5 Ways to Keep Your Customers Happy on Mobile

Hi, this Lili Chu reporting to you live from a mobile device. OK, not really, but I always wanted to say that. You know, like the reporters you grew up with.

So let’s frame this with numbers. Forrester Research, a global research and advisory firm that collects proprietary research, consumer and business data, says by 2016, there will be 1 billion smartphone users. Just in the USA, there will be over 257 million smartphones along with 126 million tablets. Does that get anyone’s attention?

Like any marketing, marketing for mobile is all about what the consumer expects. I mean seriously, do expect to sell something to a buyer if you don’t have what they want. Just plain common sense. As Eben Pagan and others say, it is all about entering the conversation the consumer already is having in their head.

So, it’s true in mobile as it is true in every other marketing medium. You must give the mobile user what they expect. So what do they expect?

5 Consumer Expectations for Mobile Devices

1. They expect you to have optimized your site so it will look good on whatever screen size they choose. The challenge is there are many screen sizes, so there is no one size fits all solution. It’s another important reason ThinkBigandGrow Media uses WordPress to build SEO and mobile friendly custom websites. Themes are easily made to respond to the screen size of any device so you don’t have to have special pages for 90% of your content a mobile user wants.

The good news is, even though tablets are becoming very popular (even for home use), your typical, non-responsive website will work OK with most tablets. Nevertheless, it won’t work with a smartphone or other smaller device.

You need to monitor your traffic, and listen and talk to your consumers. If a significant number (you decide for your business what is significant – but I say anything 10% or higher is pretty significant) complain or are accessing your device by mobile, it is time to consider a custom redesign of your website.

If you would like to test your site, Wayne has a free tool where you can see what your website looks like in the various sized devices. Just watch Wayne’s video to see how…

2. Like any website, you need calls-to action. On mobile devices, they typically will make it easy for a user to call your business, or to find direction to your business since that is the most common activity done by mobile browsers.

But have you ever been on a mobile device where the call to action button is so small, you keep getting some other action other than the one you want? Think about it. Make your buttons appear large enough so a consumer is delivered the correct action.

If at all possible, place your call to action at the top. Make it easy to find, so your potential customer takes immediate action and doesn’t get distracted by something else.

3. Your site not only needs to be responsive to size, it needs to be speed responsive. Slow speed of loading is typically considered one of the major factors in consumers bouncing off your site. This is true for both mobile and classic desktop.

Mobile is affected both by your website performance and the speed of the mobile connection. Having your site use functions like server cache, and content distribution networks (CDN) can really speed up your performance without changing your website. Amazon AWS is a great solution for a content distribution network. This loads your images and objects into “the cloud” so they are more readily accessed by web browsers regardless of location.

You can check your sites speed by going here.

4. Keep your design very simple. Again, Wayne and I apologize if you wasted your money on one of those fancy flash sites. That’s too bad. Simple is better, and consumers don’t like the flash sites because they are too slow, and non-responsive.

It is true you can do a lot on a desktop or laptop, but as your viewers move to a smaller screen, complex becomes impossible to navigate. So decide what is really necessary on a page. If needed, move some content to another page. The more simple a page, the easier it is for your mobile viewers. In some cases, you may want pages specifically for mobile, but most of the time this isn’t necessary.

5. Make the important stuff obvious to your viewer. If your page exists for a specific reason, highlight the information most critical to the reason the page exists. Most small business should expect the principle thing a mobile user is looking for is directions and/or a phone number. So make sure you feature these items at the top of your page.

Sure, you can have other information easily available, just highlight what your browser is most commonly looking for. Seriously, when I’m out shopping, I’m not going to read a whole web page about how great you think you are. I want to know where you are and how to get there. If you can show me a great discount up front, that’s cool, too.

There you have it.