Mobile Marketing After the Smartphone Crossover

Something crossed over in 2011 that hadn’t crossed over before: Nielsen reported that smartphones outsold feature phones among US consumers for the first time that year, which meant the phone in a typical customer’s pocket had gone, within a few years, from a device that mostly made calls to one that browsed, searched and increasingly bought. That crossover is why mobile stopped being reasonably describable as “one more channel” and started being closer to a second, parallel context that marketing had to work inside, whether a business had planned for it or not.

The practical case for taking that seriously comes down to what people are doing on those phones. Mobile web browsing and mobile search had both been growing quickly through 2010 and into 2011, driven by the iPhone and the rapidly expanding range of Android devices, and a meaningful share of that search traffic already carried local intent, someone looking for a business nearby, right now, rather than researching generally. A business whose site loaded slowly or displayed badly on a phone screen wasn’t losing some abstract future opportunity. It was losing a customer who had already shown up with real intent to buy or visit, and left because the experience made that too hard.

Most mobile sites in 2011 were still separate from the main desktop site, built on their own “m.” subdomain because full responsive design, formally proposed by Ethan Marcotte only the year before, hadn’t yet become the default approach most businesses used. That made the basics harder to get right than they’d eventually become: pages needed to load fast on slower mobile connections, text needed to be readable without pinching or zooming and buttons and links needed to be sized for a thumb rather than a mouse cursor. None of that was glamorous work, but it was the difference between a mobile visitor completing an action and a mobile visitor giving up.

SMS marketing was the other mobile-specific opportunity businesses had access to by 2011, and it came with real intimacy attached. Text messages had extremely high open rates compared to email, and they arrived on a device people kept within arm’s reach at nearly all times. That made SMS powerful for timely, useful messages, an appointment reminder, an order update, a real limited-time offer, and it made SMS damaging fast when overused, since a phone felt far more personal than an inbox, and industry guidelines from the CTIA already required explicit opt-in for exactly that reason. Businesses that respected the format’s intimacy built trust; businesses that treated it like free advertising space burned through goodwill quickly.

The real case here, ultimately, wasn’t about chasing a trendy new channel. It was about recognizing where a growing share of customers already were, and making sure the basic experience they found there, a page that loaded, text they could read, a form they could submit, didn’t quietly cost the business the sale it had already won everywhere else. Fixing that gap wasn’t a matter of adding something new so much as not losing what mobile visitors were already trying to give the business.