Your potential customers are now living in an increasingly mobile world. In 2015, the number of people accessing the internet from a smartphone or tablet was greater than those accessing it from a desktop for the first time ever (Comscore, 2015).
As a local business, it’s important to understand what devices your prospective customers are using and how it affects their experience with you – from whether they find it easy to navigate your website to if they’re ready to tweet about excellent customer service as soon as they leave your store.
Potential customers will behave differently on your website and when talking to you online depending on the device they’re using. Here are a few of the differences between how people use mobile and how they use desktop, and what that means for your business.
It’s no surprise that mobile consumers who are looking at your website, searching for you online or interacting with you on social media are very likely to be moving around and on-the-go.
This means they might be connected to the internet using mobile data, which can be expensive, or public WiFi, which can be very slow in a crowded area.
To make sure these potential customers have a good experience of your website, make sure it’s quick to load and mobile-friendly. Nearly 75% of people will leave a website they’ve just landed on if it takes more than five seconds to load (Loadstorm, 2014), so avoid using images that are too large or pages stuffed with links.
Although it sounds silly, desktop consumers are much more likely to have a pen and paper to hand than mobile consumers when they’re browsing online for information. That means desktop consumers can write down your address, phone number and opening hours easily, and give you a call without taking their eyes off the screen.
For mobile consumers, that’s not an option; their notepad and phone are all in one device – which they’re currently using to look at your site!
The most effective way to help a customer call you, is to use a ‘click to call’ button for your phone number, which automatically opens your consumer’s keypad on their mobile device and dials your number for them when they click it.
You also need to make sure this contact information is very clear on every page of your website, or there’s a ‘contact’ page that’s easy to find. This will be good for desktop consumers, who won’t have to search for the details they need, and good for mobile consumers too.
To improve the experience for mobile consumers further, you could also link to Google Maps from the business address on your site, making it easier for them to find you.
These small edits could be the difference between a potential customer and your next customer: Google’s 2014 survey found nearly 70% of customers searching for businesses online used the ‘get directions’ or ‘click to call’ buttons in a search advert.
Your potential customers browsing your website on a mobile device only have their fingers and thumbs to help them get around, which can be very difficult on sites which aren’t mobile-friendly.
What seems like good design or easy-to-use navigation on a desktop computer might be too small to even see on a mobile: the most popular laptop screen size is 15 inches, while the screen size of the iPhone 6 is less than a third of that!
Some of the common problems of ‘unfriendly websites’ that consumers don’t like include:
Luckily, all these sorts of problems can be fixed by using a website design that’s responsive. Responsive design means the elements of your website (like text and images) automatically rearrange and resize themselves depending on the device your prospective customer is using.
Even though these websites are designed for mobile, they’re also very helpful for desktop consumers as they’ll resize to whatever size their browser window is.
By starting to think about your mobile consumers and desktop consumers in different ways, you can make sure all of them have a great experience when visiting your website or talking to you online.
Want to learn more about mobile? Take a look at our guide - ‘Winning More Customers With Mobile’
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