Terri Mock, chief revenue officer, Ve Interactive
From refreshing product messaging to starting website enhancement projects, e-commerce marketers often enter March with a highly ambitious spring cleaning list. For marketers looking to end their spring cleaning efforts on a high note, a focus on mobile is a good investment for a potentially substantial improvement in driving more e-commerce conversions.
Mobile shopping will continue to be a primary driver of e-commerce sales over the next few years. According to comScore, mobile commerce accounted for 20 percent of total e-commerce sales for the first time in Q3 2016. Analysts predict that this percentage will only grow, with Business Insider recently reporting that mobile commerce will make up 45 percent of the total U.S. e-commerce market by 2020.
For e-commerce companies interested in enhancing their mobile shopping experiences, here are a few tips to get started:
Improve mobile site speed, responsiveness and ease-of-use
If you are assuming that your desktop site works “well enough” on mobile devices, take the time this spring to start the process of building a great mobile experience. Cart abandonment is more frequent on mobile devices – only 16% of mobile shopping carts lead to a successful order. If you want to do beat this statistic, it’s important to make sure that your mobile site is fast, responsive and easy-to-navigate.
One of the most important areas is to pay close attention to making sure that your mobile checkout process is user-friendly. For example, instead of a long form that is hard to read on a small screen, keep the required input short and split over multiple screens. Also consider showing a well-designed progress bar that clearly shows how many steps are left to complete the transaction. Wherever possible, reduce the number of clicks to add products to a cart, and allow for convenient checkout as a guest or logged in user.
You don’t want shoppers frustrated by the wait because your site is not optimized for mobile checkout. By making it quick for mobile shoppers to find what they’re looking for, and easy for them to walk through your checkout process, you can decrease abandonment rates and drive higher e-commerce sales.
Refresh mobile creatives
Seasonal creatives help to encourage a sense of urgency among shoppers. To be as effective and relevant in your messaging, start preparing summer-themed creatives that prompt shoppers to make purchases with the change of the season.
Even with limited resources, simple designs featuring summer-themed stock imagery can help drive additional sales. You can consider rewriting some of your product descriptions with seasonal language. A “perfect for summer” phrase next to items that people would enjoy using in the summer, from sundresses to sunglasses, can go a long way towards helping people imagine using the products.
As you’re designing your creatives, make sure that they look equally good on desktop and mobile. A few questions to focus on include:
- If you have spring or summer-themed videos on your site, have you optimized the video size while still maintaining the best quality possible so users can easily watch them on their phones?
- For your upcoming summer-themed campaigns, do you have clear calls-to-action so users can read the bold text and move along quickly in their purchase process?
- For your upcoming summer collection, are all your product images loading quickly and at the right aspect ratios in your mobile browsers?
Enhance mobile marketing efforts
After working on your mobile site and creatives, turn your attention to the mobile-friendliness of your re-marketing campaigns.
This starts with onsite engagement, and double checking that your mobile overlays are responsive. If a mobile pop-up freezes your site and is unresponsive to a shopper’s efforts to close it, your abandonment rates will increase as a result.
For those customers who abandon, make sure that your re-marketing emails are mobile friendly. Keep your subject lines short, and your content concise. Resize images to fit mobile screens, and use responsive email templates. Provide a clear call to action that is easy to complete on a mobile screen. Also, take the time to check that all the links in your follow-up emails direct to pages that are mobile friendly, and that the email images load quickly across browsers.
Making your entire mobile commerce experience as friendly and engaging as possible for consumers is time well spent. As with any type of spring cleaning, deep cleans are always a bit more time-consuming and tedious than spot cleans, but the extra effort always pays off.
Based in the United Kingdom, Ve Interactive is a provider of online marketing and advertising services.
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