MOBILE WEBSITES

Don’t be an Ostrich

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Future-proof your Business with Mobile marketing

A lot of business owners, especially with a bricks and mortar business like to pretend that the Internet isn’t happening. They think that if they ignore it and put their head in the proverbial sand, that it will go away.

Sorry, but it is time to take their heads out of the sand and face reality. It isn’t going anywhere. The Internet is here to stay. It is like a juggernaut that is thundering along, gaining more and more momentum and your customers are moving with it.

Right now, just having a website is not enough anymore. It is vital that your business has a mobile friendly version.

Your customers are not going to wait until you do have one created. If they can’t see your site properly (if at all) on their smartphones they will spend their money somewhere else…your competition.

This is not scaremongering. The statistics all around are warning us what is happening right now. 51% of the mobile subscribers in the UK own a Smartphone and 49% of the mobile subscribers in the United States. They are eager to use your services. 9 out of 10 mobile searches that they make lead to action, over half leading to purchase.

The numbers are growing. 9 out 10 phones now sold are Smartphone’s. In the first quarter of 2012 alone, almost 145 million smartphones were sold. By the end of 2012, it has been estimated that more smartphones will be sold than PCs, with estimated sales of 657 million smartphones sold to consumers. As an experiment, ask your friends and family what kind of phone they have. If they don’t have a Smartphone at the moment, no doubt they will tell you that they will be getting one soon.

Smartphones are an important part of your customer’s lives. They are addicted to them. They are using them for Twitter posts, updating their Facebook status and for shopping online.

If you provide a product or service that they want, they will expect to be able to see your website on their phone.

If your website content is not easy to read on a mobile phone, you are in trouble because most mobile users will simply leave your site and take their business elsewhere.

So even if you don’t think that you need a mobile version of your website, you will actually be doing your business a lot of harm by ignoring the statistics and your customer’s needs. Every day that you don’t have a mobile web site you will be losing customers – Customers with money to spend looking for your product or services.

Whether you are a dentist, a local retailer, a chiropractor, a florist or a landscape gardener, you can reach all of your clients more effectively and easier by having a mobile web site.

Having a mobile website will future-proof your business by opening the doors to literally hundreds of new and creative ways to drive traffic to your site. For example QR (quick response) codes will allow you to create unlimited marketing campaigns that will drive potential customers to specific mobile friendly landing pages with calls to action that work (see page 9 for more information about QR codes)

Recent figures show that 50% of Smartphone uses have scanned a QR code and 18% of them purchased after a result. That is 18% extra customers that you would not have got without your mobile marketing platform. Can you see the potential for your business?

What some business owners forget is that it is not your customer’s job to remember that you are in business. You need to remind them constantly that you are there.

Using the right tools and resources is vital. We see some businesses owners attempting to draw attention to their business by throwing away good money on large newspaper ads, the Yellow Pages and flyers.

Newspapers and the Yellow pages are a dying business model and in most cases it is a waste of time putting a one-time advertisement in them. Flyers are expensive and have only reach a limited demographic.

Mobile marketing is the most effective way of keeping in contact with your current and potential customers that may have forgotten you or not known that you were there.

We would advise any business considering using mobile marketing to reach potentially millions more customers to talk to an expert on how they can employ traffic generating marketing strategies and turbo-charge their business.

Having a mobile friendly site will not only impress your clients but will set you well apart from your competition who still have their heads in the sand and are refusing to acknowledge that times are moving at such a terrific pace.

You will find our contact details on page 3. Why not take a few minutes to contact us for a no obligation chat and we will gladly advise you on how you can reach even more customers by providing the type of content and user experience that your customers expect using their smartphones.

Mobile Coupons That Work Like Magic

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In these days of budget tightening in most American households, coupons are growing more and more popular. But beyond tedious clipping of paper coupons, is a growing trend for convenient and low-effort mobile coupons. According to research done by American Express, in 2009 mobile coupons redeemed across the US number approximately 200,000, but they estimate that by next year 70 million mobile coupons will be redeemed, worth $2.4 billion in discounts to eager consumers.

