#49. How To Increase Your Mobile Conversion Rate | Podcast

Vira: 0:16

Today we will be talking about how to increase your mobile conversion rates.

Alissa: 0:45

Hello, hello everybody, and welcome back to another episode of Email Einstein. This is the Flowium podcast. Before we get started, it’s Vira and Alissa here, your two very lovely hosts. As always, we are two email marketers at an email marketing agency called Flowium. We’re super passionate about email marketing, and because we love what we do, we want to share our insights with you. Flowium, the marketing agency that we work for, is one of the fastest growing email marketing agencies in the world, and we specialize in providing a premium full full-service e-commerce email marketing experience for all of our clients. Our service is tailored specifically for your business and is designed to help increase your online retail revenue by 20 to 50— that’s 5-0— percent. Deliver the right message to the right person at the right moment. That’s what we’re all about here at Flowium. I actually said that to someone today and I can’t remember who I said it to, and I was like, am I recording the podcast right now?

Vira: 1:43

I know, that’s how I feel about it. I know our little intro by heart, so every time I say something from there, my are so impressed and like, yeah, that’s the way we roll. Oh, that’s hilarious. Yeah. Today I’m like super excited about today’s topic. Alissa, me too. And we literally just talked about it before we started recording, sharing all this like exciting numbers, like two email marketing nerds talking to each other. Maybe we should just like start recording our random conversation as soon as we start. I feel like they are so like entertaining and so random. If you guys don’t mind, we can be random with you.

Alissa: 2:20

We can just chat.

Vira: 2:21

We can just include it. We can just add, we talked about home DIY, about being the owner, about parenting and email marketing as well. So come, come to our little show or we’ll start our separate one, Alissa.

Alissa: 2:34

Yeah. We’ll just start our own random chat. It’s like the email Einstein blooper series.

Vira: 2:41

Yeah. Oh gosh. I would totally subscribe to that one. Cool, cool, cool. Let’s talk some mobile conversion rates in this podcast today. I actually came across a really fun comparison today when I was researching this podcast. One guy— I’ve got the where it was from, but anyways, he said like, imagine that you are the owner of brick-and-mortar store. You have a beautiful big brick-and-mortar store with big windows and nice stuff and everything. And overnight the world decides that it wants to make everything in your store small, like very small little store with teeny tiny windows, with teeny tiny cash desks, miniature cash machines, teeny tiny stuff and everything. But the product is still the same. And more and more people are starting to go into your small store versus your big store. But no matter what you your little shop never sells as well as your big old one. And that’s how sometimes e-commerce business owners feel about mobile commerce versus desktop.

Alissa: 4:06

That’s really funny.

Vira: 4:07

Versus like desktop stores. And while the world hasn’t undergone such like big change overnight, people still cannot get used to the fact that mobile commerce is here to stay. And I mean, whether you like it or not, people using their mobile phones more more and more. You probably— you will not see that many people in the mall just like randomly walking with their desktop computers, you know, like in their hands or something. So mobile commerce is here to stay. And today we will be talking about how to increase your mobile conversion rates. And I’ll share some fun stuff, some fun data with you later in the podcast. But today we’ll be talking about all things mobile conversion. So our different conversion versions you can— strategies you can try, different like approaches. But before we go there, I know that Alissa has prepared a really cool pro tip of the week, and it is really connected actually to what we’ll be talking about today. So Alissa, what’s the pro tip of the week?

Alissa: 5:13

So this pro tip of the week is to focus on mobile SEO first. And the reason for that is because Google actually uses a mobile-first indexing. So what the heck does that mean, right? Because I read this and I was like, what? I’m an email marketing nerd, not a Google nerd, so tell me, explain. So the mobile version of your web page is actually crawled first. So if it doesn’t exist, then the crawlers look for the desktop site, and your mobile site is actually what impacts your online visibility. So Google’s crawlers, for example, can’t really understand the context of a video. They crawl text along with it to make sense of what the video is about. So if you actually want to get indexed, you need to ensure that your mobile, mobile SEO game is strong. And with that, you can actually expect a boost in your mobile conversion rate. Sorry, I keep saying mobile because in England they say mobile and I was born in England and I haven’t lived there for a very, very long time. But there are still some random words that I say kind of strangely, so I apologize. Mobile, mobile, you get the picture.

Vira: 6:19

Do you call the apartments flats?

Alissa: 6:21

Sometimes I do.

Vira: 6:22

Sometimes I do.

