it difficult to find and use the search bar? All of these questions need to be asked when a brand is looking to optimize their site to be as informative, relevant and easy to use on mobile devices. If it isn’t, you can bet consumers won’t think twice about visiting a competitor’s site or even clicking away forever from all of your digital channels.

To be sure, Hispanics are not a monolithic and homogenous market. The group actually embraces dozens of different nationalities, cultures and identities, including about three out of every five Hispanics who were actually born in the U.S. As a result, buying habits and patterns may vary significantly depending on their country of origin and local community.

Oddly enough, relatively few mainstream e-commerce marketers make specialized efforts to personalize and tailor their presence across multiple channels to better serve the needs of this hyper-connected and demanding market. Some major sites, such as insurer Progressive, are setting the bar high in terms of creating customer experiences that are authentic, engaging, relevant and useful for mobile buyers.

While your site may be well designed for full-screen viewing on a PC, it may be difficult and impractical to view on a smartphone or tablet. Is the navigation practical? Are the products and options presented meaningfully on a small screen? Should you parse and meter the content differently?

Depending on the nature of your site, it may pay to invest in a so-called “responsive design” that automatically adjusts to the viewing device, allowing for a coherent experience on anything from a 4-inch smartphone to tablet, to PC—or deploy a separate, specially built layout designed strictly for mobile devices.

In addition, it would be smart to thoroughly test and experiment with your mobile presentation to discover possible obstacles, sticking points and other issues that may affect the mobile users’ experience. In the constrained space of a mobile device, you may need different tactics and approaches to ensure a seamless and frictionless experience. What works on the PC may fail on a smartphone.

People don’t engage with brands; they engage with a purpose.

Earlier this year, Gustavo Razzetti, EVP and managing director of Lapiz, the Latino unit of digital agency Leo Burnett, wrote in Clickz: “Social media has become so big that sometimes we forget to approach it as part of the overall marketing strategy. Successful brands have a holistic approach rather than approaching social media as a stand-alone tactic. We know that Latinos show a higher engagement with brand pages versus non-Hispanics. But that doesn’t mean that they will follow any brand. People don’t engage with brands. People engage with a purpose. And the most successful case studies are precisely those that embrace this approach.”

Now consider the fact that the Pew Hispanic Center found that 68 percent of Latino Internet users say they regularly use Facebook, Twitter and other social media, compared to just 58 percent of all U.S. Internet users. Perhaps even more relevant for online marketers is that Hispanics are actually more likely to seek advice and opinion before making a purchase, including both face-to-face and mobile and social channels. This means brands need to take ownership of what social channels they are embracing, how they are communicating and interacting with these tech-savvy consumers, and what purpose they fulfill. Otherwise, counting the millions of likes a brand gets on Facebook is just an empty metric if brands don’t, in one way or another, drive consumers to click more, read more and essentially spend more across multiple channels—be it in-store, online or mobile.

With more advanced personalization and optimization strategies, it’s now possible for brands to modify and customize the customer experience across multiple channels—in terms of messaging, tone and content—based on where the visitor is coming from, be it Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or another referring site. The result can make for a smoother transition between social and commerce, a low-friction journey toward purchase.

Never stop testing and learning.

Depending on a brand’s particular offer and target market, including a Spanish-language path for customers, may be worth testing and refining. However, you might discover that a simple language translation of your site may not be optimal; messages and elements that perform well in English may not work as well when simply recast in Spanish. It may indeed call for separate optimization and refinement. Should your buttons, calls to action and checkout processes be tweaked and adjusted for different language or cultural sensibilities? Only real-world testing can provide definitive answers.

UPDATE:  here is a page that provides citizens with guidance on getting the most of the Census website. Enjoy!

The Red Bull Wake Open in Tampa, Florida is the world’s largest Wake Boarding contest and they wanted to do something new and engaging from a guest experience perspective this year. So, after reviewing various mobile technologies they decided to partner Smartsy to incorporate Visual Recognition and User Generate Content into their branding and collateral to help make them more interactive and actionable.

