Mobile optimization

How important is mobile in your marketing strategy? Very important, according to recent research by Accenture and Google.

The study evaluated hundreds of high traffic mobile sites in the Asia Pacific region, with a focus on Australia and New Zealand.

It confirms what many of us have suspected: customers are using their smartphones to do research in-the-moment. As soon as items, experiences or services come to mind, customers are pulling out their smartphones to look for more information.

Though here's the best part — most of these customers are ready to buy. 74 percent of Australian consumers will act on their mobile searches by visiting a store or making a purchase.

Brands that have focused on creating great mobile experiences have the best chance of making a sale.

The five categories that create a great mobile experience

If your brand hasn't created a good mobile experience, then you're at risk of losing your customers. Here are the five main categories that top-performing mobile websites excel at.

Findability

Mobile sites that have great searching and filtering capabilities come out on top. Users want to find the right product quickly. Don't make them search too hard for what they want.

Product pages

Key product information is concise and easy to read. Mobile product pages with consistent layout and prominent calls to action are the winners.

Registration and conversion

The last place you want to make life harder for your users is at the bottom of the funnel. Top mobile sites have registration and payment experiences that are simple, safe and easy to complete.

Mobile design

Mobile screens are small, so optimized design is a critical factor in mobile experiences. Clear headings, a logical layout and consistent branding pull every element of the mobile experience together.

Speed

The best mobile websites are optimized for speed. Pages loading slower than three seconds disrupt the user experience and result in the loss of 53 percent of users.

Speed is a major pain point for mobile users

Mobile users are entirely unwilling to accept slow websites. Of all the high-ranking mobile websites assessed in Australia and New Zealand, speed was the worst performing category. 55 percent had worse speeds than the APAC and industry standards.

For speeds to be considered "good" by APAC standards, mobile websites need to be visually available to users in less than 5.5 seconds. Improve your mobile website speed by:

Ensuring content is compressed correctly: pick the right settings for your images including quality, size and format. Look into progressive JPEGs or gzip compression
Enabling browser-side caching: this helps the user's browser reuse previously fetched responses to improve load time
Fix backend bottlenecks: inspect your existing backend infrastructure and implement a monitoring solution that will alert your developers of any anomalies. Try to promptly fix any bottlenecks that occur

How to make the most of the mobile experience

Customers will be visiting your website on their mobiles. It's a fact. So, you may as well make the most of the opportunity and convert as many of them to paying customers as possible. 65 percent of mobile users will abandon a poorly designed mobile site.

Here are some things you can do to make the most of your mobile traffic:

Allow your users to create a wishlist of their favorite items
Use dynamic search functions that allow for multiple filters without reloading the page
Only send a user to a new tab when it's 100 percent necessary
Suggest popular searches with an autocomplete function
Implement a spell-check in your search bar
Correctly tag input boxes for autofill functionality (so users can checkout faster)

Over the long term, you may also want to consider implementing concepts and strategies that are focused on your customer journey. This will give you a holistic view of your user experience and entire marketing funnel.

Uncover customer insights

Understand how your customers are behaving on your website through analytics software like Heap or Google Analytics. Engage in user testing and implement an NPS to understand where your customer's pain points are.

Design and implement solutions

Take action on the insights you uncover. Set up an internal process to prioritize fixing the gaps in the user experience. From simple design changes through to complex backend implementation, the path to a mobile-optimized website is one that involves almost every team in a company.

Test and learn

Continuously improve your website through constant testing and validation. Monitor your website's speed and ensure you're always looking for ways to make the user experience better. Keep an eye on performance metrics and make sure you're always delighting your customers.

See the full report from Accenture and Google.