Alissa: 6:23

It’s like very random, like my brain kind of picks and chooses the instances that it wants to say something in UK English versus American English. But I know, fun fact, I still use a UK keyboard on my laptop.

Vira: 6:36

Oh yeah, is it different from the US?

Alissa: 6:40

It’s kind of different. Like where the hashtag symbol is, there’s actually a pound sign, and like where the at sign is, there’s actually a euro sign. So it’s like kind of— yeah, it’s kind of interesting. The main reason why I use it, I don’t know why I do it on my phone too. I do— I use English, so my autocorrect spells everything like favorite or color. It’s not just favorite with like a U, right? Yeah, it adds the U. So, and I get a lot of shtick for it, but I’m like, you know what, whatever.

Vira: 7:10

It’s actually interesting because in Canada we use the Yeah, you use British. British English, right? Um, not exactly. We like Canadians sound like Americans but write like British. Yeah, this is very confusing, you know.

Alissa: 7:22

But, uh, I’m kind of like Canadian a little bit.

Vira: 7:25

Yeah. Yeah. Come, come once the borders are open because we are still very much closed.

Alissa: 7:32

Yeah.

Vira: 7:33

Yes, you are.

Alissa: 7:34

I guess that’s your pro tip of the week and also your fun fact about Alissa’s weird life.

Vira: 7:41

Yeah, no, I randomly call stuff in like British English as well, just because that’s the English that we learned in schools growing up. We never learned like American English. We learned British English. And yeah, the first time I was exposed to like American English was from TV shows. So that’s why I’m like a mix of both. Well, anyways, back to Marlborough. Or mobile traffic. Fun fact, back in 2016— so it was when, like 3 years ago? No, no, 5 years ago. For God’s sake, it’s already 2021.

Alissa: 8:15

We’re old.

Vira: 8:16

We are old. So back in 2016, mobile traffic already surpassed desktop traffic. So it was like 5 years ago and it’s only been increasing ever since. And mobile accounts for approximately half of like over half of web traffic worldwide. And in the first quarter of 2021, mobile devices generated 54.8% of global website traffic. However, it’s— I was really curious to learn that actually when it comes to conversion, like in doing online sales, mobile traffic is converting less than half the rate of what desktop does. So mobile is only 2.25% and on average desktop desktop is like 4.81%. So almost like twice as little. Wow. Yeah, we see twice as little conversion on mobile versus desktop. And it was very interesting to learn because most people, they are searching from their phones, but when it comes to like actually purchasing something, they go to their desktop. So people are happy to browse on mobile, but they prefer to buy on desktop. So let’s look at some reasons why and how we can actually improve the mobile conversion rates in 2024. 2021. So that’s what we will be talking about in our podcast today. And I’m super excited about this. That’s something that we’ve been discussing internally a lot. And these are some like out-of-the-box ideas that you can try and they will for sure help you out. And the first one, Alisa, we like literally just talked about the first strategy. Yeah. Yeah.

Alissa: 10:00

Because it’s actually something we’re doing internally. Vira, the total transparency, everybody, Vira and I were actually talking about this because Vira was like, Did you know that actually the conversion rate is 2 times higher for desktop than it is mobile? And like, that’s so interesting to me. And Vira and I were agreeing that it’s true, like more than happy to browse on mobile, on your mobile device, but when it comes to like actually finalizing the purchase or like doing anything that actually requires a level of like either focus or like typing additional information or providing anything else, I always move on to my laptop. I don’t do anything on mobile.

Vira: 10:32

I’m the same.

Alissa: 10:33

And what did you say, Vira? It was fat finger syndrome.

Vira: 10:37

Yeah, they call it the fat finger syndrome is basically when you just like minimize everything that is on the desktop and you minimize it to the size of the mobile phone. But just like remember how easy it is to click in the text link on your computer. You just like click with your mouse there. But when you’re doing it with a finger, the struggle is real.

Alissa: 10:57

Yeah.

Vira: 10:58

So that’s why it’s not like we cannot create the identical design for both. Like mobile and desktop and hope that they will both work like equally as good. And in fact, I learned that it’s even— this difference is even bigger for more expensive items. For example, when people are buying like travel tickets, right, like airplane tickets or something, approximately like 80% or something, people are going there from mobile, but the conversion is like 18% lower than in like other cases. So like from that 2-point-something, it’s like -18% on top of that just because people are not comfortable with like purchasing expensive stuff. Trust issue. And also it’s like an expensive purchase, right? It’s not like you’re purchasing like $10 socks, right? You’re purchasing $800 airplane ticket and a mattress. Right, right. I wouldn’t purchase a mattress from my phone. No, it’s just— I don’t know. It’s something— it’s probably also about the experience, about the entire purchasing experience, right? It’s so much more comfortable most of the time on desktops versus mobile, but I mean, we are here to change it, you guys.

