We’ve covered how mobile dealership sites have been letting dealers down, and how important mobile is, but let’s focus on the positive. Mobile experience can get better. Improving your mobile experience just means making using your mobile site better for your users.
It also means higher conversions, more leads, and more sales (and probably happier salespeople too). Like all things in the car business, it’ll require work, but it’s well worth it. Below we’ve laid out some of the best ways to enhance customer experience on mobile (and get your salespeople smiling again).
1. Understand That Mobile is Different
For all its power and importance, mobile is still different than desktop.
Effective mobile sites with good Customer Experience (CX), incorporate both browsing and purchase intent in their designs. Both are equally easy and encouraged. Trying to shoehorn someone who wants to browse into purchase behavior all but guarantees a bounce, and visa versa.
Create your mobile site with more than one behavior in mind. UserTesting reminds us that mobile is “all about immediacy and personalization.”
2. Make Sure Your Mobile Design is Good Design
“Good design” is a somewhat vague term, but it boils down to a few different elements. Design should make your page simple, consistent, and easy to navigate. Clutter and confusion kill mobile conversion rates and frustrate shoppers.
Google urges mobile developers to show only primary content by default, and leave all secondary content hidden, but accessible, off-screen. Mobile is about clarity. This does make a difference. By using space better and emphasizing the essentials, a dog food brand called BullyMax increased their conversions by 24.5%.
3. Check Your Search and Scroll Functions
Does it seem like all of these are about ease of use? Well, good. That’s the point, and there are a lot of ways to do it.
If you have a lot of content on your site (and chances are, if you’re a car dealers, you do), you have to have a good search function. In addition to this, high-content pages need to have easy scrolling. Everyone knows the restless frustration of a page in which you try to scroll down a little, endure lag for half a minute, and then are shot far past your target as the scrolling over-compensates. Easy scrolling should be smooth, and if at all possible, avoid having to click to the next page.
4. Prune Your Forms
If there is the opportunity to cut down the information you receive in a form, do it. People dislike long forms on anything – customs forms, standardized tests, etc. They’re practically the definition of tedious.
Filling in a long form on a mobile device is tedious times infinity. Typing is fiddly and annoying on a mobile form, and mistakes are too much of a pain to go back and fix. Shortening your forms might be the quickest and easiest way to boost your conversion rates.
5. Get Yourself Some Mobile-First Design
If you read a lot of our blog posts, you’ll notice we’ve talked about this before. And who can blame us for nerding out over game-changing design practices?
Mobile-first design builds a website from the foundations up, focusing heavily on the essentials and making these exceptionally easy to use. Responsive design is in the past, gone the way of the separate mobile site, and mobile-first design means your site works just as wonderfully on one screen size as another (and that’s a good thing, because there’s over 500 screen sizes to deal with now).
6. Extra Tip: Integrate Mobile With Your Brick and Mortar Store
Honestly this tip is more of a “improve your whole business rather than just mobile,” but it’s a good one. It’s a recommendation we see time and time again, and yet shockingly few dealers or businesses have successfully adapted their businesses to do it: use your mobile site at your physical store.
Almost everyone who buys a car visits the dealership to do it – and they use their phone to browse inventory. By integrating your mobile site into the sales process, you can a) prevent showrooming, b) help familiarize a customer with your site, and c) increase transparency and trust by showing a seamless connection between site and store. This integration doesn’t have to be painful. It can be as simple as arming your salespeople with tablets and familiarizing them top to bottom with the site so they can use it wit customers.
But pump the brakes for just a second, you do have to have a really great mobile site to do this effectively (and you can make sure you have one by following the steps above.)
Conclusion:
So there you have it, 6 tips for the price of, well, none, because we do this for free. But in all seriousness, mobile is immensely important, and it’s getting more essential for dealerships every day. Acing your mobile experience means getting a leg up on the competition, helping your store, and beating car shoppers at their own game. Following the tips we laid out above will help you do just that.
Sources
https://yoast.com/improve-mobile-ux/
https://www.paulolyslager.com/10-ways-enhance-user-experience-mobile-website/
http://marketingland.com/5-ways-improve-mobile-ux-towards-higher-conversions-86631
https://conversionxl.com/improve-mobile-ux/
https://www.usertesting.com/blog/2015/02/18/why-doesnt-mobile-convert/
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/8-mobile-ux-tips/
http://www.designyourway.net/blog/design/improve-mobile-user-experience/