Transform Your Mobile Experience

Show Notes

• You may have noticed in recent years that everything is going mobile.
• 90-95% of Facebook traffic happens on smartphones and tablets.
• The people who are on Facebook are likely the people who will spend money with you. As a result, you will also want to be accessible on mobile devices as well.
• As small business owners we frequently work on a desktop or a laptop because many of the tools we need to use are easier to use on a desktop. This puts us in the wrong paradigm because when people are making decisions to buy, they are often on smartphones.
• Start thinking about your prospective customers experience and test it on your smartphone in an area with spotty/typical internet reception.
• How to make your mobile experience more effective:

1. When the page loads does it take more than two seconds to load?
2. Typing on a smartphone is not ideal, so make the experience as easy as possible by limiting what the prospective customer needs to fill out.
3. Make sure your mobile form is pulling up the right keyboard according to what type of information you are asking for. (i.e. numbers, @ symbol, etc.)
4. Think about where you are sourcing your leads and use these to your advantage. (i.e. Twitter, FB lead ads, etc.)
5. Make sure your order form is easy to read and to fill out. Is it always visible on the screen without scrolling back and forth?

• Think about your mobile experience from beginning to end and make sure it doesn’t prevent people from finding you. If you fix your mobile experience you will have higher conversion and sales.
• Remember that the mobile phone number is the key to connecting to your customers in a way your competition isn’t.

Transcription of Episode

[00:00:00] This is Ryan Chapman from Fix Your Funnel and a couple of years ago, I started noticing a trend, I'm sure you noticed it as well, which was that everything was going mobile. And in fact, if you look at the way that Facebook started to change their business model, it's very lucky that they figured out that everything was going mobile and they changed as well. If you went back to 2013, 2012, and that epic, they had actually no revenue from mobile. All their revenue was desktop based. Then they made a shift.

I would say that they made the shift even a little bit late, but they made a shift and because they made that shift, they started making billions of dollars on mobile.

It's a good thing they did, because if you go and look at their traffic today, 90 to 95 percent of their traffic actually happens on smartphones and tablets. That's a pretty big trend. That's a trend that you as a small business owner actually have to be paying attention to as well because these people that are on Facebook are most of the people that would also spend money with you.

So, if they're spending most of [00:01:00] their time on mobile, you need to make sure that your marketing and your business is appropriately on mobile as well.

In today's episode, we're going to be talking about, what are some of the things that you need to be looking at as you think about the mobile experience for your customers.

One of the big problems as small business owners, especially small business owners that are using technology to gain leverage in their business, is we frequently work on a desktop computer or laptop computer. Meaning, most of our time isn't spent on smartphones because we're trying to make money by utilizing this technology and most of this technology isn't built to work on our smartphone. We have to be on a desktop.

For example, if you're using Infusionsoft, and you've ever tried to do very much on Infusionsoft on your smartphone, you know that it is a painful process because the tool is made to be used on desktop. Now, that's fine. I don't really have any major qualms with that, so to speak, because there are certain things that are a little bit easier for us to create on desktop still.

While that's the case, let's leverage that tool. [00:02:00] But there's a big problem with that, and the problem is, it puts us in the wrong paradigm because we get into a paradigm that is in the exact opposition of the paradigm of our customers.

When people are learning, when people are making decisions to buy, they're on smartphones. They're not at their desktop computer typically. That may not be true for some industries, but for most industries, that's actually very much the case.

People are doing investigation, people are doing education, learning, this trying to make decisions by going through these processes on their smartphone because they can do it virtually anywhere. Sometimes that's the only place where they have time, is virtually anywhere.

Because this is the case, you've got to start thinking about, what is the experience of my prospective customers as they go through my marketing processes? If you test your marketing processes on your desktop, you have no clue what that experience is about. If you're testing it on your smartphone at your home with your high-speed [00:03:00] Wi-Fi, you have no idea what that experience is all about.

In order for you to get a good feel for what your current experience is for your perspective customers, you need to go through the entire process on a smartphone and an area with spotty reception. It doesn't have to be terrible, but it has to be fairly typical of where people might find themselves other than on Wi-Fi.

If you go through that experience, you may determine why you think that mobile is not as effective as desktop for your company. It has nothing to do with the fact that it's on mobile versus desktop. It has to do with the experience that you've created. And if you accept that responsibility, now you're in a position to actually do something about it.

Here's a few areas where you need to be looking to make your mobile experience more effective. Number one: when the page loads does it take more than two seconds to load? If it takes more than two seconds to load, that doesn't mean you have to get rid of it. It just means it can't be in your primary flow of lead generation. [00:04:00]

Once you've got motivation, people will wait eight seconds for your website to load. But, when you don't have motivation yet, when you don't have that person convinced that you are an option that they should be investigating, then an 8 second load time is going to be a deterrent to them actually giving you the information or identifying themselves.

In the mobile marketing experience, we need to be thinking about every page load that a person has to go through. How long does that take? And is it even necessary? So you want to be thinking about, is this step necessary? Are there any other alternatives to getting this done?

Number two: when people input information on smartphones, they have to use their big french fry eating fingers, and typing on a smartphone is not exactly the most ideal experience. Because of that, people will hesitate to fill out forms that are unnecessarily long.

