5 questions to ask yourself about your mobile strategy
More than half of web traffic comes from mobile. Despite these numbers, mobile conversion rates are lower than desktop.
Why? Research suggests many fails to prioritize mobile properly because they don’t know that their current mobile plan is doing its job. This could likely cost them customers. Visitors who have a negative experience on a mobile website are 62% less likely to purchase or comeback in the future than if they have a good experience. No matter how well planned and executed their marketing campaigns are.
Here are five questions to take you through making mobile the center of your company’s digital transformation.
Is a mobile strategy a priority?
It’s not enough to assign one person’s duty to manage your mobile strategy. Enhancing the customer experience must be everyone’s responsibility.
Leadership needs to invest in the right technologies. Marketing and analytics teams need be continually measure and optimize for new revenue opportunities. Developers need to be up to speed on the latest mobile development tools and techniques. Designers should be intimately familiar with mobile UX best practices and work closely with developers to create the best possible experience.
You can’t improve your company’s mobile site performance until you’ve established specific KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). For example, is your mobile conversion rate getting better over time, and is it in line with your mobile traffic? If 70% of your customers hit your mobile website each month but only 35% complete the purchase on their phones, you have a problem.
Here is some advice
Have your team regularly test your mobile page speed on Test My Site, where you can easily compare it with last month’s performance
Is your site performance up to speed?
The average mobile web page takes 15.3 seconds to fully load, and more than half of visits are abandoned if a mobile website takes more than three seconds to load.4 In retail, we see that a one-second delay in mobile load times can impact conversions by up to 20%.5 If you don’t have a team dedicated to optimizing your customers’ experience, you could be driving users to faster competitors.
Fast pages start to load in under one second. Test My Site, our mobile speed testing tool, can help benchmark your mobile site performance and let you know where you’re lagging.
Are you using the right solutions?
Optimizing aging legacy systems may hold back your team over the long haul. Modern web technologies like Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Progressive Web Apps (PWA) allow you to create engaging sites that look beautiful and load instantly on every platform. Both technologies help enhance the user experience and neither requires special skills to implement.
Modern mobile technology can also alleviate another obstacle — the checkout process. Often mobile shopping carts require too much text input. Simplifying the checkout process by using platforms like Google Pay can help streamline the process and boost conversions. The closer you are to a one-click purchase experience, the better.
Tips for success:
Connect with your tech to review your current systems and explore opportunities to adopt new technologies.
Are you continually testing?
The only way to know what your customers really want is to give them multiple options and see what performs better over time. Continuous A/B testing is a hallmark of nearly every successful internet company. For example, every day Booking.com runs a thousand A/B tests, and Amazon changes its prices more than 2.5 million times a day.
Tips for success:
Help build a culture of testing in your organization from the top down with tools like Google Optimize.
Are you thinking like a customer?
There’s no substitute for hands-on testing under real-world conditions. Not everyone has access to a fast 4G LTE connection, and speeds vary depending on location and other factors. Your team should be stress-testing your mobile website frequently and recording the results.
Experiencing the site, the way your customers do will reveal their pain points far more effectively than simply poring over data. Then ask your team: Is this what customers really want? If not, it’s time for a change.
Tips for success:
Regularly challenge your team to complete typical customer tasks, like “find and buy the perfect winter coat” or “find the answer to a question within 30 seconds on our mobile site”
With more options than ever, people demand a mobile experience that’s fast and friction-free. Ensure you’re meeting customer expectations — and your mobile growth goals — by leaning into these principles and investing where it counts.