Alissa: 12:36

That’s interesting.

Vira: 12:37

We’ll be, we’ll be talking about it today. Yeah.

Alissa: 12:39

Sorry, I got off track because we started talking about like why, why, why. Okay, so we’ll go back into like how to actually fix the problem. Right, right. So the first thing, and we’ve kind of touched on this a few times, and like I mentioned, or like we mentioned before, this is something we’re talking about internally, is starting to design for mobile. And this is across the board when it comes to like your emails and then also your website experience as well. So when we’re talking about conversion rate optimization, CRO, for mobile, it’s a totally different beast altogether because when people are using their phone to either check an email or to be on your website, your brand’s website, like squirrel mode is activated, right? They’re out and about. And so the phone is more of a means of like mediocre entertainment as opposed to like your sole focus. When you’re sat on your computer, you are like in your desktop practically like face in the screen, whereas on your phone it’s a little bit different. You can easily get distracted by by other things going on around you. So the two things that you want to resolve almost right off the bat are making sure that your website navigation is really easy to do and really easy to deal with. And then also making sure that the content that you’re featuring, whether it’s in your email or on your website, is fit for a smaller screen. And I mean, I’m probably like every e-commerce brand’s nightmare, but I now have the iPhone 12 mini because I want a smaller screen than I do a larger screen. So sorry to all of you e-commerce owners, you have to fit on my iPhone 12 mini screen.

Vira: 14:05

So do they, do they though most of the time?

Alissa: 14:08

Yeah, no, it’s, and that’s the thing is like, interestingly enough, I think I shift over to desktop more often than not. I have really, really tiny, like little hamster hands. So the fat finger syndrome isn’t a huge thing for me. For me, it’s more of a trust issue. And also like when a website, when I go to a brand on the desktop, ’cause we’re on desktop all the time ’cause we work. But when I go to the brand’s desktop and I see a really pretty website and then later on in the day, I’m thinking about it and I go back to their website on mobile and it looks different or looks kind of off, like stylistically or design-wise, for me, that’s a big red flag. Not because I’m like, oh, I’m a web designer snob or whatever. I don’t know about that stuff very well or enough for me to become a snob, but I lose trust in what I’m looking at. And then I almost think like, is this a real website? Am I on a fake website? Did someone make this up so they could steal my information? So I panic and then I leave on mobile. So it prevents me from continuing the customer journey where I’m now getting another touchpoint with the brand and then another one and another one before I actually to make the purchase. So the mobile to desktop thing, I mean, that’s a real big deal. So what you need to do is improve the user experience on mobile by ensuring that all the features that you would typically provide on your desktop version of your website are well arranged and easy to navigate. So the navigation side of things is like a must because if someone gets onto your mobile version of your website and it’s a mess, you’ve lost them. But the other thing is you want to make sure it’s well arranged so it doesn’t look weird ultimately, and you probably don’t need your mobile website to have a ton of heavy images because realistically people are just trying to get the information that they need from your mobile website before they actually move on to desktop to convert into a customer, right?

Vira: 15:49

Right.

