Table of Contents
Year after year, the functionality and sophistication of mobile technology increases. With more customers using mobile devices and channels than ever before, it’s never been more important for marketers to evaluate the strength of their mobile offering and take steps to improve it.
What is Mobile Optimization?
Mobile optimization is the process of ensuring that visitors accessing a website from mobile devices have an experience optimized for mobile use. This process is usually broken down into four key elements:
- Responsive design: Focused on building your website so it adjusts dynamically, based on the screen size and orientation of the user’s device.
- Fast load times: Because nobody wants to stare at a blank page, least of all mobile users who are on the go.
- Touch-friendly navigation: Designed to make sure navigating the website is quick and easy. This can involve making sure buttons and links are easily tappable and spaced appropriately.
- Readable content: Focused on making sure the content on your site is easily readable without pinching to zoom.
When mobile optimization is done correctly, it’ll yield results from increased Google search rankings to better conversions.
Why Is Mobile Optimization So Important?
Today’s marketers are faced with the challenge of optimizing content across multiple channels, and mobile is one of the most important because of the huge part it plays in consumers’ daily lives.
Optimizing for mobile encompasses the entire customer experience, and when done properly, it compliments every interaction a customer has with your brand.
According to Statista, over 50% of all worldwide web traffic comes from mobile phones. As more people are born into the mobile era, that number is only set to rise. As a result, focusing on the mobile aspect of the digital user experience is crucial, because it plays such an integral part in our lives.
The mobile shift is happening, but it certainly isn’t just starting. Organizations are allocating resources and budgets to take advantage of the mobile shift, and for good reason – mobile allows unprecedented access to current and potential customers.
6 Tactics to Improve Your Mobile Optimization
So, you know mobile optimization is important – how do you put it into practice? Let’s take a look at six tactics to help you tap into the full potential of mobile marketing:
1. Implement responsive email design
Did you know that over 50% of all email opens occur on mobile devices? If your emails aren’t optimized for mobile devices, that’s one easy way to rack up unsubscribes, drop your deliverability, and lose customers.
As a result, implementing responsive email design is a crucial part of mobile optimization. This means switching out your classic designs for mobile-responsive templates that automatically switch up their format when they’re opened on mobile to single-column designs and larger, readable text that makes consuming your content easy. Touch-friendly buttons are essential to navigation and engagement – and don’t forget to test your emails to see how they render across various devices and email clients.
Emarsys customer? Use our Inbox Preview tool to quickly check out how your emails will look in Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook and more.
2. Create engaging, mobile-centric experiences
Mobile optimization and marketing strategies must be carefully implemented or brands risk alienating their customer base. After all, marketers are reaching customers on one of their most personal possessions: their mobile phones.
You need to provide highly personalized, engaging, and mobile-centric content across all of these channels in a way that is consistent as the user jumps from one interaction to another. Beyond ensuring your website is mobile responsive, you can increase the personalization of product recommendations and in-app messaging, and automatically trigger personalized responses as your website or app is used, boosting conversion rates and increasing the number of active customers.
In addition, brands must also ensure their customer service and assistance support is mobile-centric. FAQs and contact information must not only be available but also built to accommodate a wide range of screens for maximum effectiveness. After all, customers tend to have short attention spans when using mobile devices. As such, if they must search or zoom in for assistance, they are likely to simply navigate away or close the app altogether. All customer experiences, from shopping to buying to customer support, must be mobile optimized and streamlined.
3. Utilize mobile messaging tactics
More than 4.2 billion people worldwide use text as a communication method, and billions of texts are sent every day.
This level of usage represents a major opportunity for marketers to reach their customers in one of the most impactful ways yet: intelligent SMS marketing. Adding mobile messaging to a marketing strategy allows brands to reach their target customers even when they are offline. These mobile messages, whether in or out of app, can work within existing omnichannel strategies to create maximum value for customers.
4. Optimize page load times for mobile devices
Your customers expect instant access to information from your brand. If they don’t get it, a big chunk of them is going to bounce in search of another brand that can deliver more quickly.
In fact, a crazy 53% of customers will abandon a site if it takes longer than three seconds to load. To enhance the user experience and retention, it’s crucial to optimize your page load times for mobile devices. Here are some key strategies:
- Compress images
- Minimize HTTP requests
- Enable browser caching
- Optimize CSS and javascript
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Prioritize mobile-friendly content
Focus on these steps, and you’ll boost your page load speed to the point where it has a noticeable impact on traffic, pages per session, and conversions.
5. Test & retest mobile tactics
Mobile tactics change fast and often – one that worked six months ago will no longer be as effective or impactful today. As a result, to be successful in the increasingly mobile world, you need to test and retest your mobile strategies and optimize them accordingly.
Real-time data and insights provided by tracking data will allow marketers visibility into how their customers interact with their mobile devices and into the performance of their mobile marketing programs.
6. Improve mobile site navigation and user interface design
Data shows that half of your website visitors are likely viewing from mobile devices. With the limited screen space that phones afford their users, you need to make every element of your website count.
Dead space and clunky design features are an easy way to lose traffic and harm your sales, so you need to make sure each element on your site works to deliver a smooth, roadblock-free user experience.
Here are some practical ways to put this into action:
- Keep navigation simple: Trim down large header menus and focus on adding essential sections into a collapsible “hamburger” menu.
- Sticky navigation bars: Customer scrolling a product page? Don’t make them have to go back to the top to make a purchase. Add a sticky “Add to Cart” navigation bar that follows them as they scroll down the page and disappears when they head back to the top.
- Design for one-handed use: Not all of your users will have both hands free when they’re on-site. Focus on putting essential buttons within easy reach of their thumb.
Conclusion
The role mobile plays in today’s digital marketing world will likely keep growing as mobile usage continues to skyrocket. By implementing key mobile optimization tactics and strategies, marketers can deliver exceptional experiences through every channel and every device. Embrace the mobile shift and optimize your digital products for mobile to stay ahead in the competitive landscape.
