What Results Can I Achieve Through Mobile Optimization?

Mobile-device usage has skyrocketed in recent years. Unfortunately, many businesses have failed to keep up with the rise of mobile.

We are now living in a mobile-first economy; yet, many consumers are still reluctant to finalize purchases across this on-the-go channel. Moovweb estimates that mobile conversion rates are a whopping 70 percent lower than those on desktop, resulting in lower lifetime customer values as well as underperforming mobile channels across all revenue drivers.

Is there anything mobile marketers can do to improve such dismal conversion rates?

Why Aren’t Mobile Experiences Converting?
It’s only been nine years since the first iPhone was released in the summer of 2007. In less than a decade, mobile devices have morphed from niche consumer electronics to a pervasive technology that is now responsible for more than one-third of all browser traffic in North America.

According to a recent whitepaper written by Moovweb, almost half of all US consumers are using the mobile channel to check account balances, browse real-estate listings, compare healthcare costs, and shop myriad other goods and services. With so much consumer activity utilizing the mobile channel, one would think mobile conversion rates would line up with mobile usage, right?

Wrong. We already know mobile conversion rates are dismal, but Moovweb further estimates that:

• Mobile bounce rates are 10 percent higher than those on desktop;
• Mobile-consumer satisfaction comes in at 4 percent less on desktop;
• Only 35 percent of banking users access mobile banking services versus 74 percent who access banking services from desktop web browsers; and yet,
• Mobile users are more likely to share content — desktop users click “share” buttons 35 percent less often.

So, what gives? We know consumers love using their mobile devices for shopping and browsing, but business performance still falters. Why? Well, because mobile conversion problems stem from a lack of mobile optimization. Proactive businesses are struggling to maintain the fast-paced demands of the mobile economy, and those that can’t accommodate the needs of mobile users are falling by the wayside. Other businesses have taken minimalist approaches to mobile, building lackluster mobile sites that may help them avoid search-engine penalization, yet deliver poor customer experiences.

It may be tempting to look at the data and think your mobile strategy is a lost cause, but putting mobile on the backburner would be a huge mistake for your business. Immense value lies in the mobile channel — you just have to know where to start.

How Can Your Brand Drive Mobile Conversions?
Mobile is here to stay, and the brands that don’t work right now to optimize customers’ mobile experiences will be left behind. What can your enterprise do to improve its mobile-optimization strategy right now? Keep reading!

1. Maintain a Simple Approach to Mobile.
When it comes to mobile user experiences, less is more. Think about it: let’s say that you’re delivering content to a device that’s a fraction of the size of a typical desktop computer. Why would you weigh down your mobile experience with endless copy and sluggish mobile-site speeds? Copy must be succinct. Every image, URL request, or script that leads to latencies must be addressed. When you’re creating your mobile experience, remember to maintain the mobile mindset: keep it lean, clear, and concise.

2. Identify Customer Pain Points.
When your customers engage with your brand via mobile, many things are taking place. They are likely on the go, killing time in between bigger tasks throughout the day, know what they want — and, they aren’t willing to wait to get it. Now, ask yourself this question: What part of your mobile site might hold your customers up? Are the forms on your mobile site difficult (or even impossible) to fill out? Are links, buttons, and calls to action easy to click on small screens? Make sure you test your content to identify the most effective mobile campaign offers. If your customers access your mobile site only to discover it’s an arduous mobile experience, they’ll likely move on.

3. Consider the Benefits of Mobile Apps.
Greg Sterling’s takeaway from Criteo’s 2015 State of Mobile Commerce Report pointed out that apps converted 120 percent better than mobile web and 20 percent better than desktop computers. The reason mobile apps leave mobile sites in the dust is because anyone taking the time to download an app will be much more engaged than someone using mobile web — plain and simple. These are your brand advocates; why wouldn’t you want your business advertised every time they access their home screens? Mobile apps are great ways to give your best customers exactly what they want — immersive interactions, offers and discounts, and exclusive content that’s readily available with a simple tap of a finger.