The custom app was easy to use and built around Red Bull’s main priorities for the event: driving guest engagement, generating new content and building athlete awareness. To do this various functionality was incorporated that allowed users to unlock secret content from posters and wake board rider cards (think baseball cards for wake boarders!) that offered insider perspectives on the competing athletes and the event itself.

During the event the fans could also capture their own experiences and see themselves on the Jumbotron, which created a lot of good user generated content and buzz. They were also asked to vote for their favorite rider (electing who would be the official “Fan Favorite”).

In addition to that they could see content from previous Wake Opens, as well as share content over their social networks and follow their favorite riders on FB or Twitter.

Despite inclement weather at the event, held over two days in Tampa on July 5^th and 6^th, the app ended up with a lot of adoption and users provided very positive responses to the app. While Smartsy can’t disclose specific stats on the results, they can say that they experienced very strong voting numbers, sharing across social networks, content ‘liking’ and user generated content exceeded expectations, and received extremely high numbers of visual recognitions, especially on a per download basis. The feedback from both Red Bull and guests were that they loved the new experience and thought it was a really fun way for Red Bull interact with their fans.

Thanks to smarter marketing, better technology and consumers speaking out, 2013 just might be the year we see a real shift in how close customers and companies can really get.

We know the deal—people are spending, and continuing to spend, more and more online. Every year, Cyber Monday will beat out the last. Mobile and tablet revenues will continue to increase. And bricks-and-mortar retailers will scramble to keep pace with a digitally driven world.

The truth is, consumers are demanding optimized and personalized sites to offer them a richer, more relevant online experience. It’s no longer an option for marketers—it’s a must-have. In 2013, expect to see:

1. Testing (Finally) Becomes a Must-Have – Companies big and small have dabbled in this for a decade. But now, everyone has to get serious about it. Companies that don’t test won’t get anywhere near providing the best online experiences for their audience.
2. True, Real-Time Personalization, for Everyone – Now that this complex technology is made easily available to the masses, we’re going to see major industries like finance, travel and media lead the charge—but also expect businesses in other industries, such as gaming and charity, to take advantage of personalization solutions to offer more custom experiences.
3. Consumers Get Over the Privacy Debate – Because consumers are getting on board with personalization, they should expect to see more of the general information they share online used by companies. Everything from age, geography and life stage, incorporating social profiles (e.g., married versus single) will play a part in offering a more relevant, more valuable ecommerce experience.
4. Retailers Start to Love Loyalty Programs – It’s not just for frequent fliers anymore. Now businesses across industries (retail, finance, etc.) are launching loyalty programs—and integrating data into comprehensive customer profiles—to offer the next level of personalization and service.
5. Mobile Gets Personal Too – As consumers adapt to living their lives from their mobile phones and tablets, they’ll expect platform-specific offerings that offer a better shopping experience, geo-specific content, special offers and other elements that complement and enhance life on the go.
6. Responsive Design as the Rule – A site that’s designed for optimal viewing no matter which mobile or tablet device is being used is the new norm. Gone are the days of resizing, scrolling and otherwise struggling to view a site depending on the size of your computer or device screen.
7. The Rise of Cross-Channel Experiences – Consumers don’t think in channels, they think in brands. So a completely seamless ecommerce experience no matter where they are —at their desktops, on their smartphones and tablets, or on social pages and sites—is a must-have.
8. Companies Get a Handle on Big Data – Most businesses have an abundance of useful data, however, very few are using this data to provide targeted individual experiences at the right time to respond to savvy consumers’ needs. In the coming year, expect to see more brands getting a handle on this to offer customers more targeted offers across all channels in real time.
9. Social Media Grows Up – For far too long, marketers have treated social media as an island from the rest of their strategy—and, in turn, have not reaped any benefits of it being a useful sales tool. Going forward, we’ll see more brands using social data to personalize experiences on their websites, as well as applying testing and personalization to their own Facebook pages.
10. B2B Catches Up to B2C  – When it comes to testing and personalization, consumer-facing businesses aren’t the only ones catching on. B2B companies—and their customers—crave a great online experience too.  More and more B2B sites will use testing and personalization to create well-optimized and targeted sites based on user behaviors.

As a consumer and a marketer, I’m looking forward to getting online in 2013.

