Your goal as an eCommerce owner is to guide customers toward conversions, to entice visitors to make a purchase. Your mobile experience should facilitate this journey. A cumbersome experience will lead to customer leakage as they simply head elsewhere. There’s so much choice, they can afford to do so.
The stakes are high. In this blog, we’ll explore essential tips and strategies to help you improve your conversion rates on mobile devices.
It’s crucial to understand why mobile optimisation is so important for eCommerce businesses. Hubspot reports that younger users, including 80% of Gen Z and 62% of millennials, prefer mobile search over desktop. Hubspot also states that marketers report mobile devices were responsible for more than half of their annual traffic.
People primarily shop via their phones, and this trend is likely to continue. The takeaway? Your eCommerce store’s performance on mobile devices directly impacts your bottom line.
A poor mobile experience can lead to high bounce rates and low engagement.
Or, in other words, lost sales.
On the other hand, a well-optimised mobile site enhances the user experience and increases customer satisfaction. These two combine to drive higher conversion rates and more revenue for your business. It pays to pay attention to mobile.
Let’s get into some actionable tips:
1. Optimise Your Mobile Menu for Easy Navigation
The menu is one of the most critical elements of your mobile site. It’s the gateway to all of your content, so its usability on mobile devices must be frictionless. Again, to reiterate, this is a literal part of the customer journey on your site. Any confusion or challenge here is enough to dissuade the customer from persevering.
- Ensure that your mobile menu is easily accessible and navigable with a single finger. Users should be able to find what they’re looking for without having to scroll or hunt through complicated submenus.
- Make sure your menu doesn’t extend off-screen, which can frustrate users and make navigation difficult. Instead, consider a collapsible or drop-down menu that is intuitive and user-friendly.
Don’t fall at this first hurdle before your visitors even get to see your products. Play around with the mobile version for yourself – what do you notice? Is there anything that irritates you as a user as you navigate the menu? Anything that’s a bit of a pain is an issue you need to fix.
2. Ensure Hero Images and Advertisements Are Mobile-Friendly
Hero images and advertisements are essential for grabbing the attention of your visitors as part of your above-the-fold content. As such, they need to work on mobile distinctly, just as you need to make them work on desktop:
- Resize to ensure users can read the text and the images are still impactful. If users have to pinch and zoom to read the content, they’re likely to leave your site.
- Use carousel ads instead of making users scroll down a long list of ads. Carousels let you display multiple ads without taking up too much space.
3. Highlight Featured Products Prominently
Featured products tend to be your best sellers, right? Or at least something new you want to highlight. It’s essential that they’re easy to find on your mobile site. How do you ensure that?
- Prominent placement – Display featured products near the top of your homepage, where they’re immediately visible to mobile users. This reduces the need for excessive scrolling ( a running theme here!) and keeps your best products front and centre.
- CTA Buttons – Include clear and compelling call-to-action (CTA) buttons, such as “Shop Now” or “Add to Cart,” near to your highlighted products that are easy to tap on mobile devices.
Both these conscious decisions pave the way for exactly what you want: a customer seeing your best products and tapping to lead to a conversion.
4. Improve Product Category Thumbnails
Product categories are crucial for helping users navigate your site, especially on mobile devices where screen space is limited.
So, ensure that your product category thumbnails are clear and easy to read by avoiding using small text or cluttered images that may be difficult to decipher.
Visual cues, such as icons and images, can also help users quickly identify categories without having to read through text (another space-saving measure!)
5. Enhance Category Page Browsing
Once users navigate to a category page, the browsing experience should be smooth and efficient.
The best option for you is often a two-column layout. Again, you guessed it by now, this facilitates easy browsing on mobile devices, even as our smartphones have expanded in size. This layout allows users to see more products at once without having to continuously scroll to see images and text.
The ability to search within a category page should also be smooth on mobile. Filters should be accessible with a single tap and should allow users to refine their search results quickly.
A well-designed, clutter-free category page can help users find what they’re looking for faster. The faster they can locate a product, the quicker they can make a purchase.
6. Streamline Product Pages for Conversions
Okay, so we’re progressing from homepage to category pages to product pages. If the customer has made it this far on their mobile device, there’s a chance for a conversion. You need to do everything you can to remove obstacles to conversion here.
- Above the fold – Place all the critical product information, including images, buying options, and the “Add to Cart” button, above the fold if possible. Users should not have to scroll to see essential details or take action. Users can scroll down for supplementary information if they want. The point here is to ensure this small area covers the basics for the visitor.
- Clear shipping costs – Show shipping costs prominently on the product page. Hidden or unclear shipping information is a common cause of cart abandonment, so make sure this information is easy to find.
7. Make Contact and Support Options Easily Accessible
Making the shipping costs clear is part of a broader set of ‘trust signals’ you need to send to customers to demonstrate your credibility. Another signal is making it easy to access help when needed. Providing this excellent customer support is key to building trust and converting visitors into customers.
- Ensure that your chat feature is easy to access on mobile devices. A visible and functional chat button that doesn’t impose too much on the experience is ideal. A quick chat via mobile can help to resolve any last-minute doubts to encourage a conversion.
- You also need to supply visible contact info for people who would rather send an email or call. This helps reassure customers that they can reach out if they have any questions or concerns.
These steps are all about increasing consumer confidence in your store. The challenge lies in landing on an intelligent mobile design that accomplishes all of the above while remaining smooth and visually appealing.
Optimise for Mobile Success
The stats all reflect a reality where mobile search is the standard, especially for younger customers. This ultimately means the bulk of your traffic will come from mobile devices. This requires a radical shift for business owners – you may need to even think of your site from a mobile-first perspective.
This conscious mindset will help you make decisions that lead to better conversion rates for your store.
And the good news is that a series of small changes – optimising menus, hero images, product pages, and contact options – can combine to create a seamless mobile experience.
Our team of experts at Donohue can help you create a mobile experience that impresses customers white driving sales. Reach out to us today for a free consultation on optimizing your eCommerce store for mobile devices.
