Monday morning. The CEO just got an iPad and asks you why your company’s website looks so strange on it? And by the way, why wouldn’t the company website load on his Blackberry? Next, the CMO let you know that 40% of the emails from the latest marketing campaign was opened and viewed by customers on their phones. (Great news, right?) However, the links in the emails didn’t go to a mobile site, they went to the full site where mobile customers did not have a good experience. You’ve also got news from the Head of Retail that customers want to know why they can’t buy that wonderful gadget they saw on the web in your store? Like every innovation in history, the multi-channel world is a huge opportunity disguised as a bunch of problems.

What is this wonderful opportunity? You can connect your brand to your customers anywhere, anytime! You can deliver compelling customer experiences across many mobile touch-points to create loyalty and deliver results. Indeed, companies that address multi-channel well will thrive.

OK, so enough problem definition, let’s get to problem solving. The tenets of a optimized mobile strategy are multi-channel perspective, mobile usability and targeted experience design.

An effective mobile strategy is one which is designed to address all the channels, mobile web, tablet web, mobile and tablet apps and on-property. This approach builds on some of the fundamentals of your web-strategy. A whole bunch of business logic went into creating your website, so make sure your plan takes advantage of that pre-built business logic. Secondly, do an honest appraisal of your current staff. Do they really have the required skills or are you willing to hire those skills? If the answer to either of those questions is no, find a partner. This partner should have experience across all the channels, not just one channel you are addressing now. You want the stuff they produce to be reusable. The same would be true for internal staff, should you decide to do all the work in-house.

Usability is the key to creating mobile experiences that help consumers do what they want to in mobile. Remember the CEO’s BlackBerry? It has to work there too, not just the newest quad core LTE connected device. Make sure it is lightweight, loads quickly, provides the required functionality and is easy to use. It should provide a better experience for better phones, so don’t design for the least common denominator. The analytics you have designed for your desktop website should still be gathered but you need to think about mobile specific metrics.

Design each aspect of the customer’s mobile experience with target goals in mind. Your mobile web site is not a tablet website. Your full website is not a tablet website. Create an experience that is uniquely tablet. Take advantage of the screen real estate. iPads are all the same right now, but Android tablets come in many different sizes, with the most popular, the Kindle Fire, being a seven inch device. Look at both the portrait and landscape experience.

Design in an on-property mode for the mobile web, giving shoppers a reason to go to your site. Offer in-store promotions available only on the mobile web. If your business is one where customers buy the same things over and over, let customers built shopping lists that can be dropped right into their cart. Make it easier to buy from your mobile web than from your competitor’s store!

Next, you may want to think about apps. In apps, the goal is to take advantage of work you did for the mobile web, not just wrap the mobile web in the app. Apps allow you to reach out to the customer through push notifications. Apps make the experience more fun. While your email may not get read, push notifications are hard to resist. Apps have added advantage in allowing the user to access native phone functionality, like bar code/QR code readers.

Finally, let’s look at in-store kiosks. The goal is to offer the consumer a degree of self-service and the ability to access products not available in-store. After all, you don’t want the person who doesn’t understand why you don’t stock that purple size 2 sweater in three other colors right here in the store! Offer your customer the ability to check stock and buy from the ecommerce site if you are out of stock. Provide free shipping to the store. Help them make decisions so they buy what is right for them. Don’t you just hate returns?

Why did this all have to be planned together at the beginning? Because in mobile, every channel, every touch-point needs to work together to create an effective experience for the customer. A cart started on one channel must be able to be continued on another channel. The wish list they built should be available to them where-ever they go. Loyalty points should be automatically updated everywhere. Did I forget to mention you should make it easy for your customer to interact with social sites from all channels?

Multichannel engagement is the new frontier in ecommerce . The winners will be those companies who take the broadest view when establishing their mobile strategy. In this game, it’s not about being mobile, it’s about having a mobile strategy that fits with how you plan to grow your business.

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