Introduction
Ecommerce is a rapidly growing market, expected to contain more than 2 billion customers by 2023. Despite the majority of ecommerce browsing traffic coming from mobile users, mobile conversion rates are lower than on desktop.
It is clear that many ecommerce sites need to do more to meet the needs of an increasingly mobile-first marketplace. There are several issues which must be tackled in order to improve your mobile conversion rates, from web design and browsing experience to customer support.
These 6 steps will help your ecommerce site achieve a higher mobile conversion rate:
Tackle Cart Abandonment
One of the biggest sources of lost sales on mobile is cart abandonment. Over a single year, cart abandonment costs businesses $4.6 trillion in lost ecommerce sales. Cart abandonment is most commonly caused by frustration with the speed or usability of your checkout process, so streamlining the purchasing process is a critical first step.
Try to reduce the number of pages users must load as much as possible. For example, make sure customers can edit their cart contents and customization options without leaving the checkout screen.
Similarly, ensure your site preserves the cart content between logins, and allow guest purchases. If a user forgets to login before filling their cart and this information is lost when they log in, they may not want to spend their time doing it all over again.
Mobile-Friendly Customer Support
Customers will be less likely to make mobile purchases if they don’t think they can easily get support as easily on mobile. 27% of consumers say that being unable to contact a business using their preferred communication method results in a poor customer experience.
Phone calls and email are less convenient ways to get in touch with a business via mobile, and it is a good idea to offer support through SMS and instant messaging. Customer support should also pay a significant part in your social media marketing strategy. These enable customers to get quick responses to queries and pick up the conversation at a convenient time.
Instant messaging, social media and SMS chatbots can ensure customers always get a fast response even outside of working hours, and are able to handle many simple customer support tasks. This means they work as a self-service tool for customers needing help, and for issues that require live support, they can pass the details onto a live agent or bring a live agent into the conversation. It is important to research the most important social networks for your audience, or you could waste a lot of time on platforms your customers don’t use.
Mobile UX Design
Your ecommerce store needs to be easy to understand and navigate at a glance on mobile, or it will discourage mobile users from making a purchase. A simple site design and layout are must-follow best practices for any ecommerce store, but this is especially important for mobile shoppers.
Small screens make cluttered page layouts and small fonts hard to take, so always scale objects on the page according to their importance, with the highest priority going to the most important information and call to action. 65% of internet shoppers are primarily visual learners, so the layout and visual design of your site are vital in communicating the value of your business and products.
Color is also a useful tool for drawing attention to the most important parts of a page. Color design can play a significant role in purchasing decisions. Use a contrasting color to highlight calls to action and key details against the rest of the page.
Web Forms
Lengthy web forms can cause a lot of lost conversions. It is vital to avoid overwhelming customers by presenting them with too many fields to fill in at once. Multi-step web forms let you ask for their details in more manageable chunks, without loading multiple pages.
For example, BrokerNotes replaced a menu in their web form which needed three clicks to answer with an image-based field needing only one click. By reducing the number of clicks needed to complete the form, they were able to increase conversions from 11% to 47%.
Typing out details on a virtual keyboard is not ideal, so offering autofill features for payment details and addresses can add a lot of convenience for customers. This should include auto-completing addresses using postal or zip codes, and offering common online payment methods such as Google Wallet and Paypal. These greatly reduce the amount of inputs needed from a user to complete a purchase, improving the buying experience for mobile users trying to make a quick purchase in their free time.
It is also helpful to clearly mark optional fields for time-pressed mobile shoppers. If a field is filled out incorrectly, you can make this problem easier for mobile users to correct. Attach the error message to the relevant field instead of putting it at the bottom of the page, and scroll the user’s screen to the field so they can easily find it.
Optimize With Analytics
There is always room to improve the mobile experience of your ecommerce store, but you won’t know where to start without solid data. This is why you need to track how customers interact with your site. Information such as how long users spend on each page of your site and the links they follow can help you identify the parts of your site which are failing to achieve their conversion goals.
Once you have spotted these areas and started to redesign them, analytics can also help you decide on the best improvements. Split testing is a common method of showing multiple versions of the same page or process, in order to directly compare their performance, and can be very effective at improving conversions.
Send Follow Up Messages
Follow up messages can help turn first-time visitors into repeat customers by showing your appreciation of their purchase and giving them additional reasons to come back. By sending messages based on the items they purchase or browse, you can increase their interest and awareness of other relevant products.
This can be used to send customers highly personalized offers, for example rewarding a repeat customer’s loyalty with a discount for the products they regularly buy, or letting them know an item on their wish list is on sale. 61% of consumers say they are more likely to purchase when a business sends them customized content.
Follow up messages can also help avoid losing customers by reminding them that they haven’t checked out their cart yet, or checking in with a customer who has recently made a complaint or asked for a refund. Smart businesses regularly get in touch with their customers to make sure their experience is positive and address any issues before they lose a customer.
Conclusion
Low mobile conversion rates are caused by inconvenient design and insufficient mobile support. Focus on streamlining the browsing and purchasing processes, and make sure your site design doesn’t clash with the strengths and weaknesses of a smartphone.
By taking advantage of mobile communication methods and reducing the obstacles between customers and making a purchase, these steps will help you increase your mobile conversion rates.
