How to Increase your Mobile Magento E-Commerce Sales

In this day and age, a mobile site isn’t merely important — it’s necessary. In fact, so many of your visitors shop online that not optimizing your ecommerce Magento store for mobile users will ensure a loss of traffic and sales.

Mobile now accounts for 53% of ecommerce traffic. Knowing that the first hurdle — having a mobile-friendly site is essential, we can move on to optimizing your ecommerce site for mobile customers and sales.

I. Invest in User Experience

Having an easy to use Magento e-commerce store is vital for both desktop and mobile sites. In addition to pleasing your customers, this affects how your site ranks in mobile search.

More and more, we see sites dropping off page one if they have pages or an entire site that is not mobile-friendly. A loss in ranking will lead to decreased traffic and sales overall.

Making sure your Magento store is mobile-friendly is simplified with the use of extensions. The short list below can help with some of the major mobile issues many ecommerce sites face:

• If you’re using Magento, you know that it’s a powerful platform for ecommerce. Keep your site running smoothly with Magento Debug, a free extension that can find and fix any issues your website and store might be experiencing.
• Mobile users are all about speed. Make sure your page speed and checkout process are quick and seamless with Fooman Speedster, a free extension that will combine, compress, and cache Magento’s JavaScript files and CSS to improve site performance.
• To enhance your site’s navigational properties, optimize the customer experience with site search. There are several extensions that add a site search navigation bar to your Magento store, and you get the dual benefit of being able to see what the most popular product searches are.
• Increasing sales on mobile can be mostly attributed to a simplified checkout process. On a smaller screen, the customer wants to exert least amount of effort for their purchase. The default Magento checkout can be sluggish and lengthy for mobile consumers. One-page checkout extensions for Magento can optimize this process for increased mobile sales.Additionally, since you’re working with a smaller screen, make sure all calls to action are clear and visible, but not impeding on the user experience in any way.

II. Focus on Increasing Your Mobile Audience

Marketing specifically to mobile users can be helpful in your goal to increase sales. As you would for a desktop site, you should have a specific strategy geared toward your mobile shoppers.

• Landing Pages: Create specific landing pages and campaigns that target and encourage mobile users. This can be strengthened by paid search and display advertising — send paid mobile traffic to landing pages for products, not to the homepage, or category pages that match the users intent and embrace the mobile mentality of short and simple.
• Social Media Engagement: Start conversations and foster communities through Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter — social mediums where apps are used more proficiently than the websites and increase your new customer base with brand awareness.
• Social Media Advertising: Once your social communities are buzzing, contribute to your sales volume by publicizing specials, coupons, new products and more across the cost-friendly advertising platforms on these mediums.

III. Understand the Trends

Black Friday mobile traffic grows more and more. Knowing that other holidays cause similar spikes, this should be factored into your on and off-site optimization.

When the stores are closed, customers continue to search for products and bargains on their mobile devices. Mobile product searches on Google increased over three times in the last year.

Mobile devices have become powerful for holiday shopping — you can watch product demos, compare brands, and view photos on the go.

While shoppers are browsing ecommerce site during this busy time, make sure you’re at peak performance from a technical perspective. Additionally, make sure that both your ads and the site include all relevant product information for the shopper.

IV. Embrace the Medium

Mobile is weighted heavily toward visuals over text, so factor that in to your product descriptions, photos, and home page. Tie in social media where possible to promote your brand:

• YouTube: Create tailored, beautiful images or how-to videos to spark awareness and interest in your products and overall brand
• Pinterest: Pinterest can drive a lot of traffic and offsite engagement for new users. Create boards of product categories and invite users to pin their favorites
• Instagram: Post photos that invite engagement, promote specials and more.

In a world that’s moving primarily to mobile shopping, following these on and off-page tips can be useful for increasing your mobile sales overall.