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By Alex Cramer
Willie Sutton was one of the most famous bank robbers in American history. He held up his first bank at the age of seventeen and over a forty-year career, he committed more than 100 robberies and stole over $2 million in cash.
When a reporter once asked him why he robbed banks, he gave a simple reply: “Because that’s where the money is.”
And when we tell you that you need to optimize your brand for mobile shoppers, the reason is pretty much the same: Because that’s where the money is.
According to Statista, mobile e-commerce retail sales in the United States reached a staggering $362 billion in 2022, and are projected to almost double to $710 billion by 2025.
Mobile shopping isn’t just the future of e-commerce, it’s the present, which means that if you’re not riding this wave, then you’re under it.
Built for Speed
According to Hubspot, smartphone users expect a webpage to load in four or fewer seconds. Any longer than that and your bounce-back rate skyrockets.
Keep in mind that mobile shoppers will usually be using WiFi signals or cellular networks of varying strength and quality, so you don’t want your mobile site to feature too many bandwidth-sucking features like auto-play videos or excessive visual elements.
Focus on text and quick loading images to make sure that the spinning loading pinwheel doesn’t drive away your customers before they even get to your site.
Optimize the User Experience
Building out your web page for mobile shoppers requires more than scaling your website to fit an iPhone screen. Technically this works but your text will be hard to read and your buy buttons will be small and tough to use.
To get the conversions you want, you need to have a mobile responsive website design. This means that you create multiple versions of your website, each one of which is customized to run on a specific screen type and size.
This will usually mean your site will display fewer images, center your text and most importantly make your “add to cart” and “buy” buttons easy to find and use for mobile shoppers.
A visually optimized shopping experience is essential to converting your prospects into sales.
Simplify the Buying Journey
We understand the appeal of having your customer create an account before making a purchase but mobile shoppers are often on the go and don’t have the time or the desire to two-finger type a bunch of info into your check-out screen.
You want the mobile purchase journey to be short and simple. That means if you do ask shoppers to make an account, you should make it easy for them to opt-out.
You want to create the shortest possible path between “add to cart” and “complete purchase”. Design your check-out process so that your buyer has to navigate as few pages and menus as possible when making a purchase,
Even small steps, such as using address predictors and making sure your form fields are vertically aligned for easy navigation, can help push up your conversion rate.
Optimize Your Mobile Ads
It’s not just your website, but your digital ads that need to be optimized for mobile shoppers.
Social media apps are designed to keep users scrolling quickly. You might glance at a headline or pause to tap a heart on a cute Insta snap, but social media apps train users to move to the next piece of content as quickly as they can swipe their thumbs up.
Avoid walls of text or slow-loading videos for your mobile ads because shoppers won’t take the time to look at them. Rather, focus on either eye-catching images or short, punchy text with some kind of hook. You need to give your buyer a reason to stop and actually pay attention to what you’re saying when they’re conditioned to quickly move on to the next thing.
Mobile shoppers are the fastest-growing segment of your customer base and success with converting their sales depends on understanding their behavior, buying habits and expectations and then optimizing your brand to meet their needs.