Alissa: 15:49

Some other things that you can do to kind of make the design for mobile a little bit better try to give your customers a concise yet detailed menu that shows your key products or just key bits of information that you actually need to get across. So then that way it’s easier for them to access all the areas of your website without getting super overwhelmed with all the little details that maybe you would include in the desktop experience. Another way for you to make things easier for your mobile visitors is by integrating autofill into your website. So what this function does is it automatically inputs details that have been provided earlier. So it saves users time as well as the inconvenience of typing into small fields. Again, that kind of addresses the fat finger syndrome. So like this would only work, for example, if you already have have the user’s profile data in Klaviyo, or like if cookies is stored on the person’s mobile device and you’re not using Klaviyo, whatever it is, you just want to make sure that that autofill feature is working and functioning on your mobile version of your website. So then that way it just takes the hassle out of a lot of the things that, that would create a hassle for your users. So in terms of when you have to ask your visitors to manually fill out forms, it makes them want to abandon your website. So again, going back to that, like if things look kind of off on your website, if you’re asking them for a ton of information and it requires a lot of effort for them on their phone. If things aren’t rendering properly, if images are too heavy and taking too long to load, there’s just so many issues that can happen on mobile where people say, you know what, I’m not going to bother with this. And then this was another thing that Vira touched on earlier, which is really, really smart, is making sure that any CTAs on your website and especially in emails are massive, but like as big as possible. So then that way when someone’s trying to click on something, they’re not accidentally clicking on another part of the email or another part of the website and it takes them away from what they were trying to do. That goes back to that ease of navigation, making sure that your CTA buttons are big enough where anyone, no matter the size of their finger, can click and they’re doing what they want to do. So those are just a few kind of like minor tips on designing for mobile, but that is a huge, huge element to making sure that the user experience is great, not only on desktop, but also on mobile, which is again, something that we’re focusing a lot on internally. We’re actually going to kind of switch over how we’ve been doing things and start designing strictly for mobile and then later optimizing for desktop. Desktop because remember we want to make sure that we’re catching and capturing the audience’s attention on mobile, but we know that realistically they’re going to convert on desktop. So we want to make sure that mobile looks really great and is easy to navigate, but ultimately desktop is where we can include all those kind of finite details. So then that way they’re converting properly. So that’s the, the first thing we wanted to talk about in terms of increasing your mobile conversion rate.

Vira: 18:33

And that’s actually what a lot of people are doing with their websites right now, like these days as well. They start with creating a mobile-friendly website, mobile-friendly checkout process, and then they extend it to desktop version when like a few years ago we were doing it like the other way around, right? You start with desktop and then move to mobile. So I feel like that’s a trend these days. And like even when I’m sending the campaigns for my clients, when I check the stats, depending on the brand, of course, but I see that like majority of my viewers, they view the emails from mobile. On average, it’s like 60+% if it’s like a younger brand. And even for like boomers or for older generation, like it’s always mobile that is winning. Like they have 50+ percent usually for mobile. So that’s like the way to go. And this number will only increase over time.

Alissa: 19:24

So it’s true.

Vira: 19:25

That’s a big, that’s a big trend.

Alissa: 19:27

Especially as these handheld devices are getting more and more intuitive and more and more accessible to everyone. This is like where it’s going to go. You know, people are now like, should I buy a laptop or should I just get a tablet? And it’s eventually going to migrate even more in that direction.

Vira: 19:41

So yeah, I actually learned that people convert on tablets better than on phones. So the phone is like— I know, I know. I guess the tablets are more convenient, right? Yeah, they are more similar to desktop. Yeah. Like the checkout process would be more similar to the desktop than mobile. True. I would love to have a convenient mobile process so I can do everything from one device, but most of the time it’s not happening with like most of the brands. So unfortunately for now. Okay, so tip number 2 is maintaining a good good page speed. So Google has announced like lately that load time is one of the main things that decide whether or not your website will be ranking well. So it’s load time is a direct ranking factor. This means that if your page suffers from like poor speed, you have a lot of problems with your SEO, right? And on top of that, Google actually released this statistic showing that 53% of visitors will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Can you imagine like 53% 3%. So like more than half people will abandon the website if it loads for more than 3 seconds. Like 3 seconds, it doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you think about it, when you are like ready to spend money, you expect a good customer service in a way, right? You expect a good experience in a way. So even 3 seconds, it’s a lot in the e-commerce world. And maintaining a good page speed might just be the single biggest like direct factor to improving your overall shop’s conversion rate. So in fact, here’s like another shocking number that I learned. The website conversion rates drop by an average 4.42% with each additional second of load time. So that’s like, if you’re like over 3 seconds, if your page is loading for longer than 3 seconds, forget about it. Wow, you lost your customer. That’s, that’s a sad statistic if you think about it, but it is what it is. But one of nice things about platforms like Shopify, for example, and I know that most of our listeners are probably using Shopify or WooCommerce. Nice thing is that your store like comes with some speed optimization stuff out of the box. So after creating a new Shopify store, you’ll find that like there are a lot of good performing features that are already like implemented automatically. For example, Shopify leverages browser caching. So that’s a big one. Also stores like Shopify, platforms like Shopify, they utilize so-called Content Delivery Networks, which basically it allows your website content to be stored on like different servers across the world. So the transfer of the information is faster. So that’s basically like out-of-the-box functions that Shopify stores come with. But there are also other options how you can speed up your online store. So first of all, you can choose if you’re using the standard theme, you can choose one of those themes that immediately put the website in a great position just from the performance standpoint. I will not be naming those themes because I mean, we are not paid to promote them, right? So I don’t want to, I don’t.

