Online strategy: mobile optimisation or responsive
Get mobile right and the results can be impressive. Get it wrong and it will cost customers. Many retailers are failing to use mobile to deliver a business advantage. By Martin Wilson of Mobileweb Company.
Many of those in retail are starting to realise the potential that mobile offers. A leading UK retailer experienced an up-lift in total online traffic of 40% following the launch of a fully optimised mobile site. All of this up-lift was contributed by mobile. If you run a desktop website, it is likely that you will be seeing around a third or more of all traffic coming from mobile users. Today, you are both letting these customers down and potentially missing out on the opportunity to capture new customers.
Consider that Google will report very soon that 50% of all searches come from mobiles – this has risen from around a third of all searches since October of 2012 – their calls for businesses to invest in mobile first certainly should not continue to go unheeded.
For those that have already created a mobile presence, many need to think again. The majority of sites are poor, being hard to use, slow, visually unattractive and failing in so many basic areas of best practice. Customer experience is far from great. The worst often appear as they are merely ticking a box, as an afterthought. This is costing customers.
An event I recently attended saw me ask a leading UK retailer: Why have they created such an amateur mobile service? Why was there no prioritisation on the homepage? Why was everything the same size? What about all the customers out there that don’t have an iPhone and on whose devices the service would therefore not work properly?
So why does it matter so much? Research has shown 57% of customers would not recommend a business with a bad mobile site, with 40% turning to a competitor’s site after a bad mobile experience. Users expect services to be quick to use, with 60% of users expecting a mobile site to load as fast as a desktop site. Research suggests that a page load of anything more than 30 seconds sees site visitors fleeing in droves.
So where should a business start? Forget the hype we all too often read about in the media, or hear from an agency. For most businesses mobile will be a valuable way to engage customers. Use it for that purpose. Be very clear on what you expect mobile to deliver and the value to your business. Focus on the customer and what they want. Then deliver to that need.
It is important that any mobile service is first optimised for any mobile, it must work well and be quick to use on the wide range of devices that your customers’ own. Secondly, it must be optimised for search discovery, as a search engine is where most customers will likely go to find your business. An optimised approach is to produce a dedicated service geared towards the mobile user and, if done well, can deliver rapid results. A leading edge, fully optimised site can be delivered in just days, with very little effort and for a relatively low cost.
Any mobile site should include product search, image carousel and of course, click to call. An individual presence should be created for all products with images and descriptions for each. Maps, directions and links to services and information on branches or stockists should be standard.
Optimisation v Responsive Design? So how does the optimisation approach differ from the Responsive Design methodology pushed by many agencies? Responsive Design is an approach to design whereby one set of content is simply repackaged to display on different screen sizes. For some organisations this is a valid approach, for many it is not.
Services often present badly with the layout often distorted and basic features do not work. Services often do not present well on a wide range of devices. Essential elements such as payment, click-to-call or a map and directions, expected to be front-and-centre by mobile users, either don’t work or are buried under layers of content.
Services can be very slow. Responsive design sees a lot of unnecessary data being sent (and downloaded) to a mobile (and then not displayed owing to the responsive approach). If a desktop site is 500kb to 1MB or greater (and that’s not an unreasonable size, with images etc.) that is the size of file that will be sent over a mobile network. Even on 3G, that can take minutes to load.
It can be very expensive and take time. An agency will be keen to suggest a desktop site be completely re-engineered to use responsive design. In many cases this is totally unnecessary and will mean your sites are completely interdependent. The high costs make it far more difficult to achieve a return on investment and can take months to deliver.
What results can you expect? Get mobile right and results can be phenomenal. In the first month after the launch of a fully optimised advanced mobile site for a leading UK retailer, provided by Mobileweb Company, they experienced an up-lift in total online traffic by 40% with over fifty per cent of the new mobile traffic generated from organic search. It took just weeks to deliver this return on investment.
This is just one example of how mobile can transform a company’s fortunes. Keep it simple and make sure that you turn to a specialist. They will ensure that your service delivers what customers truly need, that it uses best practice and helps you to achieve a rapid return on investment. Focus on optimising your site for a mobile customer and search. Don’t become another tick-box casualty.
Martin Wilson is managing director of Mobileweb Company and will be sharing his knowledge at the Retail Bulletin’s Mobile Retailing Summit, 24th September 2013. Click here for programme details and registration.