It’s predicted that shoppers around the world will have purchased about $119 billion worth of goods and services through their mobile phones by 2015. Which means, as a sales channel, it will either supplement or replace other marketing platforms—namely, brick-and-mortar store locations, online stores like Amazon and eBay, and/or standalone ecommerce sites. Either way, mobile will be instrumental in expanding brands’ reach and connecting them to new and existing audiences in a different way. But determining where mobile will fit in is an exercise in correctly gathering and interpreting consumer data.

Because mobile devices are an extension of each consumer’s life—set up and customized to their individual needs and preferences—they potentially offer marketers more personal data about their audiences than ever before. It’s a goldmine of information for the direction of marketers’ mobile strategies and determining where mobile fits in as both a sales channel and marketing medium.

So how can mobile consumer data improve sales and marketing efforts?

1.     Using data for real-time content targeting

Now that marketers have the ability to utilize CRM intelligence to improve consumers’ experience with a brand across all touch points, they can also marry this data with new mobile behavioral data. One particular application of CRM data in the mobile environment is a marketer’s ability to target specific customers with specific content in real time. That’s right, real time.

This approach complements how consumers are using mobile (on the go) and will therefore increase its effectiveness in reaching them in a meaningful and relevant way—improved brand retention, loyalty, and customer lifetime values; increases in revenue per visit, and a truly connected multichannel experience. CRM-based Real-time content targeting is the gateway to connecting with consumers, across any medium, consistently, and at the right time.

2. Provide a Consistent, Optimized Experience… Everywhere

Marketers must accept mobile for what it is: one of many channels to the overall marketplace. And consumers don’t think of mobile as a channel, but rather another means of connecting to a brand, whenever they want—wherever they want. Any personalization you might be achieving on the PC, must be reflected on the mobile site (and on social, email, tablets and so on…).

Aligning all these efforts first requires companies to consider how consumers are using mobile devices to interact with the brand, and how that will differ from the online or in-store interaction. It’s unlikely, for example, that a banking customer will want to complete a loan application on a mobile phone, but probable that she will use the device to check account balances or find the location of the nearest branch. Account balance pages, therefore, should be priority for targeted and optimized content offerings, which are consistent with those offerings among other channels.

Of course, different platforms allow for unique opportunities and shouldn’t be treated as if they are entirely the same—because they’re not.

3. Personalize all access points

With traditional web sites, companies have the luxury of using space to present a great deal of information across different areas on each page. But this luxury is not available in the mobile channel. Given mobile devices’ limited screen sizes, companies must ensure the right content is put in front of the consumer in the right format, the first time–without being able to exploit other test areas on the page.

Marketers can make the mobile experience just as customized and personal as it is on a standard website—and, along the way, draw in and win over customers. Segmentation allows marketers to capture behaviors and attributes about their web and mobile visitors in order to create content tailored to their location, their time of day, type of browser or operating system, or even their brand of mobile device. Another form of personalization, behavioral targeting, gets personal on an individual level: users can be targeted by previous searches, past purchases, the time of their last visits, and even their activities in physical stores, call centers or websites—to predict the next best offer for them in their buying lifecycle.

Any way it’s presented, personalizing the customer experience across all channels is an essential practice for a marketer wanting to be on top of the game.

The thick of the 2012 holiday season is here. And if you’re a retailer, hopefully you haven’t just primed your in-store and online offers, but your mobile presence as well. According to comScore, consumers spent approximately $37 billion on holiday shopping in 2011—up about 15 percent from 2010. And nearly 51% of the U.S. population are avid mobile Internet users, according to 2011 U.S. Census department figures. If we put two and two together, it’s safe to say it’s going to be a busy holiday season for eTailers, and their mobile sites will be no exception.

While mobile commerce stats have been rising for quite some time, many retailers have yet to nail its optimal experience. The quick fix of mirroring an online site for mobile applications won’t help here. The trick is figuring out what your customers need most in their on-the-go lives—and acknowledging that your mobile technology and strategy are only as good as the behind-the-scenes commerce ecosystem they support. Your mobile app or site connects the customer with the product, but its success can be greatly affected by several non-mobile factors—especially during the holidays (or other high-traffic buying seasons).

