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Tips for Increasing Mobile Sales
According to an IBM report, 39.7 percent of all online retail traffic this past Black Friday came from a mobile device, and that traffic was responsible for 7.2 percent of the total online sales that day.
With that in mind, the biggest challenge retailers now face is the gap between mobile and desktop conversion. The average retailer's mobile conversion rate is only 35 percent of their desktop conversion rate. When 15 percent of a retailer's traffic is only converting at a fraction of what it used to, it's bound to have a serious impact on its bottom line.
With most retailers already having a mobile website in place, their focus this year should be on improving conversion.
Principles of Conversion-Driven Design
Conversion is a journey rather than a destination. In order to practice conversion-first design, consider the following tips:
1. Offer a fully customized mobile user interface (UI). You need to be able to build a mobile website that best serves the needs of your customers on mobile phones. This means the UI has to be driven by usability and not by templates. You shouldn't be constrained to use a few cookie-cutter designs or have limitations around what features you can put on various pages of your mobile site. The best mobile websites have a unique design specific to that retailer.
2. Have a mobile website decoupled from your desktop website. Your mobile website needs to have its own navigation stack and site map, and it shouldn't be forced to be the same as your desktop site map. You're not looking to "mobilize" your desktop site, and you shouldn't be constrained to only doing a one-to-one mapping between your mobile site and desktop site. Usability and conversion principles should define your mobile website.
3. Provide rapid iterations of your mobile site. The launch of your mobile site is the beginning of your m-commerce journey, not the end. Continuously monitor and improve the site by adding/removing features in an agile manner. Your m-commerce platform and/or vendor has to be able to help you in this journey. If you're not able to make rapid updates and improvements post-launch, you risk losing customers to your competitors. An important note to keep in mind is that customer loyalties on mobile are different from desktop. If a user doesn't like your site on their phone, even if she is a loyal user on desktop, you risk losing her to a competitor who is providing a more convenient mobile experience.
4. Feature shallow navigation. Reduce depth in your navigation stack. The average number of steps back a mobile user takes is one. Very rarely does a user switch departments/categories by navigating multiple levels back.
5. Prevent early exits. Exit rates on mobile product detail pages are much higher than site average — it's about two times site average — while the homepage is less than the site average. Visitors are trying to find what they're looking for quickly and easily; if they can't, they give up and move on. They don't go back or continue to go back and look. Therefore, create an experience where they'll continue to search by moving forward and provide nonlinear ways to find products.
6. Leverage promotions and deals. Price matters. Deals and promotions drive traffic to pages, increasing pages viewed in the session and, ultimately, overall conversion. Promote on header, promote on homepage, promote on every page.
Danielle McCormick is the director of marketing at Skava, a provider of multichannel e-commerce solutions to retailers. Danielle can be reached at danielle@skava.com.
