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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