What to consider when marketing to mobiles
More users are viewing online campaigns with their mobiles than ever before, and that trend appears to be accelerating. Marketing to mobiles tends to produce a response that is different to those of traditional methods.
The vast majority of mobile users have their phone within arms reach at all times, this makes your communication with them a very personal one. Some can see it as an invasion in to their life whilst others feel a more personal connection is being made, and as such these people consider the message to be more trustworthy.
User experience is key
Even with new technologies, once the excitement of what can be done has subsided, only the apps, websites and messages that offer the best user experience tend to receive any continued attention. It’s no surprise that a huge amount of money and effort is invested by online businesses into their interface and how it works on a mobile.
Just look at Social Media – Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Linked In have all put a great amount of effort into making the mobile experience as simple as possible. They still offer the majority of the desktop functionality with only a couple of taps of the screen.
This easy user experience has made Social Media instant, without this investment in user experience Social Media would have remained something that we could only enjoy at lunchtime or when we had time after work, on a computer, probably a shared computer.
How to help ensure user interaction
Building a branded mobile experience is very important if you want user interaction on mobile devices. Just because you have a website that is mobile-friendly or even a mobile app doesn’t ensure user interaction. It’s very important that you provide an easy path to the interactions that matter to you, this can take the form of multiple choice options with the preferred answer appearing as the easy option or even the safest.
Users tend to act much quicker on a mobile. At face value this seems like a marketing dream, however this once again puts pressure on the user experience as users are also quicker to ditch content that presents any type of difficulties or unnecessary steps.
How to improve the user experience
The best user experience is uncluttered, uses easy to identify icon graphical elements that have a clear purpose, this also aids faster page loading over mobile data connections. Misunderstood icons waste time and cause frustration, also, is there a back button so the user can retry in the event of tapping the wrong icon..?
By having a single purpose and graphical elements you are reaching your targets and goals faster, by leading the user down the path you have laid out for them, albeit a very short one.
Keep the call to action simple, mobiles have built in apps that perform single functions and this is how you should think. Again keep it simple, do you want a Social Media share, phone call, registration or email..? Choose just one.
Conclusion
With mobile, interruption techniques are just blocking users from what they wanted to do, often with no easy way out which creates frustration.
Remember that users have a different relationship with their mobile phone than they do with any other technology, when you mess with their phone it’s personal.
A simple, fast, graphical user experience is the key to continued user interaction and has a higher chance of creating likes and shares, essentially recommendations to their friends.