Despite the growing prevalence of mobile eCommerce, greater volumes of traffic surrounding shoppers have struggled to convert into mobile sales. Addressing this disparity could be the key for marketers when it comes to transforming their fortunes in welcoming greater volumes of custom.
Today, the majority of online shopping traffic comes from portable devices like smartphones and tablets. With 60% of eCommerce traffic coming from mobile devices, the fact that just 40% of sales are completed through the same method is a stark contrast to the growing trend.
Despite technology surrounding mobile browsing improving at a rapid rate, the customer journey through sales funnels is evidently causing a breakdown in the purchasing process that isn’t present in desktop browsing. Marketers and businesses must act to address this disconnect or risk losing out on their conversions.
Mitigating Cart Abandonment
Let’s take a look at the cause of the gap between mobile eCommerce browsing and sales. The past decade has been punctuated by widespread smartphone adoption, and the ability for huge audiences to access online services – and, significantly, eCommerce – has been one of the biggest developments in the world of online marketing.
The gap between mobile traffic and sales is still significant across a range of industries. Most notably, travel sales are almost 50% lower than traffic when it comes to browsing and buying on smart devices.
Smartphones have become commonplace across many developed nations around the world today, so what drives this fear of converting on mobile? Let’s take a deeper look into why sales don’t necessarily follow on from traffic in a mobile landscape:
One key reason may stem from the limitations that navigating on mobile devices conjures up. When it comes to acting on interest and making a purchase, customers may be more motivated to navigate on a PC screen to better visualize the item they’re looking to buy.
Secondly, the checkout process itself may be a pain point for consumers. The ‘add to cart’ rates for mobile devices are approximately 10.4% on mobile, while it’s 12.9% on desktop. This indicates that people initiate checkouts at relatively similar rates. The story changes when it comes to conversion rates, however – with mobile conversions hitting 2.25%, a far cry from the 4.81% of desktop conversions.
De-Clutter Your Checkout Process
Businesses should address their lost mobile conversions and car abandonments by revising their checkout processes.
One important addition that can be made is the option to checkout as a guest. Despite this approach potentially causing you to lose out on other potential mailing list recipients, it’s essential to offer an option for customers to save time in buying products.
Remember that some customers aren’t looking to enlist a new brand to make a life-enhancing purchase – they just want a new pair of pants.
The act of creating an account can be a real bugbear of shoppers online. Additionally, a long checkout process that’s complicated or needlessly extensive clearly has an adverse effect on purchases. Although it could seem regressive to remove an account registration requirement from the purchasing process for customers, perhaps consider running an A/B test for the approach to see whether more mobile browsers follow through with their purchases with a streamlined funnel.
Catering to a Mobile Market
Consider incentivizing the act of carrying out purchases on smart handheld devices. Although introducing discounts and freebies to audiences can seem like a way of losing revenue, this approach can help to build confidence and generate lasting confidence among users who may still be afraid of buying items on smartphones.
Be sure to create app-exclusive or mobile webpage-centric sales as a means of introducing more users to your mobile stores and encouraging them to act on their interest with the help of a discount.
Above, we can see how huge multinational corporations like eBay are also adopting the approach of guiding traffic on to their apps as a means of building their mobile user base.
Furthermore, this tactic shouldn’t be limited to businesses that have already established dedicated apps. Companies can choose to create campaigns that are specific to their mobile web pages by offering vouchers for visitors to use during the checkout process.
Incentivizing the checkout process means that businesses can encourage more in-app purchases or through mobile pages as well as playing a key role in generating better user confidence to convert after adding an item to their cart.
Send Your CTAs Mobile
It’s vital to make sure that your mobile pages showcase a visible call-to-action for your traffic to see. The best CTAs stay relevant to the content that your visitors see and should be created to encourage them to snap out of their passive browsing and make a purchase.
The key message of your mobile CTA needs to be adapted to fit accordingly with your business model and target audience. Some of the approaches to create an element of urgency can revolve around tapping into visitor FOMO, encouraging decisive actions and creating a sense of scarcity by utilizing messaging like ‘available for the first 100…’ or ‘offer ends at midnight.’
By instilling this sense of urgency, you can help to generate a higher volume of interest among mobile browsers to snap out of their browsing and take action on their interest. Doing so can help you to leverage more sales on mobile, but at the same time, it’s vital to adopt the right tone to complement the audience profile of the visitors you’ll draw in. If you’re too persuasive or not persuasive enough, you could alienate your visitors.
Test Your Content
Many mobile devices get cheated when it comes to figuring out their true conversion rates. This is because many customers may use their smartphones to research a product or service before switching to a desktop to complete their purchase and before going into a local store to buy in-person. This means that they decided to buy on mobile, but switched to another approach to actually complete their conversion.
Sadly, many analytics platforms aren’t strong enough to track conversions from cross-platform customer journeys. But, it’s still possible to tap into tracking platforms like a Google forwarding phone number or a discount code to allow some form of tracking to take place for your customer journeys.
Additionally, analytics platforms like Google Analytics and Finteza can be used by marketers and businesses alike to better optimize mobile funnels. Both engines are examples of how insights can identify precisely where cart abandonment occurs within mobile browsers – allowing users to look deeper into possible sticking points.
Although it can be difficult to analyze the journey of customers across a range of devices, analytics platforms can help to leverage a greater level of understanding when it comes to seeing how users interact with mobile websites and the approach to navigation that they use.
With eCommerce sales on mobile devices set to steadily rise in the future, it’s key for businesses to look at how they can transform traffic into conversions faster to secure their growth ahead of their competitors.
eCommerce is on the verge of becoming much more mobile. As this landscape shifts towards handheld devices, the quickest businesses to adapt will be the best placed to benefit from the growth that comes with it.