The question has to be, do I need to collect this information in this format right now [00:05:00] in order for me to be able to take the next step in the process? If they do, are there any other ways for me to have the information pre-filled or filled in for them so that the experience is easier on them so that we don't allow the fact that they have to deal with the keyboard on their smartphone as a deterrent from them taking the next step in the marketing process?

In this scenario, this will seem like it's in opposition to what I said in the last podcast which was, the amount of information you can ask for is directly proportional to the motivation of the prospect, but you have to also look at the mobile experience and take that into consideration.

When I did that business, I was in a time and epic when most people were using desktop computers to be able to interact, especially in the industry that we were targeting. It wasn't a big deal for them to have to enter in all that information.

If I was doing that business today, I would still try and get that information, but I would have to piecemeal it and then target it specifically so I got it from the right device at the right time. You do have to take into [00:06:00] consideration the mobile experience as you're deciding what information you're going to collect and what you're going to put the prospect through before they can tell you who they are.

The next step, in terms of looking at this is: what kind of keyboard pulls up when they're filling out information? So if I'm asking somebody for an email address with a smartphone, I have the ability to control which keyboard comes up that will facilitate them being able to enter an email address, meaning, the at symbol is already on that that current view of that screen.

They're going to have numbers across the top, then letters, and then they have the at symbol and then the submit button. All that can show up on the keyboard dynamically with smartphones. Is that happening when they fill out your form?

If it's not happening, then you're missing one of the pieces of the puzzle. You need to make sure that your mobile form is actually pulling up the right keyboard. If you're asking somebody for a cell phone number or credit card number, does it pull up the number only keyboard? This number only keyboard has fewer buttons so all the [00:07:00] buttons are bigger and it's a lot easier for people to tap on and it makes it easier for them to be able to enter that information.

When you're asking somebody for a phone number, or credit card, or maybe even the expiration date, are you showing the appropriate keyboard that makes it easy for them to enter that data? If you're not then you're missing a piece of the mobile puzzle.

The other place that I take into consideration is when they have to fill out an order form, what are the options I'm giving them? And if you think, well, PayPal would be great for mobile, maybe not. Think again, because they have to enter in the email address, which they've already entered somewhere else and maybe this is a different email address for PayPal, so that may not be the best course of action.

Think about the process, make sure your order form is pulling up the right keyboards, and you're going to be that much closer.

One of the things that I would introduce to you and propose to you in this process is thinking about where we generate or source our leads. If I'm sourcing my leads on Twitter, Twitter has an option to allow you to be able to get [00:08:00] the Twitter account, email address, and name directly from Twitter with the authorization of the prospect.

That's gonna be much more effective than sending them to a website where they didn't have to go through more copy and then fill out another form typing in the email and name.

Facebook has a similar thing now called lead ads, which means that I can have Facebook's information that they already have on the prospect pre-filled in to the form, making it less likely that they're going to give me a bad email address because of the effort it takes to replace the email address. It's more likely that they're going to fill out the form because if they clicked on the link to go to your website to then fill out the form, that takes the same amount of psychological energy as it does to tap on the button, have a form pre-filled by Facebook and they just hit submit, in terms of getting them to take that action.

The difference is, if we send them to your website, how long does it take your website to load? And now there's another opportunity for them to read something that may change their mind on giving you their [00:09:00] information which then adds another hurdle and prevents the ability for you to be able to identify who that person is in the first place.

All of these things got to be considered as you're going through the mobile experience. Go look at your order form.

Does your order form make sense when the person lands on it? Do they have to zoom and pinch to be able to see the different places? When they tap into a form field, does the description of that form field disappear to the left, or is it still visible on the screen so the person can know what it is that they're providing at this step? All of us have tried to fill out an order form where we had the slide left to be able to find out what we needed to put into the form and had to be going back and forth like that as we've gone through it, and we know it's a painful experience.

If that is going on and any sort of interruption happens in real life, the person is going to drop that process and they're going to step away and it's going to cost you money.

You've got to be thinking about your mobile experience from beginning to end and make sure that it's congruent with the mobile experience that people want to [00:10:00] have and that it doesn't have the unnecessary delays or hurdles into it that are preventing people from taking those steps.

If you make those changes in your mobile experience, what you're going to discover is that you're going to have higher conversions on mobile and have higher sales on mobile. People are on their smartphones. They want to stay on their smartphones. The only reason that they will go to desktop is if your experience is so terrible that they can't finish it on mobile, but they're so motivated that they're willing to do anything to get to the end result.

That's a good indicator for your motivation, but it's about indicator for your mobile experience. Fix your mobile experience and you'll fix a lot of problems that you may have in your business that you didn't even realize were there.

That's the major parts of the mobile experience, the other part, obviously, we've touched on a number of times before, is you got to get to the mobile phone number. The mobile phone number is your key to be able to connect with your prospects and your customers in ways that your competition can't.

When you show up where your competition can't, you have an advantage of delivering your marketing message and, as a [00:11:00] result, moving people to take action that will be good for them and you. This is Ryan Chapman with Fix Your Funnel. Keep moving forward.