The number of mobile apps comprising the apps in both the iOS App Store and Google Play Store is about to cross 5 million mark. Every minor niche, use case and category now represents thousands of mobile apps. Naturally, competition has already reached the stiffening proportion and in spite of pumping thousands into app promotion, many apps are simply not getting results in terms of user acquisition, revenue and business conversion.
Though the common market is abuzz with tips for mobile app success, maybe making things perfect in bits and pieces won’t make much difference. You need a comprehensive approach to orient the entire design and development process with marketing and business conversion. Do you have any clue about doing this? If not, let us guide you through the entire process. But before that, let us understand the metrics of measuring business conversion which we call as conversion rate.
What Is Called Conversion Rate?
While you may have thousands of app users on board, all of them may not be your customers. Obviously, by unrolling a business app you want to convert these users to customers. Now, the metrics that focus on measuring this conversion of users to customers is called conversion rate. In respect of mobile app, it is the portion of app users who take specific and decisive action leading to purchase, subscription or any act of business conversion. Even when they do not particularly buy a product or pay for a service, but just shows meaningful interest through an activity, it can be considered as an instance of conversion.
What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?
The entire practice and methods that are employed to boost this rate of conversion to decisive actions, is called conversion rate optimization (CRO). Over the years, certain development and design practices help to boost the conversion rate of mobile apps to a great extent. Apart from the common marketing and promotional practices, the app developers and designers can also play a pivotal role in boosting business conversion. The responsibility of conversion rate optimization (CRO) not only rests with the marketers now but is also taken care of by mobile app developers and designers.
The role of developers and designers to Boost Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)
The website developer and any mobile app design service play an equally important role in boosting business conversion as the marketers. In fact, with several design and development aspects, they make the foundation for the app to engage the audience more and push them to take more decisive actions while using the app. So, the design and development inputs for business conversion work as the foundation upon which the marketing success of an app depends.
Here below we are going to explain the key ways designers and developers can incorporate all the elements that help business conversion.
1. Personalized And User-Centric Campaigns
The ground rule for any successful app is to know the audience of the app and how the app can help them achieve their objectives. After knowing the target audience group grossly and after knowing the basic impetus for using your app, it is also important to evaluate the varying user intentions and to serve them app contents and features suitable to their specific needs. You need to identify a variety of minor and major user-intentions for using your app and their in-app behavior. When you know this, you can personalize the user experience by helping them to do their intended things more effortlessly.
2. Boost The Website Speed
The first and foremost thing that any app developer should concentrate upon is boosting the performance and loading speed of the app. There is a statistics that states that more than one-third of websites (around 40%) are just abandoned by the users just because of slow page speed. The loading speed is primarily assessed by a website development or mobile app development company India through Render Start Time (RST) which is basically the time taken by the first content of an app to load. Websites having fastest RST are known to get at least 50% more user engagement than the rest.
Let us mention here some of the time-tested methods to optimize the performance and speed of a website or web application.
- Make sure the website is built on a responsive or mobile-friendly theme or design.
- Make sure it follows the Google recommendations and industry-benchmarked practices to boost mobile page speed.
- Don’t forget to evaluate the page speed from time to time. You can easily do it through the mobile page speed checker of Google.
- Install plugin for caching to allow loading earlier accessed pages instantly.
- Use a reliable content delivery network to boost the loading speed of contents.
- While using images and visual contents, always use the appropriate formats to ensure faster loading.
- Cross check the website code base and remove all unnecessary code lines and spaces.
- Use techniques like lazy loading or progressive loading to priorities loading of searched contents first.
3. Make The Website Design More Appealing
The essential sales always take place by making an impression at first glance. As the first impression of a website or web app is all that matters to engage users quickly, the job of a website designer plays an important role in pushing business conversion. Most website or app redesigning queries generate from the sheer necessity of engaging users with a visually appealing and mobile friendly design.
Here are some time-tested practices to make a more appealing design and make a lasting impression.
- First of all, make sure that the design is mobile-friendly and highly responsive.
- The design should also ensure that users can access the information they need with ease and without much efforts.
- Optimize the design to boost readability of contents and accessibility of features.
- Consider the Thumb Zone in responsive design to help users navigate on the screen single-handedly.
- Consider boosting the onboarding experience better by helping users to find features and contents easily.
- Design the Call to Action buttons and all links for helping users to take decisive actions that convert business.
4. Optimize The Contents
Not only the quality of web contents do matter for a website, but the visual look of the contents equally play an important role in boosting audience engagement and business conversion. Most website visitors are now very restless and impatient and they mostly grab a content with a fleeting glance. Naturally, contents need to be presented for “at a glance” readability. Images, animation and video contents should also fit in the website design to easier access to contents.
Here are some of the key tips to optimize contents for websites.
- Text should be presented in small-byte sizes and preferably with images and visual elements.
- Contents should be published in a structured manner with sections, subsections and bullet points.
- Only high quality images should be used that can directly elicit emotion and appropriation of the meaning.
