Do Sweat the Small Stuff: How Micro Moments in Mobile Drive Conversions

Whoever said, “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” never had to worry about retail mobile conversions. Everything in mobile retail is small, from screen real estate to attention spans. And so far, the returns have been modest too, compared at least to desktop sales. Though mobile accounts for 60% of online traffic, it results in just 16% of purchases.

This is the oft-mentioned “mobile conversion gap,” which was the main topic of discussion at Dynamic Yield’s “Rise & Dine” monthly breakfast series, held on November 10th at the Bowery Hotel. Directors of product marketing and VPs of eCommerce from over 25 companies from across the business spectrum – from the very large to the boutique – talked about how to handle the challenges and opportunities of the largely untapped potential of mobile commerce.

Liad Agmon speaking at Dynamic Yield’s “Rise & Dine” breakfast roundtable

Despite a difference in scale, small and large retailers have similar challenges when it comes to mobile web conversion. There’s the lack of omnichannel consistency, limited screen real estate, and a critical lack of personalization.

There are, however, some important distinctions between the large and smaller retailers. For smaller retailers, conversion rates are everything. It’s rent. It’s the electricity bill. It’s payroll. For them, it’s convert or perish. For larger eCommerce operations, conversions are also very important but one bad quarter won’t crush them.

But this existential threat makes smaller retailers much more adaptable when coming up with and trying out different solutions. And often what they find works best are “micro” solutions: small changes to the mobile web experience that can have an enormous impact on sales.

A retailer doesn’t have to do a massive strategic and infrastructure overhaul in order to improve sales. A marketing director from a men’s lifestyle retailer revealed that instead of pushing a customer survey at the end of the purchase journey, which is the norm, they decided to do it at the moment of acquisition: when the consumer first lands on their site. They found that this small deviation from the typical way of doing things, drove conversions.

Others pointed out other seemingly small techniques that yielded big returns, such as auto-populating all of the fields in the checkout funnel. The customer experience team from another eCommerce operation told the group that merely including a “Call Us” button on the checkout page, regardless of whether or not consumers used, helped drive up their conversions. The mere suggestion that you can reach out and connect with a human reassured their customers while making a large purchase on mobile. And the merchandising manager from a popular women’s fitness brand explained that personalizing emails by region – not even city – is enough to drive large uplift in numbers.

If you’d like to participate in “Rise & Dine,” Dynamic Yield’s monthly breakfast discussion series, email Elizabeth at elizabeth@dynamicyield.com