Is your mobile site fit for purpose?

Rob Thurner, mobile consultant and trainer (ex Incentivated and Clear Channel), says the message is clear – consumers won’t hang around on a mobile site that gives a poor browsing experience…

Most of my training courses start with an open discussion around the pros and cons of mobile as a digital marketing, CRM and commerce channel. Hands shoot up as participants want to get their comments on the white board before others in the room. They all have opinions, positive or negative, usually informed by their experiences as consumers.

But more often than not, this ice-breaker exercise is followed by pregnant pauses when I ask them to explain their own companies’ experiences. This is odd because the majority of them have had an early experiment with messaging or running competitions – and most know what their competitors are up to. Based on the sample of the 950 people I trained last year, the biggest question mark hovers over their mobile internet presence.

Some say they’ve used the mobile budget to build an iPhone or Andoid App, without realising that the majority of their customers don’t (yet) have smartphones.

Optimising your site for mobile is no longer a “nice to have”. Research from John Lewis shows that consumers expect a decent user experience on the mobile internet and will shift allegiance to competitor brands, which offer a better mobile web experience.

The focus for many brands over the past 10 years has been getting the fixed line website right. This is often the reason many brands give for delivering their full site to customers browsing on mobiles. The vast majority of brands – 83% according to Google – still have not optimised their websites for mobile. This stat is mirrored by a rather dismal situation with bounce-rates for mobile sites, which stand at 88% on average. The message is clear to everyone in the training room: consumers won’t hang around on a mobile site that gives a poor browsing experience.

This may not seem like a matter of life and death but to brands in sectors like retail and travel it my not be far from the mark. Digital superbrands including eBay and Amazon have proved the central role of mobile in delivering a personalised mobile internet experience built on previous shopping behaviour data, which is fully integrated with your content management system, and sophisticated targeting. Often to the detriment of brick and mortar retailers, whose bewildered store staff are confronted by growing numbers of smart shoppers doing price comparison shopping in their stores. Many of us are intent on seeing the product in the store, checking if we can buy it cheaper on Amazon, then placing the order using our mobiles and waiting 24 hours for free delivery.

Amazon’s sales on mobile hit $1 billion in 2010, a figure surely surpassed in 2011 and heading north in 2012. User experience is a significant success factor.

Whether you’re buying a pair of skis on your smartphone or replacement cartridges on your feature phone, eBay also detects your handset and delivers a consistently easy browsing experience from product search to reviews and check out. eBay’s year on year sales on mobile grew from $4 billion to $5 billion in 2011.

According to eBay’s head of retail, Angus McCarey, mobiles effect on high street retailers is unavoidable, and comes in the form of “shoppers hitting you in store with internet shopping in their pockets”. eBay calls for collaboration with other retailers.

Peter Fitzgerald, country sales director for Google UK and former Amazon marketer, who delivered the keynote speech at the IDM annual lecture in 2011, likens a poor mobile site to closing your doors on the high street for a couple of days a week. Poor sites turn away customers – and through their social networks, they turn other customers away – into the open doors of your competitors.

This is not the place to debate the merits of partnering with resellers like Amazon or eBay rather than running seasonal sales, or closing down sales, but the disappearance of Woolworths, habitat, Blacks, Best Buy and others from the high street acts an a poignant reminder that mobile commerce, accessed via the mobile web, offers a lifeline to those struggling to keep afloat.

Retailers must act fast to make sure they are providing an optimised mobile sales channel, which is easy to find, quick to navigate, and secure to transact.

There is clear evidence that optimised mobile sites pay dividends. M&S, a true mobile pioneer, has developed a mobile strategy matching the mobile behaviour of its target audience. At the heart of its targeted mobile CRM programme, developed by Incentivated, M&S offers customers an optimised transactional mobile site that handles one-off transactions exceeding £3,000.

Specialist brands are also reaping the rewards of optimised mobile sites. Kiddicare.com is Europe’s largest online nursery retailer, with further European expansion planned for 2012. It is one of the most successful brands to benefit from Google’s support in mobilising retail brands’ web presence.

According to Fred Soneya, Kiddicare’s head of e-commerce: “We identified that our customers’ browsing and shopping habits have changed; consumers are watching product videos, shopping and looking for answers on mobile devices, so support and an interactive community for those experiences are essential.” In order to address these habits and make the online shopping experience accessible to 21st century parents, Kiddicare developed a transactional mobile site to replicate their website offering.

The overall strategy was to create a presence for the brand in consumers’ pockets via their mobile devicea, through which they could access the full range of Kiddicare.com products at any time, and compare prices with its competitors. The fully transactional mobile friendly version of the Kiddicare.com website automatically renders for mobile devices and isn’t a new domain, simply an extension of the existing site. This means that Kiddicare.com’s award winning SEO strategy maintains all of its link equity in mobile search.

The mobile version of the Kiddicare website took just seven weeks to design and build, from concept to launch and, once live, the first customer order was placed within four minutes. Within 12 weeks, mobile accounted for approximately 10% of all Kiddicare.com unique user revenue. Just over a year later mobile accounts for 12% of Kiddicare’s revenue, with this figure expected to grow to 20-25% in 2012.

Back to the training room… It’s clear I’ll need to spend time talking through the seven stage process of designing, building, monitoring and adapting the mobile site for most of the brands represented. And as all “off-site” training groups include marketers from multiple brands and sectors, we’ll be using examples from financial services, automotive, travel, IT and phama sectors, and referencing B2B businesses.

If time allows, I’ll ask the group to get their owns sites on their mobiles and set them a group exercise to mock up designs for the sites (remembering the “three click rule” for accessing content quickly and easily, and the “on tracks” vertical-only navigation rule).

I’ll explain the best ways to drive traffic to sites, how to optimise mobile advertising budgets, the changing world of mobile search, and the value of working closely with offline media channels, as 83% of us are now “multi-screening” – using our mobiles and tablets whilst watching TV – which explains why the successful mobile brands like M&S see spikes in mobile site traffic during primetime TV.

This article has not addressed the relative merits of mobile sites and apps, which can provide a rich user experience for smartphones users. As browser capabilities improve, we’ll start to see more mobile sites looking and performing like apps – but in the short and long run, there is no substitute for the internet, whether accessed on PC or mobile, for brands looking to reach all their customers 24/7, in home and out of home.

Top tips for brands launching mobile sites:

• User experience is fundamental. Make sure content is quick to find and easy to navigate.
• Use handset detection software and redirect to a mobile optimised site matching that handset’s capabilities.
• Ensure all other media channels drive traffic to your site. Add SMS calls to action or QR codes on above the line media, mailers, point of sale materials.
• Be honest – would you bookmark your site? Personalised content, derived from full integration with your CMS, encourages return visits.
• Evaluate payment options and minimise steps in the check-out process to reduce drop off.
• Test the site prior to launch to remedy errors, test text and layout variables to optimise user experience.
• Monitor traffic and page views constantly, and refine content in realtime.