Building a Mobile-Friendly Website

Part 2 of our Mobile Marketing Series

Last week we dipped our toes into an ever-changing and exciting world of Mobile Marketing.  You enter Part 2 of the Mobile series, armed with knockout customer insights and a vocabulary full of jargon terms you already used to impress everyone at Monday’s department meeting.  The next step is to build a proper Mobile webpage, which will not only convert potential clients into paying customers, but increase positive association with your brand.

 

Seeing Through Your Customers’ Eyes
Access your website through a Mobile device, and see it through the customer’s eyes. As expected, the design and layout of what looks good on a personal computer doesn’t translate well into mobile experience.  If you’re squinting to see the font, so are your frustrated customers. If you’re having trouble navigating through the pages, your customers are contemplating checking out your competitor. If the page is still loading by the time you finish this paragraph, the customer already left.

Cashing In on the Insights
The insights you gathered are a blueprint for your website. After monitoring and analyzing your traffic through Google, you will know what mobile devices your customers are using. iPhone, Android, Blackberry or tablets have different  strengths and weaknesses, so it’s crucial you understand them. For instance: if your customers are primarily using an iPhone, keep in mind that it cannot run Flash (so don’t use it).  Android and iPhone use touchscreen navigation, while Blackberries might not.

Satisfying a Need
Looking at your Mobile Segmentation analysis, ask what NEED does your website satisfy for your customer? Depending on your insights you may arrive at different conclusions. If your customers frequently get lost while trying to find your location, they access your mobile website for directions or your phone number. If that’s the case, make sure that the first page that loads has your phone number and directions.   If they are looking for prices, make it brain-dead easy for them to find and buy items. If they’re looking for coupons, you can offer a special for signing on Foursquare or “Liking” you on Facebook/ following you on Twitter.  Satisfying their need is your first priority. Users who cannot find what they are looking for or are have trouble navigating through the store check-outs, often leave halfway through the transaction, never to return.

Keep it simple. I mean it.
Everybody knows your cool website has flashy graphics, ready-to-download case studies and well-written bios, but nobody wants to see it on their smartphone.  Slow connection speeds and pay-per-byte data plans will make the experience of going to your website expensive and unbearably slow. Keep the graphics to a minimum and focus on satisfying the customer’s needs.

Small Screens = Large Fonts
Unless your customers are rocking an iPad, they’ll have a hard time seeing anything written in regular font.  Make the font larger, and test it on mobile devices. Your mobile page should fit neatly into the screen of the hand-held device and spitting out easily-digestible content. Buttons, links and navigation tools should also be bigger to make navigation between pages easier (especially with touch-screen devices).

Click to Call
If you’re listing a phone number that the customer might want to contact you with, make sure that it’s “click to call.” Once the customer clicks (or touches) the phone number they will have an option to automatically dial it, eliminating the hassle to write it down(while driving).

Listen to Feedback
The biggest mistake you can make is ignore your customers while building a mobile website specifically designed for them. Involve them in the process by asking about and monitoring their mobile use. When the beta version of your website comes out, bring in a few loyal customers you trust and test it out. Observe and improve.

Deep Thoughts About Ending Paragraphs
If you haven’t found a mobile development expert within your department’—congratulations you are the new mobile web development expert of your department! As the newly-crowned mobile expert it is your responsibility to enlist support of digital advertising veterans to make this thing a reality (what about The Yaffe Group? I hear they’re pretty good). Stay tuned, next week brings the final installment of the Mobile Series. Use the internet-comment-machine below to post your mobile thoughts.

Read part 3 of this series: "3 Successful Mobile Case Studies & What You Can Learn From Them"

 Dmitri Pivtorak, Socially Mobile