With over half of the Internet traffic being carried out via a smartphone or mobile devices such as a tablet or laptop, there has never been a better time to really get your website into a position to take advantage of this continuing trend. But where do you start?
Responsive Design
If your website hasn’t been updated in say the last 2 or 3 years, it could be that the first thing you should consider is making it responsive.
What does this mean?
In essence, it means using a framework for the site so it responds and changes the layout of the site depending on what type of device being used to view your website. This will mean that the user will find it much easier to interact with your site and view your web pages.
Google has also suggested in the past that responsive design is paramount to help get better rankings on its own search engine results pages. That’s in itself could be a great benefit.
Totally mobile ready
Some of the biggest sources of site traffic are also developing quicker ways to deliver content to users on mobile devices. Currently these facilities are only open to a select number of publishers but they will be widely available by the end of April 2016 and now is a good time to check them out and see who they can be incorporated into your websites to drive even more traffic.
Take a look at Google AMP (https://www.ampproject.org/) and Facebook Instant Articles (https://instantarticles.fb.com/) which will give you some idea of where these big companies are going with mobile technology.
Your website designer or development company can help you with implementing these systems.
Complete mobile journeys
Even if you have a responsive website already and maybe are working with other mobile technology platforms to drive more traffic, it could be worthwhile ensuring all of your customer journeys are mobile enabled as best as possible.
If you link out to a third party for fulfilment for example – it is a very good idea to ensure that they are on top of this as well. The last thing you want to is to develop a fully mobile friendly site and yet when a user wants to book their holiday online or buy an insurance policy on their phone, they can’t as the system isn’t mobile friendly.
Mobile friendly marketing
Lastly – and one most companies forget to consider – is their marketing. Is your marketing mobile friendly? Do you have mobile responsive email templates so if you are sending out a client newsletter or other forms of customer emails – are they responsive? Email is very much alive and well, with yet more and more people reading their emails on their mobile ‘phone, so do make sure your emails and newsletters are mobile friendly. This will make a huge difference to both open rates and click rates.
Are you carrying out any display marketing online? If so you might need to check out specific banner sizes for mobile sites. If you are not displaying the right sizes you could be missing a huge amount of traffic. You can see mobile ad sizes shown on the IAB website.
Summary
As we can see, mobile Internet is not a passing fad and will be the primary way people consume the Internet. If your website is not ready for it, you will be missing out on a growing amount of traffic and revenue. But it is not just about your customer facing pages, ensure your back office processes and ecommerce elements are mobile ready as well as your marketing. We hope this gives you a few ideas to help grow the business you are receiving from your mobile marketing efforts.