Alissa: 22:48

Want to be biased here, people.

Vira: 22:51

Not yet anyways.

Alissa: 22:53

Yeah.

Vira: 22:53

Yeah. But I mean, just like Google, Google fast Shopify themes and you’ll find a ton of them. I know for sure that, okay, I’ll say it. I know for sure that the Brooklyn theme is a good one. A lot of my customers are using it. It’s very fast, very responsive. I’m not sure if it’s free. I don’t think it’s free. Brooklyn theme, if you’re listening to us sponsor our next— you’re so funny.

Alissa: 23:17

You’re like, we’re not going to give any names. Okay, I’ll give one name really quick.

Vira: 23:21

Just one. I mean, I have like a list of them, but I know that my customers are using it and it’s, it’s, it’s pretty good. Pretty good theme. So just Google them. Yeah. And I mean, resizing large images is another big one, actually. I know that those like large images, they look really good in terms of like improving the overall branding of your store and like user experience from the desktop stop. But that’s one of the reasons why your mobile version of the website might be loading slower. And just like, think about it, not every time you’re looking for something from your phone, you’re not always connected to Wi-Fi, right? Sometimes you’re just using your mobile data or data— how to say it? I don’t know, what’s the proper way to say it, Alissa? Data or data?

Alissa: 24:08

Data. You got it.

Vira: 24:09

Data. Okay, good. So oftentimes you’re just using your mobile data and it’s not necessarily faster than the Wi-Fi. So that’s why mobile versions of the websites. They should be as fast, as light as possible. If it means sacrificing the quality of the images, let it be. The main thing for you is that they need to load faster. Besides, if you think about it, when you’re loading the image on the small screen of the phone, it doesn’t have to be humongous because screen is so small that you will not see the difference between like a super good quality image and average quality image. But you will only experience the delays. That’s like the only way you tell the difference. So here’s another fun fact, or not so fun, I don’t know. Out of all of the people who were surveyed in that Google survey that I already mentioned, 53% actually said that they would be willing to give up an animation and a video for a faster load time. So if you have like a— if you have a good video on your website, but it’s loading and it’s taking some time to load, just like give it up, move on, do something simple, do something something practical or something simple. And the main thing, speed is very, very important in this case. So rule number 2, maintain a good page speed.

Alissa: 25:27

Wow, that’s so interesting that people are— and it’s, you know what, it’s so funny, it goes back to what the customer wants, right? Like what the customer actually wants and not what we think they want. So right in our heads we think like, well, our customers want to see a fun animation about our product. And it’s like, well, no, most customers probably don’t care because unless that animation is giving them time or money back, then it’s not contributing to like anything. It’s not adding value. So give them what they want, give them faster load times. Yeah, that’s interesting. That’s very interesting. So we move on to our third kind of how-to when it comes to increasing your mobile conversion, mobile conversion. And the third is to have mobile-friendly popups. Ooh, that’s a good one. Yeah, this is a really good one ’cause it’s a struggle that I’ve had with a client over the last couple of weeks in in terms of us designing a popup, but it’s way too long for mobile and it doesn’t render correctly or anything like that. And it’s true. And it’s getting more complicated now as we’re trying to add SMS consent to a lot of our popups. So now with SMS consent, there’s major compliance issues and like legalities that kind of back all that up. So there’s like a fat chunk of copy that needs to be underneath where people would consent that says like, by hitting submit, I consent to receive SMS from X brand. This is the privacy policy. These are the terms and conditions, da da da da. And that’s like all like legal terminology that we don’t have a choice. We have to keep there and there’s no way to shorten that copy. And wow, that’s been a big struggle because it’s really, really, really hard to keep these popups mobile friendly and still include all the information that’s in there. So we’ll kind of get into that. So what we do internally and all that we mentioned kind of in terms of designing for mobile applies to these mobile friendly popups, right? So you want to make sure that any imagery that you use isn’t super heavy so that it’s loading properly. You probably want to look at even like changing the behaviors of your pop-ups from mobile to desktop. So I’ll just kind of give some like best practices in terms of what we do internally. And then you as e-commerce business owners or email marketers or just like general digital marketers as a whole can kind of take and see if you can fit them to make them your own. So because we work in Klaviyo, whenever we create, for example, like a homepage pop-up for our clients, we create a desktop version and a mobile version and the behaviors change, right? So for desktop, when someone’s desktop, that popup can be relatively big. It could have some kind of heavy imagery in that popup. We typically time it so that when someone goes onto the homepage, after they’ve been on the homepage for about 10 seconds, then it loads, that kind of thing. In terms of mobile, the game totally changes, right? And what I’ve seen our designers do really, really well is they’ll take that desktop popup and they will completely change how it looks like on mobile, but still using and utilizing some of the basic foundational design elements. So fonts will obviously stay the same, probably like backgrounds background color of the popup will stay the same, but more often than not, the image is taken out. A lot of additional wording is taken out. Like the copy is significantly reduced in terms of like on the desktop, it’s like, hey, sign up now so that you can receive emails from us that do this and do da, da, da, da, that, da. And it’s like a whole thing. Whereas on mobile, it’s like sign up now.

