Mobile website user journeys to build customer relationships

Businesses who understand mobile website user journeys are able to gain an advantage to capitalise on these opportunities.

Developing a mobile strategy

Getting your content and services on mobile devices can be quick and cheap. Good websites will display on mobile devices by default, but this is not maximising mobile engagement. Key areas to concentrate on when developing a mobile strategy include:

Delivery

Apps, mobile style sheets or mobile sub-site there are Mobile website delivery options of each.

Channel

Mobile is one of many different communication channels, but one that is increasing in importance. It should be put much more centrally into the overall communications strategy.

Context

Mobile users want specific information, a location or perhaps opening times. The geo-location function in mobiles can aid this.

User experience

Top tasks that are easy to access and perform should be clearly displayed. The content offered needs to be carefully planned and researched. Navigation should be clean and simple.

User journeys

Plan your user journeys, once live, your analytics and user testing can give you guidance on the areas for improvements.

Search

Your mobile sites need to be easy to find with good landing pages. Mobile Search Engine Optimisation (MSEO) is of paramount importance, use of back links, fresh content and keywords will aid this. Pay per click (PPC) advertising is also a significant traffic driver, but simply replicating traditional web advertising is not necessarily the best option.

Management

Good Web Content Management (WCM) systems will allow you to display a mobile version of your site as requested by the mobile devise so that it displays correctly. Additionally content and content libraries can be shared between the PC and mobile sites. WCM systems allow you to quickly edit content to keep the site fresh with little technical effort after the mobile site has been built.

Metrics

Measure everything, including content, maps viewed, and if possible, calls made to a number specified for the mobile website. Then expect to change content, navigation or user journeys quickly.

Building relationships with a mobile strategy

Mobile has the ability to build relationships with consumers like no other media and can facilitate two-way information flow. Brands can position themselves as "friends" to deliver tailored content to people's intimate spaces. Added to this, more precise targeting can occur when tied to an individual mobile's data, place and time. However interpreting the data received from individual's browsing is more difficult, as the nature of mobile browsing is so quick. For example, establishing benchmarks for activity such as "time on site" is complex.

However, once you understand your users you can engage with them more closely and define clear user journeys to increase loyalty, trust and conversions.

Defining User Journeys, measuring and refining them

When users encounter website problems on a mobile device they can be quickly lost and may never return. In order to avoid this, and to help your mobile website build trust, confidence and loyalty, define your optimum user journeys before you build your mobile website. This can be done with simple wire-frames and then tested at an early stage before you commit to development. This is just the start of improving usability.

Once your website is live, user testing can be conducted to observe how real users interact with your mobile website and realise their goals. This will assist in understanding how users experience your website presentation and navigate through your website and complete their goal (finding information, making a purchase or completing a task). By understand user journeys and refining your navigation, content and service delivery, less customers are lost and more converted.

This is a continuous process that starts with monitoring and in depth analysis to gain insight into what users are doing on your website. Typically you should concentrate on areas of the site that bring the most revenue, cause the most complaints or where there are a large number of drop-outs.

Tools like Google Analytics can be configured to give you the basic data needed to understand user journeys and funnels (how users move through a pre-defined process to complete a task). With this information, website managers can continually refine and hone their content presentation and service delivery to get the optimum conversions. Devices that can utilise JavaScript, can be used for multi-variate testing to further to identify optimum layouts by dynamically presenting users with different versions of a page. The resultant behaviours are subjected to statistical analyses to determine which the best version of the page to adopt. This is not a one-off process, but a continually evolving and iterative one where alternative variants are tested regularly.

Conclusion

By defining a clear mobile website strategy and understanding mobile user behaviour, user journeys can be defined to maximise their engagement with your brand. This ongoing process will allow businesses to refine their mobile websites to continually increase conversion rates. Key to this is the use of analytics. Gaining insights from analytics is a skilled job, but one that will reveal user trends and activity that can be acted on to optimise user journeys, mobile content and mobile service delivery.

Posted by Rob McCarthy13th September 2011

Mobile website strategy whitepaper

Mobile strategy As more users adopt mobile devices it is important for businesses to understand mobile website usage and customer requirements, which may be similar to your PC website. But there are differences, particularly in experience, and web managers should aim to embrace the differences and exceed customer expectations.

Deciding to deliver your mobile website as a sub-site is just one aspect of developing a mobile website strategy. This whitepaper examines user trends and what businesses can do to capitalise on the opportunities that mobile websites offer and includes: