In comparison with desktop sales, mobile conversion rates are still staggeringly low. This is an issue for all eCommerce site owners regardless of their size or what they are selling. It is estimated mobile sites only convert half the level of sales that their desktop counterparts enjoy. All this and consumers still state their preference for mobile over desktop. It’s time you tackled your poor mobile conversion rates once and for all. Here’s how:
Make your calls to action clear and easily tappable. It is crucial that your calls to action on mobile screens are not only as succinct and attractive as those on your desktop site, they must also have enough white space around them to make them easily tappable for even the most fleshy of fingers. You don’t want users hitting the wrong link and getting taken to another part of your site because they weren’t physically able to tap the desired link. This will put users off at the first hurdle and cause you to lose their interest.
When it comes to mobile shopping there are still issues over trust, even in this day and age. The thought of putting card details into a phone scares shoppers, certainly those of the older generation. The use of security logos such as Norton or McAfee, BBB logo, Google Trusted Stores, etc used in the webpage footer, can help bring about this trust and assurance. A tap to call function, which allows shoppers to carry out their purchase over the phone with a trusted sales person is also looked upon favourably by consumers.
Forty percent of users will wait no longer than three seconds for a site to load before they are off. With this in mind, it becomes crucial that you as a mobile site owner make sure you have a speedy site. Users are impatient, and if your site is slow, you’ll lose users before they’ve even seen your products. What can massively slow your site down is the presence of too much data. This is an issue when it comes to images, especially if you’re delivering the larger version of an image and then relying on the user to shrink it to the right size. It requires a lot of space on your server to store the right-sized images but in doing so you will see an increase in site speed.
Creating a mobile first site is another way of improving mobile conversions. Mobile-specific or m-dot sites have fallen out of favour in recent years due to SEO concerns, with responsive sites being seen in a more favourable light. Adaptive web design could prove a useful third way. Adaptive design utilises the same code as original sites, but its display is different. It is separately optimised for mobile.
To help determine which items need to be more prominent on mobile, review click and scroll maps of your current site and see what elements users are engaging with and which ones they are missing. Ensure your call to action is always prominent and simplify things wherever possible. Make a users path towards the all important checkout, clear and simple.
More than one-third of users who buy from desktop sites will have viewed your products elsewhere. With only 30% of transactions happening on mobile and 50% of all eCommerce traffic being mobile, progress must be made. Even if your best efforts to shake up your mobile site’s conversion rates don’t work, you want to ensure you still absorb all the traffic that filters through to your desktop site. You can do this through consistency- by making sure your desktop site is similar to your mobile one, so you don’t throw visitors off. You need to make it easy for users to assimilate when arriving via a new device.
Mobile is the future, but it will take time for consumers to see it as their first option for purchasing goods. In the meantime, making sure you optimise your mobile site with clear CTA’s and a quick loading speed, means that when consumer confidence in mobile eCommerce goes up, you will have laid the groundwork to capture this traffic.
