10 easy ways to increase your mobile conversion rate

It’s official, mobile is taking the e-commerce market by storm. It is expected that by the end of  2020, the number of mobile users that will make at least a purchases using their phone will reach 168.7 million! And that is only for the US market.

number of mobile buyers in the us 2014 2020
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Since this number is only going to get higher, optimizers and business owners alike should focus their attention on the mobile version of the websites they are managing. 

I have already written about the importance of mobile devices and how they can affect your cart abandonment rate in The secret behind shopping cart abandonment rate and how to improve it, but I haven’t covered the ways to increase your mobile conversion rate, so let’s get started.

How can I find how many mobile visitors do I have?

Before any test or optimization process you should have your data sorted out. It’s never a good idea to start working on something without a solid foundation, thus it is really important for you to understand how much traffic you get from mobile users. In order to do so, you should fire up your Google Analytics and browse to Audience -> Mobile -> Overview. 

For this example I have used the Google Merchandise  Store’s (GMS from now on) 1 Master View. The date range is May 1st 2019 until June 21st 2019. 

analytics mobile overview
If I were to optimize for GMS, I would definitely start by looking at Desktop users, as their conversion rate is the smallest, but we will focus on mobile devices in this article.
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In the previous screenshot you can see that only 28.40% of the GMS’s users are browsing their website from a mobile device. Even though they do not represent the majority of users, they have the highest number of transactions. Also, I have pointed out that their conversion rate is almost 4 times higher than that of desktop users, but still nowhere near the average conversion rate of their industry.

Now that you have your numbers, you should consider if it is worth it to invest your time in optimizing for mobile devices. In my humble opinion, any website with at least 30% of its users coming from mobile, should optimize for this category as it’s only going to get higher and higher.

10 easy ways to increase your mobile conversion rate

#1: Make sure your layout is responsive

Easiest way of checking your responsive layout is to change the size of your screen. If your layout is truly responsive everything will fit perfectly to your screen.

This is a no-brainer, but you would be surprised how many people are still having problems with this. As with any other implementation done on your website, you should test each and every page and element to make sure that they are responsive.

I have seen countless websites that have display errors when the content on them was scaled down, including but not limited to: overlapping fields, content being driven off screen, off screen buttons and so on.

Be sure to test your website on different mobile resolutions as well as different mobile browsers. The fastest way to do it is to resize your browser window to a phone’s width and height and browse through your website. Although I don’t recommend doing tests like this, it is the easiest way. 

If you want to be 100% professional and sure that your website is working as you expect it to be, you can go to Browser Stack (or any other similar tool) and browse your websites on the browsers/devices that are most common amongst your users.

#2: Increase your website’s speed

Image Source

In a world that changes at a very fast pace, speed is the most decisive factor in creating a winning product or ground breaking technology.

A study conducted by Google shows that if a page takes up to 3 seconds to load, the probability of bounce increases by 32%. Moreover, if a page takes up to 10 seconds to load, the probability of a bounce to happen is increased by a whopping 123%!

To find out how fast your website is, go to PageSpeed Insights and insert your website’s URL. Scroll down to Opportunities and try to correct the issues that Google has pointed out.

#3: Get rid of unimportant elements

First impressions really matter when designing your mobile website.

Another study done by Google, discovered that users judge the look of a website in under 1/50th of a second. As the number of elements on a page increases (text, titles, images), the user’s probability to convert drops. 

Your website needs a clean and intuitive interface that is easy to use. You should delete or hide (with caution) any unimportant or unnecessary elements from your pages.

This feature can make the difference between a visitor and a potential lead or even convert your visitors directly to customers.

#4: Make product images easy to expand

Social media represents a new chapter in the visual content history book. Because of Instagram, Facebook and everything alike, people want to see high quality images on every website they enter. 

Moreover, in the case of an online store, pixel perfect images are a must, as a product image is the best way to communicate the value of a product to a possible prospect. Since it‘s impossible to feel a product through a screen (at least by the time I wrote this article), people are judging your products based on the quality of your images.

Be sure that your users can zoom in on your images with their fingers. If you have a zoom in feature as an icon you should also add the previous mentioned functionality. Bonus points if you also inform users about the zoom in capabilities. Best way to do it is via an almost transparent, 2 seconds pop up.

#5: Make your buttons bigger

add to cart button example

Since mobile devices have really small screens, sometimes it’s really hard for users to tap on a button. Even if your CTA buttons are big enough on desktop, you should always test them on smaller screens in order to make sure that everything is working as expected.

