In the past few years, mobile devices have transformed customer sales paths and the overall customer experience. Here are my top tips for making sure your mobile marketing delivers a decent return.
By Ross Fobian, CEO and Co-founder ResponseTap
According to the IAB, £526 million is now spent annually on mobile advertising alone in the UK – a figure that is set to grow exponentially in the next few years. So it really does make sense for marketers to take mobile seriously, but where do you start and how do you do it on a budget?
1. Have a mobile optimised site
When someone is researching a product or service on a mobile device, much of the content you might offer on a larger screen needs to be sacrificed to ensure they have a user friendly experience. Nothing is more frustrating than complicated animations that don’t work on mobiles, or having to constantly pinch, grab or scroll around.
Think about the content a user is most likely to want on a mobile device (eg how to find you, or product pictures and prices) and focus on that. At the very least, consider responsive design, which provides an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices.
2. Remember that the number one thing people still use their mobiles for is to make calls!
No matter how well optimised your mobile site is, the fact remains that people often still want to call and speak to someone before making a purchase. That’s even more likely to be the case on a smaller mobile screen, where its much easier to just click a number.
So having a highly visible ‘call’ button on your site can make the difference between a sale and a fail. Research also suggests that consumers are more likely to trust a website when a phone number is prominently displayed.
3. Understand your real mobile sales conversion rate
With point 2 in mind, it’s critical that you track and analyse your telephone calls to fully understand how customers are researching and purchasing your products from mobile devices.
We analysed over 500,000 transactions and found that over three times as many sales are being made via smartphones than was previously thought.
The discrepancy has arisen because most retailers only track sales conversions when they take place within the smartphone browser. Our data shows that on average 0.4% of smartphone browsing results in a transaction. But when you include transactions made via a phone call, this figure jumps to 1.3% – over three times higher.
This suggests that investing a higher proportion of marketing spend to attract consumer attention on mobile devices will make sense for many retailers.
4. Track the complete customer journey from a mobile – both on and offline
One way to do this is to automatically display a unique phone number to every individual person who visits your website on their smartphone. This means that when a customer makes a call it can be matched back to their smartphone web session.
You can use this information to work out which of your mobile marketing spend is delivering the kinds of calls you want. For example, you might increase spend on a search keyword that is attracting interest on your mobile site and then directly resulting in calls that convert into sales.
Conversely, if you’re trying to reduce the number of calls where people ask simple questions that should be dealt with online, then you can use the information to pinpoint parts of your mobile site that might be confusing and need redesigning.
For more visit: www.responsetap.com
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