In Closing
When considering your strategy for mobile optimization, just remember that simplicity is key. Mobile sites must be accessible, should utilize advanced targeting capabilities to perform well across myriad digital devices, and must give users what they need — nothing more, nothing less. Remember to direct their every move while catering to their limited time, and you’ll be one step closer to creating optimized mobile experiences that will keep your customers coming back for more — time and again.

The post What Results Can I Achieve Through Mobile Optimization? appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/mobile/results-can-achieve-mobile-optimization/

How to reduce HTTP requests to speed up your WordPress site

Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly

This week’s articles reveal the best time to send holiday emails, mobile’s need to streamline checkout processes, the potentially waning Black Friday mythos, and more.

• Now is the time for retailers to blast holiday email campaigns [Internet Retailer]: Holiday emails sent immediately after Halloween had higher open rates than any other period between November and New Year’s Eve.
• Desktop will dominate online transactions until mobile expedites checkout process: report [Mobile Commerce Daily]: Companies have significant opportunities to impact mobile conversion by removing barriers to checkout on mobile devices.
• Retailers Can No Longer Bank On Black Friday [Forbes]: A possible drop in Black Friday shopping could impact retailers this year, as a survey indicates 47 percent plan to skip the shopping-deal day.
• Podcast: Five Mobile Commerce Predictions for 2017 [eMarketer]: Smartphones’ continued domination of the mobile scene for commerce and reduced checkout friction are areas to look forward to in 2017.
• Study Shows That 75% of Global Internet Access Will Be From Mobile This Year [AdWeek]: With Asian companies leading the way for the most part, the US is projected to have 74 percent of Internet traffic come from mobile in 2017.
• Will Instagram’s shoppable-photos strategy finally usher in social media sales? [Mobile Commerce Daily]: The social-media network is exploring new ways to make it convenient for users to shop within its app.
• Customer Acquisition Continues to Be a Priority for Marketers [eMarketer]: Many marketers continue to focus on the traditional marketing funnel in their focus on customer acquisition.
• 4 Ways Hospitality Marketers Can Use Mobile to Connect with the Weekend Traveler [Hospitality Net]: Targeting transportation hubs and leveraging behavioral data are two ways marketers can target mobile users.
• Passengers Want More Technology and Control Along Their Journey [Skift]: As technology advances in travel abound, customers are looking for more control throughout their trips.
• Facebook study points to loyalty types in online travel [Tnooz]: A new report from Facebook identifies different loyalty types in travel.

The post Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/news-and-resources/point-sale-retail-travel-weekly-27/

How to Make It On Mobile

The post How to Make It On Mobile appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/mobile/how-to-make-it-on-mobile/

Enhance online shopping with eCommerce filters

Reliable Marketing Data Helps WestJet Boost Online Bookings and Achieve Greater Savings.

In an industry where higher fares coupled with fewer services is becoming the norm, WestJet quickly became Canada’s second-largest airline, building the company’s reputation upon their ability to consistently deliver outstanding services and offer amazing savings. The company aims to delight passengers by providing them with relaxing, fun experiences that exceed their expectations — in the air, on the ground, and online. Those experiences include WestJet’s digital marketing campaigns.

In recent years, WestJet’s holiday video campaigns have achieved viral success, showing WestJet that creative and meaningful campaigns — based on targeted, reliable data — can guide marketing strategies to reach more travelers, drive more website traffic, and more positively impact the bottom line. To effectively deliver and measure better digital customer experiences, WestJet relies on Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions. For instance, Adobe Analytics allows WestJet’s marketers to gauge how customer experiences across multiple channels — including email, web, app, and social media — increase online bookings.

“Because we can see how successful our campaigns are, we know which ones are best at encouraging customers to book on our website instead of other channels,” says Ahmed Elemam, senior digital analyst at WestJet. “Increasing online bookings can help us achieve greater savings that we can also pass on to customers.”

Personalized customer experiences can increase those sales and savings. Adobe Audience Manager and Analytics work in tandem to power messages — such as fare upgrades or rewards-program benefits — sent to consumers after they’ve booked flights, and Adobe Target identifies a customer’s location to deliver relevant ads.

