Tuesday, September 3, 2019

Tip #313: Optimize Your Website for Mobile in 3 Steps



When it comes to your website, you don't want to get left behind! Blake Ellis, with CommerceV3, shares three steps to make your website mobile friendly and turn mobile shoppers into buyers in the process.

There are almost five billion mobile phones in the world. That’s an amazing number given there are only about seven and a half billion people in the world. Not all of these phones are smartphones, but the trends are clear: there are way more phones than computers, and that gap is just getting wider.

What does this mean for your online store? It means every year more of your customers will be using their phones to shop and order. You may have already seen the majority of your traffic move to mobile devices. So, what can you do to convert all these mobile shoppers to buyers?

Quite a lot actually, and it all starts with developing a “mobile-first” mindset. The next time someone asks you to review a design, a new home page promotion or the next email blast, just pull out your phone and check it out. It’s fast, easy and will get you and your team into a mobile-first mindset. If a team member tells you “that’s not really meant for mobile, we don’t get a lot of orders on mobile yet,” just tell them that’s what you’re trying to fix! Pretty soon you’ll start to see a lift as more efforts start with an eye toward mobile.

Reviewing and optimizing everything at once is a lot.
Let’s break this down into three simple steps:

Step #1: Start with Email
Most people read their emails on their phones first, so this tactic makes sense. Enter your own email into your site and open the welcome message on your phone. Test all your other transactional emails, from order confirmations to abandon cart emails to requests for product reviews. Make sure they all look great, are easy to read and perform correctly.

Then move to marketing emails. Have your team test new designs on their phones, and make it a priority to increase opens and click-throughs from mobile devices. Increasing email opens will confirm that your subject lines and preview texts are effective with customers on the go, and increasing click-throughs will confirm the layout and messaging is also working.

Step #2: Optimize Shopping
Once your inbound email metrics are rising, it’s time to get mobile users adding more product to their carts. During this stage you’re testing all your site designs and layouts on your own phone, and asking others to do the same. Designers need to wow you with beautiful, yet tiny layouts, hero images have to load fast and display well, and product detail pages have to present a lot of info in an easy-to-swipe manner.

Keep a close eye on metrics to guide you through this process. How many mobile visitors tap down through categories versus use the product search box? Can you set up filters and sorting to reduce taps and typing? Do products appear with default options so add-to-cart buttons work without any additional selections?

When in doubt, do some secret shopping at large retailers. They have the budgets to do extensive user testing and accommodate all kinds of neat features. Take a look at what they do and get your team to implement features that make sense for your customers.

Step #3: Streamline Checkout
Now that mobile users are tapping on your emails and adding product to their cart, it’s time to get them through the checkout. The key to securing more checkouts is to minimize the need to type.

Set up payment options that your customers already have stored in their phone like Paypal, ApplePay and Google Wallet. Most of these are easy to configure in most online stores, and mobile users love them because they don’t have to re-enter their credit card details.

If you’re already doing address verification, you can use this service to speed up shipping address entry on mobile. As users start to type their street address, your site starts autocompleting the entire address for them.

Finally, make sure every field in your checkout is absolutely required to fulfill the order, and that it pops up the correct style of keyboard for mobile users (alphanumeric, numeric, etc). An easy way to keep up with this is to place a test order on your own site once a week from your phone, and keep tweaking until the process is as efficient as possible.

There’s a lot you can do to improve revenue from mobile, but it all starts with a mobile-first mindset. When it comes to reviewing your own efforts, turn off your computer and pull out your phone. The more you do this, the faster the transition will occur, and the sooner your order volume on mobile will really start to explode.

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