How To Do Mobile Marketing For Ecommerce

Mobile devices are all the rage now.

In fact, in 2013 alone over half a billion mobile devices and connections were added to the fray, with smartphones accounting for 74% of that growth. And get this - 79% of US consumers use their smartphone for browsing and shopping. Check out the rest of the report by Usablenet:

8 in every 10 of your potential customers are mobile-friendly

In other words, if you owned any business of sort, you'd be crazy not to jump on the fast-moving locomotive that is mobile marketing – seeing as almost 8 in every 10 of your potential customers are using their smartphones to browse and shop online!

A recent report released by ShopVisible highlights this: in 2013, 30% of ecommerce site traffic came from mobile devices, split evenly between mobile phones and tablets. During the 2013 holiday season alone, mobile traffic shot up by 20%.

Suffice to say, if your ecommerce store hasn't gone mobile yet, you've already missed out on a pretty incredible year of growth in mobile traffic.

The tables have turned: Consumers are looking for you on their mobile devices now

Ecommerce store owners, the day has come where your consumers are looking for you instead of you having to reach out to them. According to a report by Forrester, 89% of consumers use a search engine on their mobile device.

Right at this moment, potential customers are looking for a product or service you provide.

What this means is this: if your store is not mobile-friendly, you can be sure that every single one of them that arrives on your site will bounce right off. As it turns out, a crucial factor in influencing a purchase are the visuals on your site.

If you're not convinced, here's what Justin Maas, Vice President of Client Relations at fishbat, has to say on the matter (bolds are mine):

“This data shows that businesses, especially e-commerce businesses, have to optimize their websites for mobile apps. It’s extremely important for businesses to have a mobile app version. With their growing popularity, mobile apps are the best way businesses can keep people interested in their brand. If a brand does not have a mobile app, chances are, they are losing out on potential selling opportunities.

3 Tips for Going Mobile Right Away

Here are 3 tips from top experts in the mobile space that you can implement on your store right away:

1. Invest in a mobile landing page

Invest in a mobile landing page: But an essential [marketing tactic] is a good mobile landing page. In some cases a mobile only page might even be the best approach, instead of spreading your efforts to thin across multiple channels. If you can think about the difference in use cases and needs a smartphone user, tablet user and desktop user might have. You might then target those use cases and build explicit support for those touchpoints. – Gunnar Klauberg, product marketing manager, Adobe Systems:

2. Consider Connection speeds

Consider connection speeds: Statistics show that around 40% of the top consumer advertisers haven't optimised for smaller screens or mobile, and that most mobile users are on very slow connection speeds so that the pages are too heavy and not fit for purpose. increasingly markets should think about connection speed as a key responsive consideration, more speed more stuff, less speed less stuff! – John Barnes, managing director, digital & tech, Incisive Media

3. Go Responsive

Go responsive: In a recent survey of over 2,500 marketers, more than 40 percent of respondents admitted that their email content wasn’t usually optimized for tablets and phones, even though 30–50 percent of their subscribers used mobile devices to consume that content. Leading publishers and brands (from CNN to TechCrunch) either have already implemented, or will soon unveil, completely responsive websites, which solve the multi-device problem by customizing layout to the size of the screen. This attention to user experience makes it easier for customers to read, click and buy. Look into a responsive website, or at least responsive landing pages, as part of your mobile strategy this year. – Stephanie Cox, global email and mobile marketing lead, Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud

Has your business or ecommerce store gone mobile yet? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments below!