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6th March 2017

5 Ways to Improve a Mobile User's Experience with Your Local Business

8
minute read

Whatever the age or background of your target customers, it’s more than likely they’ll be using a mobile device to get online and interact with businesses like yours. Whether that’s doing a quick Google search, checking their Facebook account or reading their emails, getting online on a mobile device is now completely normal: according to Google, 69% of smartphone owners turn to mobile search first in a moment of need (Google, 2017).

It’s important your local business is on top of these changes and responding to a mobile user’s experience through the marketing and promotional activities you’re doing.

1. Make mobile a critical part of your marketing plan

If you know people are likely to be using the internet on their mobile devices, you need to ensure that mobile marketing is part of your overall marketing plan.

This means:

  • Considering the way you write any information that you want to share online so it’s easy to read and understand on a mobile
  • Thinking about ways that you can market directly to people’s mobiles via SMS
  • Adapting your website to make it responsive for mobile users
  • Checking and testing all of your marketing materials to make sure that it works on a mobile

By making sure your local business has a ‘mobile first’ approach as a key part of your marketing plan, you’re much more likely to get the basics right for mobile-users and avoid losing a sale because your information is hard to find or too small to see! A study by Kissmetrics found that 30% of mobile web users would wait just 6-10 seconds before abandoning a page if it isn’t optimised for mobile.

2. Make it easy for people to find you

Many of your potential customers will use Google or another search engine to find out information about your business online before visiting in-store or making a purchase. Following Google’s 2014 survey, which found that opening hours, directions to the business and the company address were the top three things customers searched for when looking for business information online, Google now favours Google My Business listing results on mobile, pushing other results even further down the page.

This means it’s essential that you make it easy for people to find you and get in touch when you’re thinking ‘mobile first’. Register your business with Google My Business so you’re more likely to appear in local search results, and clearly display your business address, opening hours and a link to Google Maps on each page of your website. A ‘click to call’ button is also very useful for mobile customers as they might not always have a pen handy to write down your phone number.

If you haven’t already, you should also make your website mobile-friendly, as Google favours sites that adapt to the device that they are being viewed on. If you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, your business is likely to appear lower down in Google mobile search results, which will have an impact on the number of people finding and visiting your website over another competitor. To learn more about the benefits of a mobile-friendly website, read this article.

3. Reward customers for using their mobile

If you know customers use their smartphone or mobile device to look at your business online, it’s a good idea to give them unique rewards to encourage their loyalty and repeat sales.

Just as you would collect emails for your email marketing, ask customers for their mobile number and send them discount codes or vouchers directly to their phone using a text message. You can do this in bulk using low-cost services like Kapow or Skebby, which also allow you to receive messages in return – this could be a great way to offer customer service that’s simple and easy to manage.

You should also make sure your email marketing is easy to read and interact with on a mobile, which will encourage users to keep reading and complete the ‘call to action’ you want.

4. Don’t waste their time

If someone is visiting your website or reading email marketing from you on their smartphone, it’s likely they’ll be using mobile data to access the internet. This can be significantly slower than using WiFi, and in busy areas (like main shopping streets) it might slow down even further.

That means it’s important not to waste their time (or data allowance) with a website, emails or other marketing materials that have huge images or information which doesn’t get to the point quickly. Free online tools like Pixlr or PicMonkey will let you resize images so they’re much smaller (and therefore quicker to load on mobiles). If you want to use video or other large files, use a link (rather than the original file) so that waiting for them to load doesn’t slow your other key messages down.

5. Don’t forget about your other channels

While the number of people using their mobile to interact with your business is likely to grow, it’s important not to neglect your other marketing channels. By making mobile a key part of your marketing plan, you can link it with your website, social media and traditional marketing.

For example, you could:

  • Set up a phone number purely for customer service text messages and share it with customers
  • Encourage customers on your website to send you their phone number to get a free call back with a quote
  • Provide SMS voucher codes on print advertising – for example “Text ‘20%OFF’ to [your number] to get your discount”

By thinking ‘mobile first’ and making this useful marketing channel an integrated part of your plan, you’ll be able to talk to your customers in new, interesting and direct ways – ultimately creating better relationships and more sales.

For more information about how to become mobile-ready, read our in-depth guide here.

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