3 Ways to Increase Your Mobile Conversion Rate
Have you ever ordered a pizza while walking down the street and had it delivered by the time you got home? According to Forrester Research, mobile purchases are expected to generate $31 billion by 2016, a 39 percent growth from 2011. Since a large portion of mobile purchases will not be in-store, but rather "remote commerce," you need to think about how you not only drive traffic to your mobile site or app, but how you increase mobile conversion rates and take a piece of this growing sales channel.
While consumers are connected and want to shop on their mobile devices, friction continues to inhibit purchases. According to Shop.org's State of Retailing Online report, more than 69 percent of consumers abandon their shopping carts. Four in five experience problems when conducting transactions on mobile devices and 43 percent of those that experience problems abandon the transaction. The number of consumers who intend to buy on your mobile site or app that simply walk out the "door" is enormous. After you spend money to create a robust mobile experience, to have shoppers leave at the point of purchase is a massive wasted opportunity.
Imagine if you could capture more purchases from consumers who are already coming through your mobile channels. If you could get those existing visitors to transact, how much more in sales and profits would that generate considering you already have the sunk costs for the mobile app or site, marketing costs to drive the user to your store and more?
To increase m-commerce conversions, the consumer experience needs to be easy, fast and secure. Below are three simple rules that will directly impact how you optimize for mobile.
1. Make it easy. More than half of smartphone users (51 percent) are more likely to purchase from retailers with a mobile-specific website, but less than 5 percent of retailers have a mobile site. While often overlooked, a crucial step to ensuring mobile sales is to optimize your site for mobile devices so the shopping experience is as easy as possible for consumers.
Here are some ways to make the consumer experience easy:
- Limit the number of SKUs on your mobile site. There's no reason to make your entire inventory available; evaluate your assortment and only show categories that shoppers are more likely to purchase on the go.
- Have a highly visible search function. Shoppers don't want to browse through each product to find what they want.
- Unless it's necessary, limit the use of text. Scrolling through pages of text on a small screen is challenging for consumers.
- Optimize your images. Make sure they're sized appropriately for a small screen, and offer close-up views so shoppers can get a better feel for the product.
- All devices aren't created equally. Use device detection so that your site is optimized best for the phone your customer is using.
2. Make it fast. A crucial element needed to decrease shopping cart abandonment is to make the experience fast. According to website and applications monitoring firm Gomez, 74 percent of users will abandon a site after waiting five seconds on a mobile device. Furthermore, a one-second delay can result in a 7 percent loss in conversions, according to the Aberdeen Group. Consumers are now walking down the street with your app in their hands; can you get them to make a purchase before the light switches to "walk"?
Here are some tips on how to make the mobile shopping experience faster:
- Reduce the number of clicks (or touches) it takes to get to checkout. Once the shopper gets to the checkout process, minimize the steps and lengthy forms. Create a faster checkout by allowing customers to register once and then make future purchases with a few steps.
- Don't add unnecessary hurdles to jump over. If a page load only needs one step, don't make it two so you can capture an email address or add a flashy image.
- Eliminate page redirects and decrease page load time, one of the biggest frustrations among consumers about using mobile phones for shopping.
3. Make it secure. A consumer study by AT&T's Sterling Commerce and Demandware found that 28 percent of consumers are concerned about their security when shopping on their mobile phones. To increase m-commerce adoption, ensure consumers trust that your m-commerce channels are safe.
There are plenty of ways to communicate and enforce safety and security for mobile devices, including the following:
- Authenticate customers through their mobile phone number. You can partner with a financial institution or third-party vendor to help create this kind of secure shopping experience.
- Don't allow sensitive data such as credit card account numbers to be stored on mobile devices. Your payments provider should be able to store this information securely in the cloud so your customers are confident their data won't be at risk if a mobile device is lost or stolen.
- Even if customers’ credit card numbers are stored in your system, require customers to enter the CVV code on the back of their credit cards prior to making a purchase. This adds a step to the checkout process but it gives your customers peace of mind.
By taking these steps, you'll see real return on investment from m-commerce. Rather than pray for conversions in this emerging channel, m-commerce will be a revenue generator that will also drive higher customer loyalty.
Rodger Desai is co-founder and CEO of Payfone.