- Video contents should be shorter in size and should be made to orient the viewer instantly with the subject.
5. Effortless User Experience
A website should be designed to ensure an effortless user experience with optimum usability and traction. As soon as the user lands on a website, he should instantly know what to do and how to navigate to different sections. A better user experience can only be guaranteed by helping users to perform actions and access contents with least effort.
Here are some key tips to ensure effortless user experience for the website visitors.
- Help the first time visitors learn about performing tasks and accessing the needful contents with ease. In an ecommerce site helping visitors to browse products, add to Wishlist and make purchases effortlessly.
- Giving feedback about mistakes and errors and helping them making inputs.
- Larger and finger-tap friendly buttons to ensure easier commands and input.
- Easier and finger-tap friendly mobile CTA buttons for easier conversion.
- Implement Autocomplete for filling up website forms with information already accessed by the users.
6. Establishing Trust Through Social Proof And Testimonials
When people trust a business brand, they are more likely to respond positively and take the desired action. Building a website as the trustworthy source of contents is important for converting business through it. Question is, how can you build trust and establish a reputation for your website. Let us explain some of the key ways you can do this.
- By using social proof like customer testimonials, ratings and customer reviews you can build trust for a website.
- It is also important to establish the trust for all the transaction methods and avenues.
- Building credibility with the contact details of the business published on the website.
- By establishing social proofs like very responsive and audience-focused social pages for the website.
7. Pushing Sales Through Urgency
Most human beings respond to urgency. By keeping this aspect in mind you can utilize elements that push urgent activities. As mobile users often use their devices for making purchases, elements of urgency can seriously boost conversion. This is why mobile marketers can actively utilize urgent messages for business conversion.
Here we explain some key tips for pushing sales through urgency.
- Try to use limited-time promotions and offers that can trigger the fear of missing out goodies.
- Use the correct linguistic terms in CTA to push for immediate traction.
- Create urgency by making one part of an offer special and time-bound.
8. Boost Mobile SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the trusted practice to help your contents appear higher up in the search results. Google now gives more priority to website contents against search terms that are optimized in look and feel for mobile users. Google also created a mobile-first index for ranking the mobile websites. Google did this because the vast majority of users now access website contents through mobile devices. Naturally, you need to optimize your website for mobile users and orient the standard SEO practices for mobile interfaces.
Here are some of the key mobile SEO tips for improving your content visibility and search rank.
- Optimize the page titles and meta descriptions with keywords and search terms.
- Maintain context driven internal linking of contents.
- Provide contextual links to the contents in the highly authoritative websites.
- Boost your website credibility by getting quality inbound links through publishing valuable contents.
9. Offer Convenient Checkout And Payment Page
Whether your website is an online store or just a business website with a dedicated feature for transaction and processing of payments, maintaining a convenient checkout process and user-optimized payment page is crucial. A complicated checkout process or fewer payment options are two big negative aspects resulting in the abandonment of the store.
Here are some essential tips to make checkout and payment processing better.
- Minimize the number of steps in the checkout process.
- Give visual feedback regarding the progress of the checkout process with something like a loading icon or progress bar.
- Always allow a guest checkout allowing many visitors to make purchases without signing up.
10. Reduce Abandonment
One of the most important aspects of optimizing a website is reducing the number of abandoned users. A significant portion of visitors across ecommerce stores abandon their shopping carts without completing a purchase and an equally big number of website visitors leave website leaving the desired actions incomplete. Reducing this number will directly result in converting more business.
Here are some effective ways to reduce abandoning of websites and shopping carts in the middle of a purchase or any activity.
- Just when the visitors are about to leave, make a targeted offer to grab attention and push conversion.
- Just by detecting the inactivity of the visitor for some time, an offer can be made with a pop-up message.
- For every abandoned cart send personalized notification messages related to the products in the cart.
11. User Testing
Finally, website or app testing is of paramount importance to make your product perfect over time. A website needs to conduct user testing to evaluate on-screen activities of the user and providing the perfect flow of actions for the users to complete tasks. The manual testing through real users is always effective to get insights about the usability. But, as there are limitations with manual testing of apps, using useful testing and user analytics tools remains equally important.
You need to keep a continuous eye on the users and as your business and traffic grow, you cannot do this without utilizing customer research tools and applications. Google Analytics is a very credible and close in hand tool that help you getting continuous insights about your traffic.
There are several other quality analytics tools that deliver heat maps and session playbacks and also can analyze and track all kinds of user gestures. Such deeper analysis of user activities and gestures is key to deliver a superb mobile user experience.
The trusted method of asking for customer feedback about the user experience of a mobile website is not to be undermined. You can use tools such as Qualaroo for this. But always beware of the fact that asking for feedback frequently can actually add to the irritation of your audience. While asking for feedback, keep your queries short, simple and straightforward and limit your feedback questions to one or two in number.
Do you want to know in more details about boosting the conversion rate with customer-focused design and development? Our experts can guide you to achieve optimum business conversion and user engagement. Just allow us to reach you by dropping a message.