Using Adobe Media Optimizer alongside Analytics allows WestJet to review search-campaign performances daily to maximize search-engine marketing (SEM) investments. Besides reducing SEM support time by 40 percent, overall costs of weekend campaigns dropped 14 percent.

The post Reliable Marketing Data Helps WestJet Boost Online Bookings and Achieve Greater Savings. appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/reliable-marketing-data-helps-westjet-boost-online-bookings-and-achieve-greater-savings/

Use JSON-LD to add schema.org data to your website

In this post, we’ll shed some light on Schema.org and JSON-LD. What is it and how can you put it to use for your website?

There are many ways to let Google and other search engines know what your page is about. Next to writing awesome content, which should always be your starting point, we have also written about schema.org before. JSON-LD is a (relatively) new way to present schema.org data about your content to search engines. It comes with a few major benefits, so let’s dive in.

What is JSON-LD?

First, let’s look into what JSON-LD stands for, so we can really understand what it does.

JSON-LD, or JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data, is a method of encoding Linked Data using JSON. (Wikipedia)

Let’s dissect that:

JSON
JSON is a lightweight data-interchange format, which is easy for humans to read and write and easy for machines to parse and generate.

LD
Linked Data is about using the internet to connect related data.

JSON-LD is a combination of both. So it’s a code snippet that tells you what price belongs to what product, or what zip code belongs to what company. Basically, instead of adding schema.org attributes to individual elements on a page, you’re providing a small block of JavaScript code that has all that info.

Why use Schema.org?

What we are talking about here, is structured data for your website. Schema.org provide ways to present your information to Google in a machine readable way. With that structured data you create the option for Google to show your content in two Google Search categories:

• Rich results, which means your added content, like the price of your product, its rating and / or its availability, is literally shown in the search results as additional information in your snippet.
• Site links search boxes, if your site is eligible, a feature already supported by our Yoast SEO plugin.
• Knowledge Graph cards. This one is a bit harder, as you’ll have to prove first that you are the authority for certain content. After you have done so, Google might include your data into the Knowledge Graph.

As you can see, it’s really interesting to optimize your site using Schema.org.

Why JSON-LD?

The methods that were used to implement schema.org before JSON-LD was available, were cumbersome. You had to add schema.org attributes to pieces of code in your markup. The markup might have to change from page to page, even though you were including the same header everywhere, for instance. This made schema.org a pain to implement. For us as plugin (and thus back-end) developers, it pushed it entirely into the realm of front-end development.

JSON-LD allows you (and us) to collect all the data about your product and show them in one, small, piece of JavaScript code, that can just be pushed anywhere into the page. This allows you to work on a schema.org implementation using JSON-LD, independently of your theme development.

You can add basically any schema to your JSON-LD block, even breadcrumbs:

@seerl We support JSON-LD breadcrumbs. The docs should be updated at some point too :)

— John Mueller (@JohnMu) August 12, 2016

In fact, in its own documentation, Google often states JSON-LD is the easiest way to add metadata to sites. It’s the option that is least likely to break when you make other changes to your site.

Adding the script to your website

Luckily, JSON+LD is set up in a standardized format. Here’s an example of that format for a random product:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "http://schema.org/",
  "@type": "Product",
  "name": "Yoast SEO for WordPress",
  "image": "https://cdn-images.yoast.com/uploads/2010/10/Yoast_SEO_WP_plugin_FB.png",
  "description": "Yoast SEO is the most complete WordPress SEO plugin. It handles the technical optimization of your site & assists with optimizing your content.",
  "brand": {
    "@type": "Thing",
    "name": "Yoast"
  },
  "offers": {
    "@type": "Offer",
    "priceCurrency": "USD",
    "price": "69.00"
  }
}
</script>

You can use any schema.org schema in JSON-LD. After adding a new JSON-LD script to your website, be sure to validate your code using the Google’s structured data test tool.

As you can see, this can easily be templated in your theme. There are generators like this one, which can be useful in setting up a template for that. If you are using WordPress, there are obviously plugins that can help you out as well.

Yoast SEO already uses JSON-LD to add information about your site search, your site name, your logo and your social profiles to your web pages.

from Yoast • The Art & Science of Website Optimization https://yoast.com/json-ld/