Have you checked your phone in the past 15 minutes? Of course you have. So did the 52% of smartphone users in the U.S. alone, according to Gallup.
Mobile usage surpassed PC usage in 2014, and it seems the tables are not going to turn anytime soon. Why?
- It’s obvious that mobile devices are significantly smaller than your average desktop computer. It’s easier to whip out a smartphone from your pocket to read the news versus hauling a laptop out of its case, or getting up to turn on a massive desktop computer.
- The downfall is that the cost of a PC is usually 3 to 4 times higher than the one of a smartphone. Although the prices of PCs drop each year, people in developing countries would rather buy a smartphone simply because they cannot afford a desktop computer.
- Smartphones will completely replace desktop computers for some users in the next few years thanks to improved processing power, larger screen sizes, and options to connect them to virtually any other device.
- It is expected that mobile phone usage reaches a number of 4.77 billion in 2017.
- People carry mobile devices everywhere. Hint: it’s in the name.
While mobile usage is growing exponentially each year, online marketers still have major doubts about investing in mobile ads. Their biggest fears concern some of the following:
Testing time of every ad – not every mobile device responds equally to a particular ad, so the testing time varies from each operating system to another. Examining which ads correspond to which device and optimizing them takes more time than testing ads for a PC.
Screen size – when comparing a screen size of a smartphone with the size of a desktop computer screen, you can deduce why online shop owners stray away from mobile device marketing.
Online shop owners’ concerns are entirely justified given the fact that they can risk losing their time and money.
But not everything is as bad as it sounds. Let’s see what aspects of online shopping can mobile advertising have an impact on.
Brand awareness is the first considerable factor that can be influenced if a proper mobile marketing strategy is maintained. By regularly offering targeted information to potential customers, online retailers could experience changes in their brand’s visibility.
The second element mobile marketing strategy tackles is customer engagement. Customer engagement is linked directly to brand awareness in a way that it ensures people will return to a certain web page if it’s mobile-friendly. They’ll hopefully place more trust in a certain brand in the future.
In addition to brand awareness and customer engagement, the success of a mobile marketing strategy determines the sales conversion rates. A thought-out strategy has not only the power to retain the customer, but it also converts traffic into sales.
The last aspect that a mobile advertising campaign can alter is offline purchase. Not everyone will use their phones to complete the purchasing process. As many as 88% of consumers search online and then buy in a physical store. What’s more, many users take their phones to help them while shopping in brick and mortar stores.
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The chart below shows how many members of a specific age group use their smartphone or their tablet to buy online, according to a Bronto report.
The same report states that laptops are still the leading devices in making an online purchase.
Although using smartphones and tablets is not as widespread as using laptops for buying online, eCommerce owners have a great selection when it comes to advertising strategies on mobile devices.
Mobile app marketing
App marketing shows the biggest potential among the other advertising tactics. People spend around 80% of their time on mobile devices to use apps. Since ads that appear in the apps are quite annoying, online shop owners can leverage the power of app marketing by creating their own apps.
The distribution of a new app is vital for its survival and expansion among mobile users. When thinking about releasing an app, remember it has to be unique, exclusive and useful. Otherwise, all your efforts were in vain.
In-game marketing
According to Mintel, nearly half of Americans use their mobile devices to play games. In-game marketing can appear in form of banner pop-ups, video ads, and full-screen image ads. The higher level of user interaction means you can integrate subtle ads which look like a feature within a game.
Using in-game marketing may have limited user reach, however, there’s a solution. Advertising on multiple games and making your ad informational rather than a distraction is crucial to succeeding in this kind of strategy.
Location marketing
Targeting users has never been easier. Mobile devices enable you to track down a targeted group to know their location. Location marketing can attract a potential customer within the radius of a specific business.
Again, this strategy has a restricted user range, but combining it with another mobile advertising tactic can help extend its full potential.
What about the conversion rates?
The biggest problem with mobile marketing is low conversion rates. Any online retailer’s dream, after he invests in a sound mobile advertising campaign, is to start converting the traffic to his website.
Sadly, it is not as simple as it looks, and often results in losses. Nevertheless, you can make some changes that will have a direct effect on mobile conversion rates.
Optimizing landing pages
Bad landing pages make a potential customer abandon his or her shopping cart. But what’s worse, it can scare the customer away and make them never visit your site again.
Optimizing landing pages starts with reducing the amount of content. The website on the mobile devices loads slower if it contains plenty of images. Try removing unnecessary images from the site. If you really think you need to have all those images, consider resizing them.
Also, make sure you’re providing the users with the most important information only. Too much text will make your website lag even more.
More notably, viewers tend to get bored of old websites. If you don’t want your site design to stuck in the past and therefore suffer fewer conversion rates, it is crucial to update them when your users feel the need for it.
The biggest factor to control the conversion rates is filter options. Mobile devices are not most practical in regards to checking every item separately. With that said, having clear and effective filters will ease the search and speed up the buying process.
Optimizing mobile checkout
Numerous customers abandon the shopping cart because of a complicated checkout process. The main reason they will give up on purchasing is long forms to fill with needless information.
People feel asking for excessive information is an attack on their privacy. Your website ought to have the quickest solution to this problem. The checkout forms requiring only basic information about the customers can be the answer.
Mobile-friendly websites should also have the simplest possible checkout design and support a guest checkout. A guest can later become a regular customer.
Removing pop-up banners
When you’re done with optimizing the landing page and the checkout, it is best to see whether your page suffers from the pop-up banner disease. Users hate it when they cannot skip the banners and it leads to disrupting their decision-making process.
In case a visitor managed to somehow swim through a sea of pop-up banners, they can sometimes appear during the last stages of purchasing. This often ends up with frustration and shopping cart abandonment.
Consider removing pop-up banners completely to enhance the mobile shopping experience and speeding up the whole process.
Mobile marketing is a key element to every successful online advertising strategy. Every online retailer should consider practicing it.
Online retailers sometimes spend hours and hours optimizing their brand’s website, however, they end the year with reporting losses in sales. One of their advertising weak points could be mobile marketing.
Mobile marketing can affect brand awareness, customer engagement, sales conversion rates and offline purchases.
Optimizing the website to a mobile-friendly version and spending some time learning what users expect from online shops can make their purchases a lot less of a fuss.