There is virtually no limit to the types of deals that your business can offer with mobile coupons. It really doesn’t matter whether you offer dollars or percent off, buy one get one or any other type of offer as long as it’s valuable to your customer or potential customer and is relevant and time-sensitive.

Coupons sent using mobile messaging are 10 times more likely to be redeemed than paper coupons of any type. Coupons in newspapers have lower redemption rates than those mailed directly to consumers, but mobile coupons trump these time and again.

Cost is another factor to consider with mobile coupons. Having a paper coupon mailed either directly from your business or as part of a bulk mailer such as ValPak costs you $.25-$.40 per coupon and these are redeemed on average at a rate of just 1%. By comparison, mobile coupons cost around 1 penny each and are redeemed at double digit rates between 11%-26%.
There are a couple of different options for offering mobile coupons, including:

• Posting them on your traditional or mobile website to either print or with a code they can provide at checkout or when ordering.

• Using an aggregator site such as https://getyowza.com or www.cellfire.com to offer your coupons on their sites. Yowza cost as little as $99 and Cellfire offers a variety of plans.

• Text them directly to customers who opt-in to your email text list. People will give you their cell number in exchange for an instant discount and this lets you easily build your database.

Zero coupon fraud is another pro of mobile coupons vs. paper. People try to sneak in expired paper coupons, print duplicates and all manner of sneaky methods to get more than their fair share of a discount. Mobile coupons virtually eliminate these issues because they are attached to an individual cell phone account and will clear out of the coupon cache upon expiration so customers can’t pull them up and try to pass the deal off as current.

Immediacy, relevancy, portability and ease of use are the big drivers in the double-digit mobile coupon redemption rates. Immediacy means that by setting a same day or 3-5 day redemption window, you encourage people to act quickly to take advantage of the deal. No one likes to miss out on a deal, so they will move rapidly to take advantage of a discount.
Relevancy is crucial. If you mail diaper coupons to childless couples, you’re likely to get a 0% redemption rate. However, mailing coupons to parents of a newborn will likely get you a much higher redemption rate. Because mobile coupons are driven by coupon searches or opt-ins to business text lists for establishments frequented, you can offer relevant promotions to drive increased revenues.

Portability is a big plus for consumers – if you forget your box of coupons at home or your flyer that offered a discount, your customer is out of luck. But everyone always has their mobile device with them, so mobile coupons are accessible anytime, anywhere which encourages redemption when it is convenient for the customer which means profits for your small business.

Ease of use is critical – many people don’t want to hassle with clipping coupons and may not even look through coupon mailers that come in their box because they literally have to sift through pages of offers that won’t interest them. Mobile coupons offer what consumers want with little to no effort on their part. They get a text or access a site and show the offer or code to the sales person or order taker and they’re done – coupon redeemed!

If you’re not using mobile coupons, the good news is, it’s easy to get into. Even without having a mobile website, you can start offering mobile coupons. It’s a low cost promotional tool that can drastically increase sales by improving your relationship with your loyal customers while expanding your customer base.

The Importance of Mobile Websites

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Between 2009 and 2011, mobile web browsing grew by 1000%. It went from less than 1% to a 7% market share in less than two years. A recent study in March 2012 by Opera (a web browsing company) showed that 43% of respondents say that mobile web is their primary means of accessing the internet. If this trend holds out, the mobile web is set to almost entirely replace the traditional web by 2015 according to research firm IDC.

What these statistics translate to for small business owners is that a web presence is now mandatory. Traditional websites that were designed to be viewed on 10-15” screens are largely incompatible with the much smaller screen of smart phones and tablets. Not only will your standard website be difficult, if not impossible, to view on the smaller screen, the functionality will be unusable.

Websites that work well on mobile devices are those that have been designed specifically to function on the mobile web. Most mobile devices won’t load Flash graphics – a common aspect of traditional web design. Large graphics files are also incompatible with mobile web browsing. Your website is expected to load within 3-5 seconds on a mobile device and any load-time exceeding this leads to lower and lower browser satisfaction.

