Get More Conversion From Your Mobile Website
Over the last decade, mobile business has increased massively. It is now just as important to have a mobile-responsive website as it is to have a regular desktop site, with 85% of people using mobile devices in their everyday life and this figure is always rising. Nowadays, people can use their smartphones to make purchases via a couple of touches, especially when using the likes of Apple Pay, so it is important that mobile conversion rate optimisation is apart of your digital strategy.
Craig Tennant, Online Marketing Manager at Mancheser SEO Agency Epic New Media, states: “mobile conversion rate optimisation is often overlooked by marketers. The emphasis is usually on desktop. However, most of us are regularly glued to our mobile phones so mobile CRO can’t be forgotten.”
One factor to consider is the format of the website; though some may not realise it, there’s a big difference between viewing a regular site on mobile and the site being mobile-responsive. The latter ensures that there are no difficulties with regards to rotating the screen, images suddenly increasing or decreasing in size, links disappearing off the edge of the page etc.
In addition, it helps to have a filter section on the site, which allows users to more easily find what they want. It could be based on the product line, the price, the size of the item, the colour; there are many options depending on what sector the business is in, but having filters on the site makes the task of web browsing by mobile that much easier, and therefore can make the potential for mobile sales higher as a result by reducing the amount of time spent during the customer journey.
There also has to be a CTA, or a Call To Action. It seems so obvious, and yet so many mobile-friendly sites and desktop-on-mobile sites fail to include this, perhaps believing that the old “Contact Us” button will suffice. However, it is vital for businesses to have something, anything, on the site which provides a CTA; again, it reduces the customer journey, thus theoretically increasing the likelihood of sales, and it acts as a flashpoint that is impossible to ignore, which may make the customer think “I like what I see here, I’m going to make a purchase/investment”. In short, if you can have a feature on the website which speeds up and increases the process by which you can convert web visitors into customers via mobile, then that’s an opportunity that you must take.
One thing which you should NOT consider using in great numbers is advertising. If you’ve ever tried to go on YouTube and have your desired video preceded by an advert, or if you’ve clicked onto a website from Twitter and it’s randomly taken you to the App Store, you’ll know that mobile advertisements rarely succeed and only serve to frustrate the user. One or two basic ads which are out of one’s reach aren’t too bad, as they make the site look a little more professional and provide an extra incentive for one to make a purchase, but spread out across the page and, worse, interrupting a customer journey are the real, and all too common, downsides to mobile advertising. The fewer ads the better, and bear in mind that a strong product line should make the need for advertisements minimal anyway. Google have also clamped down invasive pop-ups, so they can also damage your search engine rankings.
Finally, we mentioned earlier how many companies feel that a Contact Us page is better than a Call To Action. Whatever your opinion on this matter, there’s no denying that if you do happen to use the Contact Us page, you want an email address or a telephone number; a form is often a source of frustration, because you want to speak to a real person, and your enquiry about a potential product might be serious, or perhaps you want to get in touch about partnering up on a business project. Either way, contact forms rarely please the user, creating more work and increasing the amount of time they have to spend to make an enquiry about a sale. Remember that the easier and quicker you can make a customer journey on a mobile website, the greater the chance that a sale will come as a result, and so contact forms without alternative methods to get in touch are a real negative. Don’t forget, too, that smartphones will allow you to click through to making a call or sending an email immediately, whilst keeping you on the site to potentially make a sale immediately afterwards.