Image via CrunchBase
Micheal Durwin has a great rant here about the importance of embracing mobile websites. When I first read this I thought that you could easily remove the word “mobile” and you would see a blog post that would resemble something from years ago explaining the vitures of being online!
40% of mobile users have Internet access (likely to triple in the next 3 years). That’s 546 MILLION people! If you’re in charge of marketing for a retailer and a mobile website is not part of your IMMEDIATE strategy, you should be fired. You just cost your company 546 million potential customers. A mobile site is not complicated, as a matter of fact it is a much less complicated site than a regular website. SInce you’re limited in the amount of information you can show, and bandwidth is limited, it’s easier to narrow your offerings down to basics like contact, store finder, etc. Good God man, my site even has a mobile version!
In recent weeks I’ve been doing last minute baby and house shopping. I’ll often find myself wondering if something is in stock at another branch of Lowe’s, where the closest Office Max is, are there specials on diapers, etc. How often do you think I’ve been able to access a mobile site? Right, never. I’ll admit that I’m an early adopter, cash permitting, but I’ve had an iPhone for over a year now. But that also makes me a more frequent user AND proponent to my sphere of influence. Do you really want to ignore me?
• Half of iPhone users responded to a mobile ad in some way
• iPhone users call an 800 number, the most common call-to-action, twice as often as non-iPhon users
• 20% of iPhone users visit a mobile website compared to 14% of non-iPhone users
• 25% of iPhone users purchased a product or visited the store of a mobile marketer
So, for those retailers out there without a mobile site, next time you don’t make your quarterly numbers, look to the marketing guy. After all, what better way to differentiate yourself from your competitor than to be more accessible to your customers.
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I'm watching our traffic figures closely. So far I've been disappointed with our mobile numbers. So either those 546 million people aren't surfing our site or they've got javascript turned off and Google Analytics can't see them.
A few years ago I studied up on handheld media type style sheets, but then I did some research and quickly discovered that only Opera supports it. Without a means to test on the plethora of mobile devices out there, and without some sort of documentation as to what devices come with what browsers and what those browsers support and what their relative market penetration is, I feel like I'm sailing without a map.
So yeah, it's a lot like trying to follow web standards 10 years ago. The good news is that gives me hope that we'll see a movement to do the research, get the documentation together, and work with the vendors to improve the experiences we can deliver to their users (and our customers).
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