The gravity of factors such as product availability, shipping and delivery times, and seasonality are compounded in the holiday conversion game—online, mobile and in-store. Not only can you expect to see an influx of new visitors, but also previous customers who have switched from site to mobile shopping. And remember, they aren’t shopping for themselves.

This being said, waiting until the day before Christmas to test and optimize mobile promotions or discount offers is too late to start converting visitors into paying customers. However, there are a few checks and balances you can plan for now to ensure that the next few months bring those revenue goals that have been dancing in your head. In particular, make sure you aren’t making any of the following five common commerce mistakes (and if you have, fix them quickly!).

Forgetting to Highlight Holiday Sales and Specials

Nearly every retailer has an abundance of sales and products planned for the holidays to both entice your current customers and bring in new ones. Hopefully you’re planning to deck your site out in a fun, festive style. Are you planning the same for your mobile site?

Many holiday retail consumers use their handheld devices to compare prices and promotional offers. Make sure you are clearly displaying buttons and items within your mobile-friendly site and navigation bar that will lead customers to seasonal hot-ticket items, so you steal their attention before a competitor does.

Concealing Shipping and Stock Status

During the last-minute holiday rush, shoppers who are reassured their precious presents will arrive in time are more likely to buy—regardless of pricing wars. Take a look at your mobile site and consider how this very important holiday shopping information is displayed on both product pages and the purchase funnel.

Specifically in a mobile environment, the impact that font size, location, showing/not showing, color of stock and shipping status has on website conversion rates might surprise you. While no single stock/shipping status strategy is correct for all brands, don’t be afraid to test it thoroughly and make sure your consumers are fully informed to make quick on-the-go purchases.

Forgetting to Integrate Product Reviews

Shopping for others isn’t always easy…and the stress of a holiday gift doesn’t make it any easier. While not all of us are the perfect present pickers, we do prefer gifts that our friends and loved ones (hopefully!) won’t return. So when it comes to holiday shopping, product reviews can have one of the biggest impacts on customer buying decisions.

As we know, with mobile real estate there’s a much smaller surface to play with. But not giving the option of reading product reviews on the mobile site can actually lead to higher bounce rates than desired. Remember that mobile shopping is a fast, on-the-go decision—the more information you can give a consumer, the better. Look at your product pages and determine where a mobile-friendly drop-down menu or selection for reviews can go. Even just having an aggregated “rating” or “star” system placed near the product is a green-light indicator of a great product.

One caveat, though: leave the product reviews for the pre-shopping cart phase. Once customers have clicked “Add to Cart,” don’t distract them with information that isn’t focused on entering credit card details and hitting “Place Order.”

Recommending Products Based on Past Purchases

Behavioral targeting and product recommendations—especially in a very personalized mobile environment—are great ways to increase your average order values and your upsell/cross-sell opportunities, as well as keep your consumers loyal. You’re already expecting an increase in traffic and purchases with the holiday rush, which makes targeting, recommendations and segmentation both easier to achieve and a must-have.

But as holiday shopping ramps up, don’t forget: people are buying gifts, not shopping for themselves. If your targeting engine is set up to promote products based on past purchases made in the off-season, you’re wasting your time. Instead, target based on items they have browsed, clicked or added to their cart or favorites in the past few weeks. If your application or site allows for push messaging or email integration, follow up with messages around those products and/or promotions. And once again, make price comparisons and your sale items easy to find and navigate to on the small screen.

Poorly Designed Error Messaging at the POS

Imagine your prospective buyer with his smartphone in one hand and credit card in the other, precariously typing his card number, expiration date and security code with his thumbs. He hits the submit button and BOOM—no dice. An error has occurred; was it a wrong number? Wrong zip code? Invalid code? The real question is, does your mobile shopper even know what happened? Or is he just giving up, leaving you with yet another abandoned mobile cart to add to your analytics report?

Testing error messaging options is an important component for any site, but it’s especially crucial for small mobile screens. Most user-input errors occur during checkout, registration or form process. Careful attention should be paid to the location, design, display and wording of your error messages. If a mobile visitor can’t see or understand it, repeated frustrations will only lead that customer away from your site before the most important conversion of all—the sale.