Tips for Increasing Your Mobile Conversions Without Breaking the Bank

By Amy Africa

The majority of mobile consultants make entering the world of mobile sound difficult and expensive. Fortunately, it’s neither.

Right now just showing up counts for a lot. Speed is also important. Mobile users will give you a lot of leeway on things like design and user interface. What they don’t have tolerance for? Slower-than-death websites. Users expect your mobile site to load fast — within just a few seconds — which means that you’ll likely need to keep your page weights low. How low? Ten kilobytes (kBs) to 50 kBs is optimal, but definitely no more than 100 kBs. (Note: 100 kBs is less than a third of the average traditional website page.)

Get Connected
What else do users expect? They want some sort of connection between your mobile site/app and your regular website and marketing materials. Granted, they don’t have to be exactly the same, but they need to be similar. Over three-quarters of your customers are going to use both channels for the same transaction. If a shopper puts something in their mobile cart, that item should be replicated in their regular cart as well. Where’s the connection most important? Your entry pages, especially your “official” homepage.

You must know what your users are doing online to achieve any kind of significant conversion to, well, anything. Whether you want inquiries or orders, you need to know what your users are doing with their mobile devices before you start asking for it. Why? Because consumers who come to your site from Facebook behave differently than consumers who come from Twitter, and consumers who come from Twitter aren’t at all like consumers who come from your emails and text messages.

I know this sounds like a ridiculous tip, but the truth is it’s one of the most critical because a lot of social media activity is taking place on smartphones. If that’s the case with your business, that could be the first place you look to get more sales or inquiries. Companies interested in mobile commerce tend to overbuild areas in the hopes that “if we build it they will come.” That’s OK, but it’s usually better to build where the users are first.

Navigate Your Way to More Sales
On-site search trips everyone up. Sadly, whatever problems you have on your regular site will be about 30 times worse on your mobile site. That’s the bad news about mobile. The good news is that if you can streamline some of your issues, your increased conversions will more than make up for the problems. Your on-site text search will be heavily adopted if your navigation is weak. Therefore, if you want to make your site better without busting your budget, work on your navigation, especially your jump links.

Mobile checkouts need to be more than miniaturized versions of your regular checkout — no matter how perfect your traditional checkout is. Building the perfect mobile checkout is challenging. It takes time and a lot of testing to see what works and what doesn’t. While you’re working on it, offer lots of alternatives to ordering via a mobile device. Put your phone number all over your mobile site until you think you have it in way too many places. Then triple the occurrences. The same goes with your email address and any click-to-call or mobile-enabled live chat and text messaging options.

Texting Isn’t Just for Teenagers
Abandoned cart programs work like gangbusters. As a rule of thumb, take whatever your performance is on your existing program and triple it. That’s what you should get from a mobile abandoned cart program. You’ll get even better results if you include text messaging in your efforts. Remember, an abandoned cart program includes more than one email (preferably five to six), pop-ups (midis, catfishes and sidewinders work best), outbound telemarketing efforts on large orders and more. Speaking of text messaging, it will be one of the best tools in your arsenal. Test it now before it gets really popular.

Amy Africa is chief imagination officer at e-commerce marketing firm Eight by Eight. Amy can be reached at amy@amyafrica.com.