If you’re a smartphone owner, chances are you’ve had an online shopping experience like this one. You’re on the hunt for the perfect Christmas gift when you come across a promising website. Unfortunately, you can hardly see the text or the images on your tiny screen. You are constantly trying to pinch and zoom just to see. Then when you try to click on a microscopic link, your fingers are too big and you end up clicking on something else. You finally get to the checkout and realize you have to fill in a dozen fields on your tiny screen. It’s enough to make any one throw their hands up in frustration. That business’s website just lost a sale.

If that business had invested the money to optimize their website for mobile devices, they could have saved that sale, and countless others. Thanks to today’s amazing technologies, people don’t have the attention spans they used to. In a world where people lose interest after reading 160 characters, businesses need to keep their mobile websites simple and efficient. Here are a few tips for optimizing your website for mobile.

Responsive design

One difficulty in optimizing for mobile is that no two mobile devices are the same. At one time, there were 4-inch screens and that was that. Now mobile devices range from 4-inch screen smartphones to 6-inch screen phablets to 10-inch screen tablets. Fortunately, there is a solution. Responsive design allows you to optimize for each of these devices at the same time.

Responsive design has quickly become the go-to choice for marketers. While it is more expensive, it pays for itself by optimizing your website for each mobile device being used to access it. So whether your customers have smartphones, phablets, or a tablets, they will see your website in a way that is optimized for them.

Use metrics to discover patterns

The real success to any mobile marketing effort is measuring effectiveness and then learning from those metrics. You might notice that certain aspects of your mobile marketing campaign are more effective with the smartphone crowd while others tend to work with the tablet owners. Apply what you discover to constantly fine tune and improve your mobile marketing strategy.

Mobile metrics aren’t black and white

Don’t make the mistake of oversimplifying metrics. Mobile metrics in particular can be misleading. For instance, conversion rates are typically lower on smartphones than computers. If you’re looking at conversion rates alone as a measure of success, you won’t see the whole picture. While it’s true that smartphone owners are less likely to make a purchase from their phone and will spend less time on your site, it doesn’t mean your mobile site isn’t effective. In many instances, people visiting your mobile site do so to do some quick comparison shopping. While they may not purchase right then and there, they may go home and do it on their desktop or come in to your store to make the purchase. Take a holistic approach to mobile metrics.

Source:  Mashable