It is very important for online retailers to invest in mobile-specific landing pages. There are many online retailers, yet some of them lack fully optimized mobile landing pages. A higher percentage of people make purchases on mobile phones now, and this will only increase in years to come.
During Cyber weekend, mobile sales increased to 16%. Mobile queries turn into calls or into store visits as users engage more with mobile devices versus desktop computers. Many consumers performed a mobile search after seeing an ad. Click through rates and CPCs are higher on mobile devices versus tablets and computers. It’s important for retailers to get their mobile site up and running as consumers are doing a lot of comparison shopping to find the best deals and promotions. I know I am.
Below are some basic tips for your mobile landing pages.
- What’s most frustrating for consumers is waiting for a site to load. Your site should load in under 5 seconds (less than 20 KB total for mobile pages).
- Always include a call to action such as click to call, click to find a store, scroll down to see offer/promotion, click here for coupon code, etc…
- You can geo target your visitors and obtain exact GPS coordinates where available. For example, you can show visitors your nearest store with distance from their current location.
- Make sure your content is available and visible for mobile devices such as designing your site using jQuery, HTML5 and not Flash – and use JPG or GIF image formats.
- As far as ad copy on your mobile site, this will have to be much shorter than on regular landing pages as mobile screen sizes are much smaller than computers. Your headings will need to be only 3-4 words, the ad copy will need to be only 2-3 points and every wording should add value and clearly convey your message. You may consider using more appealing icons/graphics to sell your product to reduce your ad copy.
- Your mobile site should be readable without having the consumer zoom in. The minimum font size should be about 16 pixels. There should be a contrast between the font color and background.
- Make sure your mobile landing page functions in both landscape and portrait views.
- The top mobile user action is making that phone call so include your full phone number and make sure that it’s clearly visible and tappable/clickable. All links and call to action buttons should lead consumers to the actual information on your products or whatever you are promoting.
- Ease of navigation is also important as you don’t want to frustrate your consumers. What would help is adding a search bar, back to home, and menu options.
Tom Waterfall has written three blog posts on considerations for optimizing your mobile and tablet sites: his posts are found here in Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Tom will help you better understand what testing you should be doing for your mobile and tablet visitors and how that can impact your bottom line.
