1. User Experience
Mobile web visitors want information quickly without having to pinch and zoom to find it. It can add an extra layer of frustration as some devices don't allow for users to zoom at all. A perfect mobile website has larger text and links readable on all mobile phones, not just smart phones. It's also an opportunity to condense content where appropriate, so your users can have the best experience possible.
2. User Interface
This is probably the most important reason to consider a mobile website. Considering you're dealing with a device that doesn't have the memory or screen size of a desktop computer, your website needs to be optimized to display correctly on a phone. Imagine a user trying to access your current desktop site on a mobile device. Your current layout may look completely discombobulated, or the site may not even load at all. If your site makes use of Flash animations to convey important content, it won't be visible.
3. Speed
A mobile website taking longer than 4 seconds to load will lose 25 percent of its visitors, according to a few different recent studies. Those frustrated users could be customers possibly taking their business elsewhere. When designing a mobile website, large pictures and fancy animations just aren't going to work. Mobile Web visitors are usually on the go, and you need to get them the information they need as quickly as possible.
4. Wasted Email Blasts
43.5 million people used their mobile phones to check email in 2010 – a 40 percent increase from 2009. When customers open your newsletter on their mobile phones, will they be able to click through to your website? Will it even display at all? With the rising number of Internet-enabled mobile phones, this could cause severe problems for your email marketing campaigns.
5. Smartphone shipments top personal computers
21.3 million smartphones shipped in 2008, 54.5 million shipped in 2009 and 100.9 million shipped in 2010, according to research firm IDC. That's an 80 million increase in only 2 years. To top it off, smartphones outshipped PCs by 9 million units last year. There's clearly a trend forming.
6. Mobile Web Shopping Preferred over Mobile Apps
Two-thirds of those polled in a study by Adobe said they prefer to shop via mobile websites rather than mobile applications. Games, music and social media were the only categories users would rather navigate with an app over a mobile website.
7. Fortune 500 Companies Want Mobile Websites
SMS (text), mobile applications and mobile websites are the three most popular marketing mediums in a mobile marketing strategy. But there are some potential downfalls. SMS marketing is intrusive, and could annoy potential customers. Mobile applications are costly, and must be specifically tailored for each mobile operating system (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc.). However, mobile websites function on all mobile operating systems without having to download any software. Specific studies have shown Fortune 500 companies are much more interested in having a mobile website than pursuing any other mobile marketing medium.
8. Mobile Web Access Predicted to Surpass PCs by 2014
By 2014, Gartner Research predicts 90 percent of the world will own a mobile phone capable of accessing the Internet. That would equate to over 6.5 billion mobile connections worldwide. Are you ready to keep up with your competitors and get a slice of this emerging market?
9. Twenty-nine percent of U.S. Consumers Have Made A Mobile Purchase
According to a study by ATG and Oracle, roughly 30 percent of U.S. consumers made at least one mobile purchase in 2010. That's a 123 percent increase from the same time period in 2009. Younger generations (18-34) are even more likely to make purchases from mobile phones.
10. Mobile Coupon Redemption on The Rise
According to Juniper Research, 300 million people will be redeeming coupons on their mobile phones worldwide in 2014. A mobile website can be optimized to place your coupon at the top of your mobile homepage. The ease of obtaining it will result in more redemptions and increased sales.
Ignoring the need for a mobile website isn't much different than willingly handing your competitors a serious advantage over you. Smartphones are the future of online Internet access. Some are even calling it Web 3.0. Mobile websites engage visitors and give them an overall better experience with your website. We use our 4D process to develop fast, intuitive and user-friendly mobile websites that provide visitors with exactly what they're looking for quickly and easily. We want to impress everyone that visits your website regardless of how they get there. Having an amazing website without a mobile counterpart is like having an amazing product without a store. Both need to complement each other to be successful.
