5 Tips To Unlocking Your Mobile Site’s Potential And Improving Sales

When talking about search optimisation, mobile websites often come into the discussion.

A few years ago, it was essential to be ready for the mobile revolution. If your website wasn’t accessible on smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices then you were not only set to miss out on a large amount of tech-savvy traffic, but also sales through mobile webpages.

Those times have now long since passed. Mobile is no longer a second thought. For a lot of businesses actually, having a fantastic mobile website comes well before having one that can viewed on a desktop computer.

How come? Simple. There will be approximately 2.4 billion smartphone users by the end of the year according to eMarketer, and they’re no longer must-have devices for a younger crowd. Everybody and their wife has a smartphone and is able to access the internet 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The mobile revolution is over. You need your site to be mobile-compliant now as an essential part of your wider inbound marketing strategy. But what if you already have a mobile website and aren’t seeing the kinds of conversions that are essential to your future growth?

Does size really matter?

There are websites out there that say, for a small fee, you can completely bypass the design process and get a mobile-friendly website in an instant. We’d advise you to be extremely careful when looking at such a service; though it may not look it there’s a vast chasm between your site being ‘mobile-friendly’ and ‘mobile-optimised’.

Have you ever seen Disney’s The Sword in the Stone? There’s a scene where Merlin the Wizard packs an entire house into the contents of a tiny bag with his magic. That’s what a mobile-friendly site does; it packs websites with a lot of pages into the incredibly small space of a smartphone or tablet screen.

Only, it’s still essentially the desktop version and keeps the clutter, making it incredibly hard to navigate and generally provides a poor overall user experience. Mobile optimisation on the other hand slims the site down, making it the perfect size for finger navigation and scales it to a point where the experience isn’t diminished despite being limited by a smaller size.

What if you’ve done that as well, though, and conversions are still low from your mobile traffic? What’s the next step?

5 of the best mobile conversion optimisation tips

As smartphone penetration increases around the world, so do sales through mobile websites. Unfortunately, research also suggests that mobile shopping cart abandonment rate also skyrockets according to research by MEF Mobile Money Report which suggested in February this year that the figure stood at 58%.

There are a number of issues that may be stopping shoppers from making a purchase through your mobile presence, so what are they and what can you do to improve your numbers if you’ve already spent time building a mobile-optimised and responsive website?

1: Integrate one-click buying

This is a more recent solution to what has been a long-term problem for many looking to decrease their mobile checkout abandonment rates. Amazon’s one-click buying patent has recently expired which was essential to their growth, allowing shoppers to simply click a button to make a purchase instead of filling out forms. Other online retailers can now use a system that helped amass billions and is the perfect antidote to mobile checkout abandonment.

2: Perform UX research and A/B test your site

Have you commissioned a mobile site to keep up with times? That may not be enough, and it’s wise to do some UX research with real people to discover how they use and interact with your mobile site in real-world situations.

Techniques like usability testing can be useful; A/B testing though can present users with two versions of a mobile site, collecting interactive data to see if the changes made on a test site improve usability and are better than what already exists on your site.

3: Build a funnel especially for mobile user journeys

We wrote recently about how, by using Google Analytics (or similar software), you can create a visual representation of your sales funnel and use it to discover the stages shoppers begin to make a purchase and drop off. That very same system can be used to perfect your mobile user journey and discover what areas need to be altered to improve conversions, and help you optimise other parts of your overall inbound marketing campaign.

4: Consider dropping the more ‘arty’ elements

The whole point of having a mobile version of your website is to provide potential shoppers with an incredibly easy way to buy while on the move.

It makes sense to have a lovely-looking website to view on a big desktop monitor, but does your site really need to have parallax web design elements and carousel sliders? Ditching those elements and simplifying the user experience can be more productive than you may think, cutting out distractions, increasing load times and improving conversion rates.

5: Target a better audience suited for mobile

The most effective inbound marketing campaigns help people discover brands organically through a wide range of channels and online mediums.

By putting some of that marketing budget into paid social and search marketing techniques though, you can better attract and generate leads to your mobile pages in creative, unique ways to improve your mobile conversion rates.

Some markets, especially younger ones that have grown up using smartphones and tablets more than a traditional desktop computer, only make purchases through mobile devices. Budgeting with the right strategy can attract those specific markets to your mobile site through platforms like Facebook and techniques like PPC to target a mobile-only audience, segmenting mobile traffic and desktop and potentially improving conversion rates on both platforms.