This is the third and final part of a series of blog posts based on our CEO Luigi Matrone’s keynote to the Alcon Gaze eCommerce conference. In the first, we showed why Shopper Experience is a key driver of online success for brands; in the second, we looked at why you can’t have great Shopper Experiences without great content. Here, we demonstrate the critical importance of quality mobile content to brand and sales success.
eBusiness Institute CEO Luigi Matrone is one of the world’s leading experts on digital transformation, eCommerce, and the digital trends impacting retail. If you would like to see Luigi’s keynote slides, please download them here.
Mobile accounts for the majority of online shopping
There are few things more frustrating for a mobile internet user than websites that haven’t been optimised for mobile. It’s maddening when you have to pinch the screen to zoom in or blindly scroll around to see an image properly or click on a link because the website you’re looking at on your phone has been designed for desktop. The same, naturally, follows for people that are trying to shop online using their smartphones and mobile devices. Say you’re trying to buy suntan lotion on your mobile. You’re going to want to be able to easily see and find out key things about it – like which factor it is, and its volume or quantity. What you don’t want to be doing is struggling to decipher those details on a blurry or pixelated image that’s clearly been designed with desktop users chiefly in mind.
Your content has to be mobile content first and foremost
The pendulum has swung, irreversibly, in favour of the majority of people preferring to do their online shopping on mobile devices rather than PCs. In the US, 79% of smartphone users have made a purchase online using their mobile device in the last 6 months, and almost 40% of all eCommerce purchases during the 2018 holiday season were made on a smartphone. With this being the case, any business operating in eCommerce that isn’t already taking a ‘mobile-first’ approach to their content needs to remedy that straightaway, or else seriously risk losing online.
The importance of Mobile Hero Images
80 per cent of people are now researching products using mobile devices[5]. Today’s online shoppers are also in a rush, and looking for smooth shopping experiences. They also don’t want to end up accidentally making the wrong purchase because a product image won’t render as they’d like it to and the information (e.g. the size of a coffee granule canister) becomes unreadable through pixelation. If a potential customer is using their phone to quickly scroll through your product pages on a site like Amazon or on your own eCommerce site looking for a specific size or variant of your product, you’re going to want them to be able to see that information as easily as possible to enhance your chances of making a successful sale. Mobile Hero Images (MHI) are product images that have been optimised for mobile screens. They amplify and simplify the benefits of a product for those users. They make better use of the image space available on eRetailer or brands’ own eCommerce sites than traditional standard packshots (still or moving images of products traditionally used in advertising and on eCommerce sites for the past 25 years). Mobile Hero Images are essential because they put vital product information – brand, format, variant and quantity – front-and-centre of the image, meaning that your potential customer knows exactly what they’re looking at, thereby helping with their purchasing decision.
Great mobile experiences help you connect with your customers
The fastest path to mobile customers is through a mobile-friendly site. If your site offers a great mobile experience, users are more likely to make a purchase.
- When they visited a mobile-friendly site, 74 per cent of people said they’re more likely to return to that site in the future
- 67 per cent of mobile users say that when they visit a mobile-friendly site, they’re more likely to buy a site’s product or service[6]
A great mobile site experience – and therefore great mobile content – is becoming increasingly important, and users will keep looking for a mobile-friendly site until they find one that works for them.
- drives choice of preferred eRetailer
- engages consumers to spend more online
- is a purchase decision-driver – so many shoppers now choosing to research products online before purchasing, whether online or offline
- decreases the number of returns caused by poor descriptions
- makes products more discoverable, both on eCommerce platforms like Amazon or traditional SEO for search engines like Google
The same principles apply when it comes to mobile users shopping on your site. So, if you’re going to create advanced Product eContent like video, make sure that it’s optimised and works well for mobile. Likewise, the payment process needs to be as smooth as it is on a desktop. And be certain that your product descriptions are easily readable on mobile screens.
In conclusion – you’ve got to think mobile-first
If your brand or product is going to successfully make sales and ‘win’ online, then it is absolutely essential that your content caters for the majority of your potential online shopping customers – namely, people using mobiles rather than PCs to research and buy products. It follows, then, that your content should anticipate and reflect the demand for quality mobile online shopping experiences. You therefore need a mobile-first approach to all content you produce for an online setting. Non-mobile friendly sites can hurt a company’s reputation because the experience has annoyed or frustrated potential customers. This, in turn, is bad for business, because you will not generate sales nor get repeat business, and your competitors will reap the benefits when what should have been your customers go to them instead.
To recap the topics covered in this series of blog posts:
- Shopper Experience is a key driver of online success for brands
- You can’t have great Shopper Experiences without great content
- Mobile content is critical to online brand and sales success
This article was written and created by the eBusiness Institute Team.
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Download Part 3 of the Alcon Gaze Keynote Slides
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Sources
[1] https://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-marketing-analytics/mobile-marketing-statistics/
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/280916/m-commerce-sales-in-japan/
[3] https://ecommercenews.eu/87-of-uk-retail-purchases-made-online/
[4] https://www.outerboxdesign.com/web-design-articles/mobile-ecommerce-statistics
[5] https://www.outerboxdesign.com/web-design-articles/mobile-ecommerce-statistics
[6] https://www.pncdigital.com/10-factors-leading-to-a-worst-e-commerce-user-experience/