As an example, an Add to Cart button should be almost the same width as the screen, with a margin of a few pixels.

#6: Add a “Call us now” button

When they were first invented, mobile phones served only one purpose: to call. 

2G technology allowed users to send SMS, 3G allowed for internet connection and 4G took it a step further by increasing that speed 10 times. Even with all these advancements, we should not forget they’re still called phones and they have a major feature – calling. 

You can take advantage of this feature and add a “Call us now” button on your website using the <a href=”tel:5551234567″> syntax. When users click on this button, their dial pad automatically opens up with the number inputted.

Go ahead, give it a try, this button will automatically dial our number:

#7: Rethink your popups

Building your email list is perhaps the hardest and most challenging part of your marketing program. There are endless ways in which you can collect emails from your visitors.

The most common of them all is via a Sign Up pop up. Usually these pop ups cover the whole screen with an overlay, making it unusable until a user has either subscribed or closed the pop up.

When designing a pop up for mobile, be sure not to interfere with the user experience. In this case, a full screen pop up is a conversion killer for mobile devices. 

You can integrate your mobile pop ups with the overall UI of your website. For example, a full screen “Sign Up” pop up can be translated into a bottom bar. This will allow users to see the content of your website while also giving them the option to sign up for an offer, discount or just to keep up with your website’s new content.

#8: Be sure to make your website’s important features easily accessible (search, currency converter)

If your website is a city, your menus are the roads. You visitors browse through your website with the help of menus. When designing your website for desktop, you have enough space in the menu container to add any and all the important features of your site (like search or a currency converter). The problem appears when that menu is scaled down to fit on a small screen.

In this example the currency converter disappears from the top of the screen as the viewport decreases in size. It is scaled down and hidden inside the menu which makes it almost impossible to be found for a new user. You should design your mobile menu as a simpler version of your desktop menu while also preserving the most important links and widgets displayed in it.

#9: Let users finish their order on another device

For starters, you should never force users to create an account at checkout. But, you can give them the option to create an account on their cart page. Allowing users to save their carts for future purchases is one of the best ways to increase your conversion rate over time.

For example, a visitor landed on your website via a Facebook CPC campaign. They have found something they like, added the product to their cart but they are not entirely sure they really want to buy from you. They go to the cart page to see the total price of the item plus shipping but they decide it’s not the right time to finish off the order and they exit. That is one potential client lost. 

In order to increase the number of people who actually finish this process, you can add a small bottom bar that collects the user’s email address and emails the cart contents to them. After you got their email address you can send them discounts for their cart items and convince them to come back and finish that order. Just be sure to ask for their consent and you will also have another subscriber to your promotional emails. It’s a win – win situation.

#10: Enable real time validation for forms

Auto validation form

There is a high chance that your mobile visitors are not browsing your website from the comfort of their homes, where they can be 100% focused on the fields that your forms have (be it a checkout form or a lead generation form). Moreover, when completing a form on a website, the keyboard is taking almost half of the screen’s height. To put this into perspective, imagine you just completed a 10 fields form and pressed submit. You expect to see the next step of the funnel (maybe a thank you page or order confirmation page) but you see the exact same page. You have to scroll up or down to see what form field you’ve completed wrong. This will make you rage quit that website and go to another one.

All of this can change if that website had real time validation on forms. This does not only reduce friction but also makes it easy for users to correctly complete a form before they click on that CTA button. Implementing this on your website can have a truly high potential to increase your mobile conversion rate.

Final thoughts – Never stop analyzing and optimizing

I have gathered 10 of the easiest ways to increase your mobile conversion rate. Everything here is doable in a matter of hours at most and can have the highest impact on your mobile conversion rate.

I suggest to test any or all of these recommendations before publishing them to your website. Each business is unique and so is its website. Even though these guidelines are universal for most sites across the web, your audience may find problems when interacting with your new features.

We are always happy to receive feedback so let us know in the comments if these guidelines helped you increased your mobile conversion rate. Also, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter to receive the freshest Case Studies, Conversion Rate Optimization Advice and Special Things directly in your inbox.

Need fully managed conversion optimization services or just a conversion rate optimization audit? Reach out to us at [email protected] and we will get back to you in under 48 hours. 

By Dan Cucolea

I am a conversion rate optimization specialist at Ontrack Digital.
I am a Spreadsheets Wizard who can translate any data into a lovely graph that even has a story behind it.

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