Vira: 28:52

It’s sign.

Alissa: 28:54

Like, hey, sign up. And that’s it. Because we don’t have all this space, you know, to work with. The other thing with mobile is what we find is that we typically change the behavior so that we’re not necessarily using time as a factor on deciding when the popup will trigger. We’re actually using scroll percentage. So when someone’s on the desktop, we will actually wait for the person or the visitor to scroll like anywhere between like 40 to 60% down the homepage before that popup triggers. Because with time, it’s a little different on the mobile device, right? With time, you could pull the website up, put the phone down, go do something, go fill your cup with coffee or whatever it is, and then you come back and you’re like, what was I doing? Oh yeah, now— and your popup just went to waste. So you have to alter the popup’s behaviors based on what you know typical behaviors are on the phone versus the desktop. So that’s like a huge thing. The design elements are another huge thing. And in terms of like the design stuff, just making sure that you’re kind of like finding a way to compress that popup to fit in the best possible. You want it to be skinny and you don’t want it to be too long. It’s just got to kind of be like a little blurb that gets the point across. But the other thing is, in terms of the form fields, again, this is going back to that fat finger syndrome, making sure that the CTA button on that or the submit button on that pop-up is massive. And I mean massive. And you also want to make sure that you’re removing any unnecessary form fields. So if you’re just trying to capture the person’s email, Email address, don’t add, please fill in your first name and now your last name and now your date of birth and also your social security number and your type and like get all that info on desktop, not on mobile. That’s not the place to do it. All you wanna get is the email address cuz that’s all that’s absolutely necessary for you to send that first email over to them and then just call it a day.

Vira: 30:42

And if you want to learn how to collect your customer’s social security numbers information, just come back next Tuesday. Oh, that’s hilarious.

Alissa: 30:53

Yeah, yeah. I mean, don’t collect your— unless you’re like the IRS who already has that information here in the US. So yeah, the unnecessary form fields, they are exactly what we’re calling them— unnecessary when you’re on mobile. Just collect the bare basics and then call it a day. Because as soon as people start to see like, fill this in, now fill that in, now fill this in, they’re like, okay, forget it. Thank you so much. Have a nice day. They’ll exit out of the browser and then call it. So just make sure that you keep things like really, short, really to the point, really concise on mobile. And again, make sure that you change the behavior so that they make sense with the behaviors that you know apply to your audience on mobile. Make sure that you have only the relevant form fields and then just make sure that it looks good and actually appears properly on mobile as well. Because if you put in a popup and you just use the desktop version on mobile, it’s gonna look totally outta whack and then people aren’t even gonna bother. So yeah, that is number 3, have mobile-friendly popups.

Vira: 31:51

And I just hate when they make you scroll on the opt-in form, right? Yeah. Usually, ideally, the form has to fit in one screen without scrolling because exactly people get annoyed with scrolling. Yeah.

Alissa: 32:08

And very easily on mobile as well. That’s the thing is like I feel like the level of patience significantly decreases when you’re on mobile. So like if you’re not there and like fitting the current mode that the customer is in, which is like I’m on my mobile device, it’s got to be quick and easy. If you’re not providing that, you’ve lost them and that’s it for sure.

Vira: 32:26

For sure. Yeah, that’s, that’s actually a good one. And that’s why we always have like different ways to make popups, right? We always create one popup specifically for desktop and another one specifically for mobile. That’s like the way we roll here at Flowium. And otherwise the popups, they will, they will not look good and they will not be converting. Believe us, we’ve been there, done that. So we’ve tested them, A/B tested them all, and that’s like the best way to go. Okay. And the last last but not the least, or how do they say it? Number 4 is improve the checkout experience. So the biggest issue behind the lower mobile conversion rates are actually the checkout— is actually the checkout process, the overall checkout experience. Many e-commerce conversions fall at that very final, final step. And Alisa, this number will shock you, but 81% of mobile users actually abandon their cart without making the purchase. 81%. So usually I think think I with like with desktop, I might be wrong, but I thought it was like something around like 60-something percent.

