How many times have you visited a company web page on your mobile phone and gotten frustrated about the experience? You aren’t alone. A survey conducted by Google of mobile users revealed that 72 percent of users think mobile-friendly websites are important, yet 96 percent have visited a site that doesn’t work well on their device.
Companies are spending a lot of money in digital marketing, but they are still falling short when it comes to the mobile experience. They aren’t using common sense to think about the user experience on mobile. Instead, they are checking a box on their digital marketing mix. This is so wrong.
Your mobile website can and should be helping drive sales, but it needs to be optimized in order to do it. This means you will have to spend some money, but if you do it right, you’ll generate a strong return on that investment. To help you out, here are some down and dirty ways to get your mobile marketing to start making money for you.
First and foremost, speed matters. You lose about 60% of traffic after three seconds, so you need to make the most of that time. Consider the ATM machine. People don’t go to an ATM machine expecting all the services they can get in a branch. They want to do simple things quickly, like checking balances or withdrawing money. The same goes for a mobile website. People want quick and easy. If your site is too slow or complicated, you’ll drive people away.
Second, user experience is everything. Think about how you use mobile. You probably like apps that are clean and simple and let you easily do whatever you need to do. The same goes for your customers. Get rid of anything messy or complicated. Don’t use weird icons that no one recognizes, and rethink forms. People abandon form submits at an outrageous rate because they are so messy. Plugins, like dealer chats, can cover up most of what is on the screen and are extremely laborious. Keep it simple, but be sure to have the most important things to your customers (like clickable phone numbers) incorporated into the mobile site.
Finally, test, test and test again. A/b testing can be a pain, so make your web developer do it. If your site isn’t working, you’ll drive your customers right into the hands of your competitors. There’s not much more frustrating to mobile users than broken links or mobile sites that don’t load properly.
In addition to speed, user experience and testing, you need to consider that your key performance indicators (KPIs) will be different for mobile than for web. Also, the future of mobile is a very customized experience. Just as websites use cookies to personalize messages for visitors, mobile websites should start doing the same.
Building a great mobile experience as part of your digital marketing mix may sound like common sense, but you’d be amazed at how many companies fail at it. Considering the fact that the number of mobile users around the globe is expected to reach 4.77 billion in 2017, mobile is just something you can’t check a box on or ignore. So spend the time and money to do it right and your budget – and your revenue – will thank you.