This is the year of mobile, right?
Wrong – that was 5 years ago! Mobile usage has been steadily increasing, and we have now surpassed the mobile tipping point. If you’re still struggling with your mobile experience, the train has left the station.
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The Customer Journey Has Grown More Complex
Commerce on mobile devices is still growing rapidly. Forrester projects that retail sales on smartphones and tablets will total $115 billion in 2015. Not only that, but mobile commerce is projected to be nearly half of all e-commerce by 2018.
Clearly, it’s a big deal. But you know that. Something you may not have thought about is the increasing complexity of the customer journey.
First, there are tons of marketing touchpoints. Google put out a cool interactive article based on research from millions of consumer interactions analyzed through Google Analytics. I used large shopping businesses in Canada for the input, and here’s what the visual showed:
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So, lots of different marketing channels affecting the final purchase. I highly recommend you play around with this interactive feature and select inputs applicable to your business.
Today, however, the customer journey doesn’t always occur on a single screen. While the Google benchmark didn’t include mobile (yet), they did release a report on Mobile in the Purchase Journey recently. The graph shows that research is highly related to purchases on smartphones (the dark color) across the board:
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Changing Consumer Behavior and The Importance of Mobile
According to Forrester, 75% of US online adults use 2+ devices connected to the internet, and 67% have switched devices while completing common tasks. All of this means that your mobile experience must complement your overall brand experience in a way that assists a conversion.
So if you haven’t thought about your mobile experience yet, fret not. There is still hope. You can still improve customer experience and bring it over to mobile.
We’ll assume that you have a good responsive site. If you don’t, there actually may not be hope (joking, but get on that). In fact, there’s a lot of room for improvement with mobile experience. Not just on your site, but industry wide.
See, things like Mobilegeddon aren’t isolated incidents. They are calls to action to smart marketers to get on board with a mobile experience that is delightful. They’re sparks that should ignite a whole new way of thinking on marketing strategy, from the smallest, minimalist screen on up.
4 Ways to Improve Customer Experience on Mobile
1. Use Progressive Enhancement
What is progressive enhancement? According to Smashing Magazine, it is “the principle of starting with a rock-solid foundation and then adding enhancements to it if you know certain visiting user-agents can handle the improved experience.”
It’s a strategy that “emphasizes accessibility, semantic HTML markup, and external stylesheet and scripting technologies.”
But in simple terms, it really means that you’re starting with the core components and layering on progressively.
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Brad Frost explained it best:
“Starting with mobile and designing with progressive enhancement covers all bases (even if just at a rudimentary level). Any web-enabled device will be able to access the website and have a functional experience. Period. Then using feature detection, conditional script loading, media queries and plenty of other delicious techniques allow the experience to be enhanced and optimized for the device’s context.
This means the site will work (to some degree) on that shiny new web-enabled gizmo sitting under your neighbor’s Christmas tree 4 years from now.”
If you want to get into the nitty gritty of how to implement, read the Smashing Magazine article.
2. Keep Proportions in Mind
You have a lot less space on mobile. Much of this is solved by using progressive enhancement, but it’s still important to keep browsing behavior in mind when designing for mobile. Ask yourself, what’s the focus of this site (particularly on mobile) and make that the focus. Ralph Lauren does a good job:
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Though there’s a lot of debate around the hamburger menu, it is pretty clear that more options will hide behind it. However, that’s not even entirely necessary, because Ralph Lauren lays out the main shopping categories right below their featured promotion.
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3. Use Location Awareness
This mainly applies to eCommerce stores that have a physical presence as well, but it’s a solid way to improve customer experience.
Google wrote an article on capitalizing on micro-moments, “intent-driven moments of decision-making and preference-shaping that occur throughout the entire consumer journey.”
Say you’re passing a Starbucks and Apple Passbook loads up your Starbucks card. Or Hertz sends you an email when your plane lands letting you know your rental car is ready. These are great examples of brands maximizing the impact of micro-moments. Their done with location awareness.
Location awareness refers to “devices that can passively or actively determine their location.”
In his CTA Conference talk, Tim Ash also explains the value of location awareness. He, too, uses the example of Starbucks.
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As he explains, instead of struggling to type in your zip code and location, it’s much easier to just click a button that says “use current location.” Starbucks finds all the restaurants near you, creating a wonderful mobile experience.
4. Use Dynamic Forms
Here’s the premise:
A mobile user may not be willing to fill out forms to the same extent that a desktop user would. Still, you want to convert them. So what do you do?
HubSpot wrote a great article on improving the mobile experience. In it, they describe a typical scenario in which a customer (Sally) finds a hair salon by searching on her phone. She sends an email to herself to check it out later, and eventually signs up using the site’s form. Her cross-device journey is typical today.
As they wrote, “They want to be able to accomplish whatever fits their fancy on whatever device is at hand. This means that simply adapting your site to look nice on different devices is not enough.”
Functionality is important as well. So if you give users the option to fill out different amounts of information on different devices, you’re personalizing their journey by improving their individual experience.
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Another article from HubSpot detailed how they increased their mobile prospect by 5x in two weeks. How? They adjusted their forms for different devices. Their standard form length for ebooks is around 15 questions. All they did was display a shorter form for mobile users that included fewer fields, and they increased conversions.
While HubSpot makes this easy with Smart Content, there are also manual ways to do things like this.
Conclusion
Mobile experience is important. Improve that and you will most certainly improve customer experience.
The future of marketing won’t require just a checklist of new tactics. It will require a new way of thinking about the customer experience, one that spans multiple brand touchpoints as well as devices for the same conversion. It is more complex, but not impossible.
Start by using progressive enhancement. Think about your customer experience from the bottom up, from the core to the ornate. Start with the basics, and you won’t have a problem with your mobile experience. Always keep in mind proportions as well. Nothing is more annoying that a huge popup promotion that blocks what you were trying to buy or read in the first place.
Location awareness can help businesses reach users with local intent. Dynamic forms can help you capture more conversion, no matter the device.
Oh, and please have a responsive design.
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