Alissa: 33:33

Yeah, it was 60-something or 70-something, but it was in that range.

Vira: 33:38

It was significantly less, but it wasn’t like 81%. So yeah, so 81% of mobile users, they abandon their cart without making a purchase. So checkout abandonment is where most stores are losing the money, right? And customers browsing via mobile, they often don’t have much time, just like you said. And the long purchasing process does not help either. So like asking them to fill out like additional forms and additional billing information, they can turn users away. And in addition to that, it’s like a hassle even like to enter the information, right? With all the small touchscreens and especially if you’re using the mini like you, like you do, iPhone Alyssa, right? My mini So, so like we, like we mentioned probably like a gazillion times in this episode already, the fat finger problem or fat finger syndrome is a real thing. So the one way to think about the quality of mobile design is to consider how many taps or how many clicks it takes for the user to complete the task. In this case, the checkout. So the less taps equals more usability when it comes to mobile. And remember, Alissa, we had Ben on our podcast.

Alissa: 34:51

Ben from, from The Pony.

Vira: 34:54

Like Pony Link, Ben. Yeah. And then like that was like one of the reasons why they created this, this like 3-click checkout or 1-click checkout, just like to make the amount of actions, the amount of clicks is like as little as possible. So let’s say you’re filling out the form on your phone. If that form has like a user dropdown menu for every question, it would be like a nightmare to fill out. And I’ve seen those forms like dropdowns. They are— I don’t know, I don’t like them. Them on mobile phones, especially when you have like a lot of them. But when you make this process as simple as possible, that’s like the way to go. Less tabs is the way to go. So how to make the checkout process more mobile user-friendly in this case? Well, we can probably have like a separate, entire separate episode just about the checkout. But here are the few things that we, we partially covered them in this episode, but still. So first thing, create guest guest checkout. People hate registering before buying something and I’m like one of them. If you make me register to purchase your product, I’m done. Like, bye, I’m never coming back. So offer the guest checkout. That’s like super, super important. Another one, autofill forms. There are sites that can allow users to autofill addresses and like payment details, and sometimes you can like save that information on your phone’s browser. So no matter whether you’ve been on that website or not, you can like auto-populate that information, right? So like allowing the autofill, autofill is huge. Even something like postcode lookup, right? Those like tools, they are— I love those. They are super helpful. I love them. I know, right? When you just like type in your, I don’t know, like your city name or your town or whatever, and it pulls the code to the postcode automatically. I still don’t know my postcode because I move so much. Like literally for the last 5 years we moved like, what, 11 times or something? So I just like, I keep forgetting my postal code. So that’s why this one function, it’s like super, super helpful. Small details matter in general. So if you can do the autofill, amazing. If you can do— sometimes I know that some websites, they offer like a numeric version of keyboard when they ask you to enter like payment card details. I don’t know if you, Alissa, have tested it or not from phone. Sometimes instead of having like a regular keyboard with all of the like letters and numbers, they just offer you the numbers one, which is super convenient because when you enter, when you enter the credit card information, like the number of credit cards, you don’t need to have letters, right?

Alissa: 37:30

So that’s true. Yeah, that’s true. I use always that.

Vira: 37:32

Every little thing helps.

Alissa: 37:35

Whenever I check out, I’m like, please give me just the numbers. Please just give the me numbers.

Vira: 37:38

I know, especially on the phone. It’s like, it doesn’t bother me on desktop, right? Whatever. I can like enter the numbers, but when you’re doing it from the phone and you have fat fingers like I do, it’s like, it’s hard. The struggle is real. So it’s like, yeah, make this process as simple as possible and also providing easy payment methods also helpful. And if you can offer like the PayPal gateway, amazing. If you can do the different online like cards or like wallets, amazing. The more the better. If you take Bitcoin like to pay for your products, I know that one of my clients actually just started receiving payments in Bitcoin and I’m like really excited to see on the backend how it will work. But yeah, I mean, offer as offer as many— many payment methods as possible just so, so the customer does not have the reason not to purchase from you. So that’s our little helpful tips on how to increase your mobile conversion rates. And again, guys, we can be talking about each of these tips for like an entire episode, but these are just like on top of our minds, right?