Bloomberg news reported last week that “twice as many mobile-phone users abandon a website for reasons such as sluggishness than their desktop counterparts.” If your site won’t load, 1/3 of users will try to reload the site and 2/3 will move on instantly. After another failed reload, all but 1% of browsers will move on, most likely to a competitor that has a mobile web presence that meets their needs.

The Bloomberg reporter then added that, “almost half of all mobile users are unlikely to return to a website at all if they had trouble accessing it from their phone.” This means that you have lost the opportunity to engage that potential customer, likely forever. But using a free mobile web converter or low-cost mobile web designer can prevent you from losing business you never knew you could have had.

The Bloomberg article cites one of the problems with slow load times is that “often it’s because the webpage isn’t designed to load quickly on a wireless device.” Mobile web design can be very thin and provide just the basic information about your business to your potential customer including:

• Location – preferably with click-to-navigate option for GPS navigation

• Phone number – preferably with click-to-call functionality

• Hours/Days of operation – in the easiest to read font and format

• Opt-in – a link or info on how to opt-in to receive text offers and information

• Calendar – if you offer special events or certain items on certain days, a simple fast loading calendar or roster is helpful

• Photos – if relevant, for menu items, inventory, etc. and if they are fast-loading, these can be helpful to customers

Whether you enlist the aid of a professional mobile website developer or decide to go it on your own with a mobile website builder utility, any mobile web presence is infinitely better than no mobile web presence.

Mobile Websites Are No Longer Optional

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The mobile web will soon be the dominant choice in internet usage, overtaking web browsing on PCs and laptops by next year. Given the clear supremacy and growth of mobile web browsing, it’s shocking to learn that 70% of businesses don’t have a mobile website.

Standard websites designed to be viewed on laptop and PC screens are incompatible for the smaller screens of iPhones, Androids and other mobile web devices. Even if your non-mobile website can be seen on a mobile device, that doesn’t mean it’s functional on a mobile device. Only 1% of standard websites will render on a mobile device.

Your standard website may feature high-resolution graphics, flash video and lots of interesting content. The very things that make your standard site so interesting are what will make it unusable as a mobile website. Most smart phones can’t play Flash programs, hi-res photos take too long to load and the volume of content will make the site slow to load and navigate.

Instead, you need to focus on the most critical information about your small business that a mobile web surfer needs. At a minimum, they need to know where you are, what you do, how to contact you and your hours of operation. For a mobile website, less is so much, much more!

Many of the best mobile websites launch with an opening screen that has just a few options that are large clickable buttons to easily navigate the user to the information they need including:

  • How to Find Us – clicking this can take your potential customer to a page where they can see your address, click for directions or click to activate their smart phone’s GPS function to automatically navigate to your establishment
  • When We’re Open – clicking this can take your potential customer to a page that simply lists your daily hours of operation – if there are holidays upcoming, you should also indicate whether you are open on the holiday as well as any days your hours will deviate from the standard
  • How to Reach Us – clicking this can take your potential customer to a page where they can click-to-call your business number, click to send an email to you or click to send a text to you – just be sure that whichever option they choose is monitored so you can communicate on the spot
  • What We Offer – clicking this can take your potential customer to a page that very briefly summarizes what you do, what you sell, what services you offers, etc.
  • Special Deals – clicking this can take your potential customer to a page that offers them an incentive in the form of a discount or freebie to sign up for your mobile texting list – this captures them on the spot and allows you to reach out to them again to encourage a transaction with your small business

Two other options to consider when prepping your small business website are social media links and an option to link to your full website. Consumers are very engaged in social media and if you have a presence on Four Square, Facebook, Twitter or other media sites, you should include links to your pages so they can follow you if they like.  Another option that many mobile sites don’t offer, but that may be desired is a link to your full website in case they want to browse all of your content.

No matter what, a mobile website, even a poorly executed one, is better than no mobile website at all. But it’s easier than you can imagine to set up a mobile website for your small business in just a few hours to get found on the mobile web and drive business to your establishment.

Offer an option to see use your full site