Delight (Rather Than Irritate) Your Mobile Customers Using These 5 Tips With a large percentage of traffic visiting your website through their phones, make it an easy experience for users.
By Jonathan Long •
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There is a very good chance you are reading this on a mobile device right now -- more than 56 percent of all traffic to top website is now mobile, according to Marketing Land. Brands that understand online marketing make sure they provide a pleasant user experience across all devices -- desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile.
With such a large percentage of traffic visiting your website on their phones, you need to make sure you delight your visitors, rather than anger them, with your mobile experience. It's important that you develop a mobile-first thought process when it comes to user experience -- it can no longer be a second thought. Here are five simple tips that will give your website visitors what they want -- a pleasant mobile experience.
1. Keep your color selection simple.
The colors you use on your website has a direct impact on your mobile conversion rates, as some colors encourage visitors to take action. Aside from that, a simple color selection makes for a much cleaner mobile user experience. I'm a huge fan of very minimalistic designs that create a simple mobile experience.
Related: Top 7 Reasons You Should Make Mobile Marketing a Priority
The colors you use on your call-to-action buttons can also help increase conversions. For example, red and green tend to be the best performing CTA button colors. When we were designing the website for our new teeth whitening brand, we wanted to keep the color scheme very simple -- we went with blue, but made sure to incorporate red for the call-to-action buttons. The end result was a clean design that's easy on the eyes, while also pulling in high conversion rates.
2. Make customer service mobile-focused.
Consumers don't want to call you or visit your location if they have a question. They want immediate answers to their questions and they want those answers while on your website. In addition to creating a FAQ page that answers the most common questions, it's a good idea to have a few customer support options available.
A simple contact form as well as a live chat option is a convenient way for you to welcome questions from your customers. Live chat can be initiated with a single finger-tap and a contact form can be submitted within seconds -- be sure to limit the form fields required to submit. If you are reading this on your mobile device right now, click here to see an example -- you will see the live chat option in the bottom right of your screen and the contact form is easily accessible via the main menu.
3. Go easy on the images and crazy fonts.
Speed is key -- mobile visitors don't have time to wait around for a slow-loading website to display images or text. Avoid using unnecessary images and stick to fonts that are very simple. Fancy fonts that incorporate things like shadows and other effects will just slow down your load time. Also, users love simplicity. Look at some of the more popular websites and you will see that flat designs with regular plain text are popular -- because they convert.
Related: 3 Common Mistakes in Mobile Marketing
4. Design for finger tips and thumbs.
Remember when we used a keyboard and mouse to navigate websites? Not any longer, as touch -- finger tips and thumbs -- is how most navigate and interact with websites these days. You can't count on the accuracy of a cursor any longer. You need to create your forms and position your buttons in a way that makes them easily accessible by fingers of all shapes and sizes.
If your visitors need to manipulate their screen in order to interact with your website, you will lose a large percentage due to frustration. Spend the time to properly test every function with real users.
5. Keep your navigation menu simple.
Before mobile, websites could display a massive menu bar at the top of the page, complete with sub-menus. This won't fly on mobile, so use an icon on the top left or right of the mobile screen, and keep your selections to a minimum.
You want to keep things accessible, so if a visitor has to tap through sub-menus to find what they are looking for there is a good chance they will leave before their second tap. Screen space on mobile devices is premium real estate -- keep it minimal.
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