Alissa: 38:45

Yeah.

Vira: 38:46

We hope that this would help you.

Alissa: 38:47

I love this. I think this is my favorite episode we’ve ever recorded. Just an FYI. So I hope you guys enjoy it.

Vira: 38:55

You better enjoy it. It’s Alissa’s favorite episode. You you better, better.

Alissa: 39:02

Guys. Thank you so much as always for listening in to us and our crazy nerdiness. And we get super excited about, about this stuff. And we appreciate all the positive feedback that we’ve been receiving from our listeners. So thank you all so much for your listening ears and your time and being with us. We’re almost hitting a year since we’ve had this podcast. So when we actually do like our year our anniversary.

Vira: 39:26

We’re going to party, like a party or something.

Alissa: 39:28

Yeah, we have to.

Vira: 39:30

Let’s party with our listeners. Yeah, let’s do something fun. Do you guys have any ideas for one year of our podcast? Just like email us. Yeah, alissa@flowium.com or vira@flowium.com. Just like email us directly. Let’s, let us know. Let’s party. We love it.

Alissa: 39:46

We’ll play some music. We’ll get really fancy and fun.

Vira: 39:48

Oh, music.

Alissa: 39:50

I like it. Well, actually, we’ll have to check on the legalities around that because we may not be able to play it, but we’ll see. We’ll see.

Vira: 39:57

We can sing it. We can sing it.

Alissa: 39:59

We can sing. Guys, don’t forget to subscribe and share this podcast with your friends if you enjoy it. And if you do have any questions at all that you’d like us to feature on this podcast in future episodes, just send them in either at flowium.com/ask or feel free to reach out to myself or Vira directly. I mean, we’ve received a couple of emails here and there for some listeners who have questions. And we love receiving the feedback and the emails from you guys. So please just feel free to reach out because we love it.

Vira: 40:28

Yeah. And definitely come back next Tuesday. Actually, Alissa, next Tuesday will be our 50th episode. Wow. Episode number 50. So that’s like halfway to 100, whatever it means. I don’t know. It’s like another reason to celebrate, I guess.

Alissa: 40:46

Episode— that’s pretty— okay, we’ll have to do some kind of— wow, it’s just like celebration after celebration. So we’ll celebrate our 50th.

Vira: 40:53

Canada Day is coming.

Alissa: 40:58

Yeah, Canada Day is coming.

Vira: 41:00

So many things to celebrate, right? I mean, we know so many goofy holidays, right, Alissa? Because like, that’s what we do on practically like a monthly basis. We brainstorm with our team for the calendars, and we know all the goofy holidays.

Alissa: 41:16

So what I’m getting We also have, so on our YouTube channel, we also have a marketing calendar for every month of the year. So if you do want to know what all the goofy holidays are with us, then check that out on our YouTube channel. That wasn’t like a shameless plug. I just thought of that because I’m like, we know all the goofy holidays. I feel like everyone else can know them too. And you can, if you go onto our YouTube channel, you can get access to them and you can get a PDF of all the holidays. Or all the months of the year that have the holidays and everything. So check that out too if you want to know.

Vira: 41:49

Alissa, you are our chief goofy holiday officer, I guess, or whatever.

Alissa: 41:56

Yeah.

Vira: 41:56

Because you, you usually like— you. Do these videos for YouTube, so you come up with all the craziest things.

Alissa: 42:01

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So if you know anything, you’re like. What does Alissa look like? You can see it on the YouTube channel because it’s my face, like What’s up guys? We’re gonna talk about the month of— The Cheese Day. Yeah, yeah, National Cheese Day, which is on my husband’s birthday, January 20th. So, again, weird repertoire of things that we know.

Vira: 42:24

Random things to know. Yeah, if you want to learn more random things about us, about Alyssa’s husband, or about 3 easy ways to win your old customers back with emails, come back next Tuesday. Yeah, because that’s exactly what we will be talking about.

Alissa: 42:41

So I love it.

Vira: 42:42

And that’s— bring, bring some cheese. We’ll be celebrating episode number 50. And thanks so much for listening.

Alissa: 42:49

And wear your socks.

Vira: 42:51

And wear your socks.

Alissa: 42:53

Bring some cheese and sit on your mattress.

Vira: 42:55

Yes.

Alissa: 42:57

We’ll see you guys next week. Thank you.

Vira: 42:59

See you guys next week. Bye.