When your customers attempt to order something from your website using a mobile device, what is their experience like? If the answer is similar to your desktop experience, that’s simply not enough for where e-commerce is headed.
Mobile traffic already accounts for 57% of all internet traffic, according to BrightEdge. As a result, your business should no longer think of your desktop experience first—it’s time to make the shift to thinking mobile-first.
With more and more of your customers coming to your site through their phones and tablets, it’s essential that your ordering and buying experiences are optimized for those devices.
To ensure that your customers receive a stellar buying experience on mobile, there are several factors you need to take into consideration. We dove into those factors down below to help you outline your own mobile strategy. Check it out.
1. Responsive Website
Fifty-seven percent of internet users say they will not recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site. If your company doesn’t have a good mobile experience, you could be turning potential customers away. But you might be wondering, "Why do users leave on mobile if it’s the same content as on desktop?"
As anyone with a mobile phone or tablet knows, the mobile experience is vastly different from the desktop experience. The screen sizes are smaller to fit in the palm of your hand and the screens also have different aspect ratios (i.e. the screens are different shapes and dimensions). This makes most sites hard to read as content shrinks in an attempt to fit onto a mobile screen.
The first step in creating a great mobile experience is to make sure your website looks great on mobile. To get started, we recommend creating a responsive website that allows your site to scale for any device. With a responsive website, your content will adjust to display optimally on all devices and internet browsers. This is important as it makes your website easier to read and navigate—discouraging mobile users from immediately exiting your site. In addition, a responsive website can reduce your page load time, minimizing the chance for users to exit due to a frustrating loading wheel.
2. Custom Mobile Navigation
While creating a responsive website is extremely helpful, it only solves half of the problem. Beyond the physical differences between mobile and desktop screens, we also interact with our mobile devices differently. Instead of a mouse and keyboard, our fingers become both our navigator and communicator.
By clicking with thumbs, it’s more common to accidentally open menus or visit the wrong page as the buttons are smaller and our cursors (our thumbs and fingers) are much larger. Simply put, mobile users are more likely to get lost in the depths of your site.
Your website’s navigation should be customized for mobile users to help them easily sift through your web pages. This ensures that mobile users won't get lost in the meaty menus of your website and instead are easily able to click through your site and ordering process with their fingers and thumbs. For example, condensing your main navigation into a single collapsible menu helps clean up the page and gives users a hub where they can access your content.
3. Cloud-Based, Responsive CPQ
Previously, we've covered how to optimize your web pages for your mobile customers, but what happens when they enter the ordering process? Is your e-commerce shopping cart optimized for mobile? If you want to increase conversions and avoid exits, your order customization process needs to be optimized for mobile as well. Just having a mobile ordering experience that "works" isn’t enough.
To guarantee that your mobile users have an easy time ordering and customizing your products, make sure your configure-price-quote software (CPQ) is responsive for all devices as well. In addition, your CPQ should be based in the cloud to improve site load times. Our own Powertrak CPQ software is both cloud-based and responsive to improve load times and reduce the number of mobile shopping carts that never make it to checkout.
4. Mobile Solutions
E-commerce likely doesn’t account for 100% of your business. Therefore, it’s important to provide your sales reps with an improved mobile experience as well. After all, sales reps spend about half of their day selling remotely. By allowing your sales team to easily manage their clients on the go, they can increase the frequency at which they interact with clients, strengthening their relationships.
Provide your team with a mobile sales tool so they can interact with customers anywhere, anytime. For example, our Powertrak for Tablets gives users mobile tools to create and submit sales quotes, product orders, project time entry, and billing expenses on any browser-enabled device. This helps your sales reps become more responsive to customers, improving the customer experience both in general and on mobile.
5. Personalization
According to Marketo, 78% of consumers will only engage in offers from a brand if they have personalized it just for them. But an Experian survey found that companies are held back by several data challenges, including the amount of time it takes to receive data, data inaccuracies, and lack of data. While customers want personalized offers, companies aren’t always able to deliver them.
To ensure your company is receiving customer data that you can use to personalize your mobile experience, track users carefully throughout their web sessions. If you haven’t already, sign up for a free Google Analytics account to begin tracking how mobile users interact with and behave on your website.
In addition, make sure your CPQ software has the ability to record user purchase data. This data can help you determine what mobile users want to order, how much they want to pay, and what turns them off to help you form a personalized offer that increases your conversion rate and revenue.
Take Your Customer Experience to the Next Level
The customer experience is evolving to create a more convenient and seamless experience for customers across all devices. Discover more ways CPQ solutions, in particular, can help improve the customer experience by checking out common customer complaints solved with CPQ software.