How to Combat Lower Mobile Conversion Rates

Mobile phones are now the predominant device used to surf the web. In the third quarter of 2020, it was reported that mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 50.81% of total website traffic worldwide.

Indeed, mobile devices have become the go-to channel for people to access their favorite stores, websites and content. While many website owners have made their sites mobile-friendly, a large section of businesses still struggle to create an excellent mobile user experience. For example, Adobe reports that 80% of marketers hadn’t planned a mobile strategy for the entire year.

If you’re trying to increase your mobile conversion rates but fail to do so, this article will help.

Before we jump right onto the strategies, let's look at what mobile conversion rate optimization is and why it is significant.

Mobile conversion rate optimization is the process of continuously improving your conversion rate on mobile phones for your marketing campaigns. These conversions can be an email/newsletter signup, webinar signup or purchase.

If your company isn't taking mobile conversion rate optimization (CRO) seriously, you're already lagging behind. CRO ensures that you aren’t neglecting your mobile audience as you’re developing a strategy for generating leads in a multichannel way.

Why is mobile conversion rate optimization important?

According to a recent study, it’s anticipated that mobile users will constitute around 73% of total ecommerce sales in 2021. With most customers making purchases using their mobile phones, every company needs to ensure that they have a mobile-friendly website to increase their sales revenue.

Your customers need a frictionless experience on every device they use, especially on mobile devices. If they don’t receive that, there likely to bounce and click away to another site.

Tips to combat lower mobile conversion rates

Here are some tips on improving conversion rates on mobile devices: 

1. Make your campaign mobile-first

If you have a website, you need to ensure that your campaigns and sites are mobile-optimized. This means that you can’t simply take a desktop design and show it to mobile users. Doing this will naturally lead the customer to a poor user experience (UX), as a rectangular desktop design seldom works well on a portrait-style mobile device.

Furthermore, mobile phones don't just refer to small-screen devices. When a user is visiting your site on a mobile phone, it’s an entirely different experience. Content is consumed by the user in an environment where they have more distractions, less attention and different location-based needs. This is why you should plan your site structure and design the post-click landing page for usability in all types of environments.

How do we provide an optimal mobile-first experience?

• Keep the titles short: Using short tags determines that users will get the idea of the exclusive content on their tiny screens in just a few words. Also, use a bigger font size so that the reader doesn't have to struggle to read.

• Use portrait-mode images and videos: When it comes to mobile optimization, you need to be careful with selecting the photos since only portrait-mode pictures and videos are easily visible on the screen format.

• Use a landing page builder that is optimized for mobile: There are now many software tools that enable you to build landing pages from scratch, with mobile optimization in mind. These landing page builders (such as Webflow or Squarespace) ensure that your site is optimized for mobile devices (in addition to tablets and different screen sizes) by having different building blocks and style elements that render differently depending on the screen size and resolution.

• Optimize image sizes: Many mobile users might be on their telephone networks instead of on a WiFi device. This means that they might have lower data speeds or a lower 4G data allowance. Furthermore, using too many images can have a negative impact on the site as an large quantities tend to slow down the loading speed of the webpage.

• Size of the page: The maximum size of each page on the site shouldn’t exceed more than 10 megabytes. For an ideal loading speed, a 1-to-2 megabyte landing page might work best for mobile conversions. This means you’ll have to resize the visual content of the page as well. Compress the size of the images to fit the exact dimensions of the mobile carrier. Also, remember to save the picture as a PNG instead of a JPG for better compression.

Design is a huge element in improving conversions. Here's an example of eight design-related conversion fails, and what you can do to avoid them.

2. Make your CTAs stand out

While your customers are surfing through the mobile, they're more likely to be searching for an immediate and location-specific solution to their problem, unlike on desktops where they might have more time to download PDF resources to read easily on a large screen or sign up for a mailing list. In this case, you need to make sure that you provide them with an instant solution with a call-to-action (CTA).

Be selective with your CTAs, as a plethora of buttons can annoy customers.

It’s often a good tip to simply focus on one singular CTA on every landing page that clearly drives the user towards the conversion goal.

3. Showcase and encourage user reviews

Up to 93% of consumers look at online reviews when purchasing online, across all industries, from B2C to B2B models. Likewise, mobile users often research user reviews before committing to a conversion event (such as a signup or a purchase) on their devices.

Build a steady inflow of verified reviews by linking your website to tools such as Trustpilot. Users often search for reviews on search engines as research, especially if you don’t have a well-known brand name yet. To optimize this for mobile devices, you can also demonstrate social proof by embedding verified reviews directly on your landing pages with plugins like Trust.

4. Ensure your site loads fast on mobile

Google's research has shown that up to 53% of people abandon a page if it takes more than three seconds to load. Slower web speeds mean lower conversions. The critical elements held responsible for the slow speed are many images, buttons and third-party plugins.

To check how your mobile site is performing, use the Page Speed Insights tool by Google. It will show you how both your mobile and desktop sites are performing and provide recommendations for improvements. You can also employ tools like Google Search Console to test the loading speed of your website.

Optimize your website for mobile SEO

It’s also vital to optimize your website for SEO, so that mobile users can find your content while making search queries online. Try to avoid intrusive pop-ups that occur on mobile devices as Google may penalize such websites.

Optimizing website content for mobile devices includes choosing compelling titles, descriptions and images. Moreover, you can use SE Ranking tools to find high-performing keywords that generate traffic for mobile websites.

Having discussed these unique strategies, any website owner can easily combat lower mobile conversions. Therefore, test out multiple ideas and designs to experience maximum conversions and give your customers a good user experience.