According to Retail Research, ecommerce is the fastest growing retail marketing in Europe and North America. And with mobile ecommerce, or mcommerce, steadily picking up pace over the past few years, as a retailer, you can’t afford to ignore the growing market of the mobile customer. In fact, Econsultancy reported that the UK retail industry is sacrificing an overwhelming £6.6bn per year due to lack of investment into its mobile offering.

So in a world where our smartphones rarely leave our sides, why is it that retailers are failing to capitalise on the mobile ecommerce revolution?

Cross-channel and omni-channel marketing play an important part when delivering a successful mobile marketing strategy. Appealing to all of your buyer personas, offering a seamless experience regardless of device or channel, is certainly a tall order. And with growing competition from retailers who continue to raise the bar with faster and easier delivery and payment options, there isn’t time for your fashion brand to stop and think about whether or not it’s going to invest in mobile, the simple answer is, you need to – if you don’t, you’ll struggle.

Research undertaken by the Centre for Retail Research (CRR), found that 66% of retailers said investment in mobile would help them drive growth and 88% said they believed they would get more visits in-store as a result of that investment. Therefore at Hit Search, we think it’s time you took your head out of the sand and started moulding your offering and customer experience around your mobile customers, before you become so far behind the competition you struggle to catch up!

How does mobile fit into your wider strategy?

Mobile and the wider strategy

Mobile should be a primary focus for any ecommerce retailer; particularly within the fashion industry. With so many high fashion and high street retailers alike, adopting and harnessing the power of social media and mobile interaction, it’s important your fashion brand takes a leaf out of their book and becomes a creative hub for its mobile customers.

It’s as much about the shopping experience for the customer, as it is about the end result, a conversion (and hopefully repeat customer!)

Give the user confidence when shopping cross-channel

Confidence plays a large part in customer retention. As a customer, being able to research and shop across a variety of platforms and devices, helps create a seamless shopping experience.

Since 2014, browsing for products online using a smartphone or tablet device has been the default process for 33% of shoppers, even if they then purchase from a desktop, or from your physical store.

Make it easier for customers to purchase cross-channel by…

1. Giving them the option to create an account, so they can effectively pick up where they left off, regardless of device.
2. Offering the customer the chance to email their basket home. This way they can easily purchase whenever they have the time; or perhaps they want to talk through their purchase with a friend/family member before purchasing.
3. Making your items easily searchable cross-device. If you can find an item easily on desktop but not on your mobile site, this will cause frustration amongst your audience.

Why build your strategy mobile-first?

A mobile-first strategy should be adopted cross-channel. The graph below clearly highlights the need for an integrated mobile/in-store experience. You shouldn’t be just limiting your mobile strategy to people who shop through their mobile devices. Your mobile users might research on mobile but purchase on desktop, or even in-store. With 43.3% of the total smartphone audience surveyed using their phones in a retail store, this could be an opportunity your brand could capitalise on.

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Whether it’s the use of in-store Wi-Fi to push messages to your audience with timely offers, to QR codes strategically placed around your store to highlight special offers. Whatever your idea is for connecting your smartphone audience with your store, this creative brainstorming process should perhaps become one of your brand’s priorities.

Still not convinced?

Check out these four more reasons why you should make mobile your priority

1. Research conducted by Oracle Mobile found that a massive 48% of UK millennials said that poor mobile experience would make it less likely for them to use a business’s other products.
2. Research from Barclays suggested UK consumers are to spend £53.6bn a year using their smartphones and tablets by 2024.
3. According to research conducted by the Centre for Retail Research (CRR) retailers are missing out on an incredible £6.6bn a year by not going mobile.
4. According to the State of Digital Marketing 2015 infographic, the most popular devices used to search the internet were PC/laptop (91%), smartphone (80%), tablet (47%) and games console (37%). Even though PC and laptop are still holding the majority smartphone is not far behind at all.

3 tips to help keep your brand focused on your mobile-first strategy

Tip #1

Use your thumb as a guide for any design and user experience changes you make to your site in order to make it more appealing to the mobile customer.

Visual Web Optimiser (VWO) is a fantastic CRO tool to help you truly understand user behaviour across any device or browser. Particularly worth your attention is the heat map, scroll map and area stats sections. Very useful and interesting for your brand to understand exactly which areas of the site draw your user in and which they skip right over.

Tip #2

Create specific mobile buyer personas. You need to create a picture in your mind of what your mobile user looks like. How do they behave? What does their buying cycl3e look like? All these questions need to be answered in order to make a start on your specifically-targeted strategy!

Extra tip: Create your buyer personas by using makemypersona.com, or, alternatively, get in touch with our digital experts and we can build them for you!

Tip #3

Banish the silo mentality within your organisation. We know this can be tricky but if your teams aren’t fully cooperating and on-board with your strategy, it’ll become difficult to implement it successfully. Marketing should be a business-wide philosophy, not just a function within your team.

Everyone needs to understand and contribute to your mobile goals. Getting everyone involved in the creative processes, perhaps with small incentives, can help slowly break down these barriers!

Getting started with mobile conversion rate optimisation

1. Test, test and test some more! It’s important to remember that conversion optimisation is a cyclical process; you should always aim to better your user’s experience on mobile.
2. Get rid of distractions along with buyer’s journey. Making the checkout process as clean and as simple as possible is crucial for making the mobile user’s journey a pleasant one, whilst simultaneously increasing your chances of converting the customer.
3. Make your goal for the mobile user clear on each of your web pages. Creative and eye-catching call-to-actions will help bring attention to the actions you want to nudge your users into completing.
4. Have easily translatable icons between desktop and mobile. For example, the globally recognised icon for ‘checkout’ is usually the basket icon. Make sure your icons are large enough for the user to click on with their thumb, too!

If you need a helping hand to connect your fashion brand with the mobile customer, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our in-house ecommerce experts, and find out exactly how we can help you!