Retailers are full throttle into the holiday season with Christmas around the corner, and this frantic holiday shopping period represents the perfect opportunity for them to wow their customers with a new mobile shopping experience.
To stay ahead of the competition, retailers need to understand how and when to engage especially on mobile sites since consumers show exceedingly low tolerance for bad experiences. Retailers don’t need to overhaul their approach, but a little rethinking and refining their mobile strategy could go a long way for them this holiday season. Here are few simple tips to turn browsers into buyers.
1. Optimize for mobile experience: Since it is all about the experience, retailers need to make sure that it is as seamless as possible. Making sure that all the product and services information is easy-to-find, information like phone number, address, map and driving direction is readily available, are some of the things that are important to get the site ready for the season. Simplifying customer experience with a basic mobile navigation and integrating responsive design to optimize the layout and format for the mobile device being used are some more examples of how retailers can optimize their mobile site.
2. Meet the need for speed: It is a known fact that customers tend to walk away from mobile sites that take a long time to load. Tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights can be helpful to check site speed and to get suggestions to make it faster.
3. Offer Location Based Services and Holiday Deals: Holiday shoppers love deals and discounts, and offering these deals via geo targeting is a great way of attracting new customers and keeping existing ones happy. LBS can enable retailers to send promotions and advertisements directly to customers’ mobile phones, thereby engaging and influencing them to make real time purchases on-the-go. It also lets retailers deliver electronic loyalty programs, providing customers with real value — and convenience.
4. Leverage Amazon and eBay: If you’re a small retailer or don’t have the budget for a mobile site, then leveraging the capabilities of eBay and Amazon may be the right strategy to enter mobile space. Listing your products on these marketplaces will give your business a much broader reach since these apps command a larger audience.
5. Be Consistent: Last, but not the least retailers must keep their message and brand experience same throughout each stage of customer engagement. Customers see the store as a single, transparent system rather than multiple channels and it expects to be treated the same way in every single store and channel across the organization. Failure to do so can result in confusion, dissatisfaction and loss of business.