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Back to School: 8 tips for enhancing mobile customer experience

In Part 2 of our Back-to-School series, an expert offers tips on enticing the mobile shopper and ensuring the mobile retail experience is rewarding for the consumer.

July 8, 2015

This is the second of a 10-part series Retail Customer Experience will be publishing through July and August to help retailers shape and hone the all-important back-to-school sales strategy. We’re looking for some great ideas and efforts for the final series parts so if you have a back-to-school retail customer experience to shareemail us! The first part, on why pre-summer months are not too early to move on the Back-to-School effort, can be found here.

One of the biggest defining trends in today’s Back-to-School retail customer strategy is the increasing use and dependence of mobile devices as consumers embrace such tools for shopping and browsing, both online and in the brick-and-mortar environment.

As Retail Customer Experience noted in the first part of this series having just a simple app doesn’t come close to what today’s consumers expect and want when shopping via an app at a retail establishment.

“Mobile traffic may be skyrocketing, but retailers still struggle to optimize their mobile experience for greater engagement and purchase,” Bob Michelian, EVP, marketing services at Connexity, told Retail Customer Experience. Connexity has 15 years of experience helping retailers and marketers sell online via its retail network, proprietary technology, and advanced audience modeling.

Michelian offered eight strategies that retailers should consider in deploying a mobile retail customer experience strategy:

1. Although desktop pages may be growing in size, it is critical to make sure the mobile site loads as quickly as possible. Pages optimized for speed in mobile have lower bounce and exit rates. Statistics show you lose 11 percent of conversion for every 1-second delay in load times. So optimize product pages for speed: Compress images. Reduce bloat: write lean code and combine common pieces of code to increase loading time (this especially affects mobile). Be especially careful about too much Javascript. Minimize dependency requests.
2. Sites with many products and categories are difficult to casually browse. Extensive filtering and sorting proves to be more challenging because there is usually a visibility problem: it’s difficult to find the filter button, and it takes more taps, clicks and screens to carry out a filter than on desktop. Make sure you display a prominent and easy-to-use search bar. Flatten website traffic — no item more than two to three filters deep because “flattening” helps improve organic traffic. This is particularly true in mobile, where users are less primed to browse and filter extensively.
3. Most mobile pages have pinch zoom disabled, and yet this is a feature users need to give them the confidence to purchase. Usability tests and customer feedback reveal customers want to pinch zoom on product images. Add the pinch to zoom feature for product images in mobile.
4. Options for saved payment information (for example PayPal) boost mobile conversions because users don’t need to repeatedly enter payment information. There is a better completion rate across returning customers using payment services. Checkout needs to be as flawless and simple as possible. Offer stored checkout options so consumers don’t need to enter payment information manually.
5. Mobile sites have less visual real estate, making it difficult for the customer to find all the latest daily promotions (although this is important to them). Thus, you’re likelier to lose the deal-seeking crowd completely in mobile. Customers who click from email into a promotion in mobile can’t find any of the other promotions on mobile sites, express frustration. You must rethink how you promote deals on mobile vs. on desktop.
6. It’s important to prioritize what shoppers actually want to achieve in mobile, not what you want them to do (or believe they want) in mobile. A/B testing showed changing the hierarchy of information in mobile based on actual customer use leads to higher completion of tasks. Redesign mobile site navigation and hierarchy to reflect actual usage of mobile users. In some cases this may mean moving away from pushing mobile purchase.
7. Users abandon/bounce from mobile sites at a higher rate when they promote a “download our app” page overlay, banner or takeover. If you have both an app and a mobile site, understand why a customer would choose to go to one over the other: It’s true that conversion and engagement are higher on the app, however shoppers hit your mobile site for a different reason and you must respect that choice. A huge banner promoting your app represents a distraction from what they’re trying to accomplish on mobile web in that moment, and causes frustration. Do not use a "download our app" overlay when a customer lands on mobile site. If you have one, take it down or move it to the bottom.
8. Mobile real estate is limited, but usability labs and comments reveal users want to see more products on one page. Scrolling is tedious. A single column of products leads to an unnecessary amount of scrolling, which results in customer impatience and bounces. For the most part the customer wants two columns and four to six products on the screen. Be aware: three columns may make the product images too small. Test your way into a sweet spot.

All the tips, said Michelian, are geared toward providing the mobile retail shopper an inviting, easy, enticing and engaging experience.

“When it comes to optimizing your mobile experience, there is no silver bullet,” said Michelian. “The reality is, different shoppers may react in unique ways to the same experience. However many of the above tactics have arisen as a common theme amongst our retail clients over the years; hopefully they provide a blueprint for A/B testing your way into a mobile approach that works best for engaging your audience in mobile.”