Today’s Landscape
Mobile adoption rates are a metric of the past. Mobile has long been a crucial piece of the customer journey puzzle, as many use them in the consideration process before making purchases.
Today, customers not only own mobile devices and use them for research; they are also converting on them. This phenomenon is a worldwide one:
- In the US, more than half the time spent on e-commerce takes place on a mobile device and this drives about a quarter of all online sales.
- In Asia, Japan and South Korea are leading the crowd with approximately 50% of total ecommerce revenue generated from mobile transactions.
- In Europe, mobile transactions are also growing continuously. The revenue generated from mobile transactions has grown five times its size in 2014 from the year before to €3.5billion in Germany alone. Out of which, €2.2billion are derived from smartphones and €1.2billion from tablets.
On top of that, with the introduction of phablets and wearables to the repertoire of mobile devices, there is no doubt that this m-commerce trend will continue to accelerate. This begs the question: As an e-commerce player, how do I increase my mobile conversions?
#1: Optimize Your Mobile Website
Contrary to the current trend of moving away from mobile websites and towards apps, a study has found that 63% of consumers actually prefer to shop via mobile websites rather than apps, up from 56% a year ago. Downloading of apps provides customers with a larger barrier to overcome, in order to just browse through a catalogue.
The fact is: mobile consumers are impatient. This is especially so when they are not loyal to your brand. In fact, almost three-quarters of respondents will abandon after waiting five seconds for a mobile site to load, while 46% would not return to a poor performing site.
On top of that, search engine giant Google has altered its algorithm in April 2015 to favour websites that are mobile-friendly and others have plans to follow.
Therefore, an optimized mobile website is crucial and beneficial in reducing the average loading speed per page to the minimum. This also includes reducing all content to the important text and necessary calls-to-action. The design needs to be easy to navigate and responsive to every device specifications, in order to attract greater traffic and raise your search engine rankings.
#2: Think Local
Customers tend to look for information on their mobile while on-the-go or in-store. Because of that, they often seek information that is relevant to their current geographical location. In fact, 69% of mobile consumers expect businesses to be within 5 miles of their location.
Therefore, it is necessary to localize your website content. This ranges from the language and currency used to the type of keywords that customers use. In doing so, you are ensuring that your customers from every targeted market are able to relate to your website and feel that you are providing value to their current local search, regardless of whether your business is physically present in that region.
After all, studies have also shown that 78% of mobile searches for local business information result in a purchase, higher than PC and tablet. By localizing your website, you are not only reaching a wider audience within the market, you are also increasing the conversions from them.
#3: Boost Your Mobile Presence
Apart from creating a great mobile website, e-commerce players should boost their presence on mobile platforms. There are several ways to go about doing this. For instance, e-commerce players could advertise with partners who have mobile-optimized websites. Mobile advertising is growing in importance and popularity, with mobile ad spend even expected to surpass desktop ad spend by 2016. By advertising with their mobile-optimized partners, e-commerce can ensure that their ads will in fact be displayed on mobile and will be able to draw greater traffic to their mobile websites.
An alternative is to provide exclusivity for mobile customers, such as mobile coupons. Studies have shown that about 75% of mobile shoppers have redeemed a mobile coupon at least once for both online and offline shopping and 80% have a better perception of the e-commerce if mobile deals and coupons were offered.
Since mobile customers have a higher tendency to act within the same day, and 70% of mobile searches result in an action on the website within one hour of when the search was conducted, mobile advertising and mobile coupons can effectively increase your mobile conversions. E-commerce players would first have to find out what their customers are searching for on their mobile, and add value to this process.
#4: Improve Checkout Processes
Getting customers onto your website is a big step forward, and getting them to deposit items into their shopping cart is another. Unfortunately, there is almost 70% chance that the customers will abandon their shopping cart.
In order to increase the chances of purchase completion, e-commerce players should look into improving their checkout processes. The process needs to be simple, transparent and efficient enough for customers to complete the checkout on their mobile right then and there. If your customer would rather save the items for a later checkout because it takes too long, your checkout process is not optimized and that reduces the likelihood of the checkout actually occurring.
Also, customers like to have options. This applies both to the modes of payment as well as the storage of their personal details. For instance, some customers prefer to have all their information stored to speed up the checkout process, while some prefer that none of their information is stored. Therefore, it is also important to provide the option of purchasing without having to register, which is also known as guest checkout.
Ultimately, the entire shopping process needs to be easy and clear, so that your customers would be happy to make repeated purchases after a good experience.
#5: Align Mobile to Your Brand
Traditionally, desktop traffic peaked on weekdays and mobile traffic on weekends. By linking mobile well to desktop, e-commerce players are increasing the availability of their brand and products to their customers.
What’s more? Customers enjoy combining both online and offline channels. It was found that more than half of mobile-driven purchases include a visit to a physical store. In fact, about 40% of customers worldwide are using their smartphones while shopping in stores. Another option could be to allow online purchases to be picked up physically at the store.
At the end of the day, mobile is a part of a bigger picture. While the mobile strategy is crucial, customers expect a seamless experience with your brand when switching from one channel to another. That is why the mobile strategy should be aligned to your marketing strategy, in order to ensure a consistent brand image for your e-commerce and to always be within the consideration set of customers, no matter where they are.
Bottom Line
The rising usage of mobile devices brings about new opportunities to e-commerce players. Businesses need to ensure that their mobile presence is easy to find, easy to read and easy to purchase from, in order to increase mobile traffic to their websites. On top of that, there needs to be efficiency and transparency in your purchase process, in order to encourage repeated purchases. By aligning your mobile strategy with the rest of your marketing strategy, your customers will get a consistent engagement with your brand across all channels.
