Online Marketing Archives - Page 6 of 8

30 June 2015

3 Best Practices for Online Lead Generation

Lead generation is a popular phrase in modern sales and marketing, and justifiably so. A number of traditional techniques such as cold phone calls or creative advertising can be used to focus interest and draw attention to a company’s products and services. Wrap a strong company or brand around that attention and interest and you have leads to pursue. Leads are the lifeblood in providing a continuous supply of new business to a company, as any sales manager can attest to.

Thinkstock/iStock

Cold calls and advertising can only reach a limited number of people. Many businesses hope (and expect) that their websites and social media accounts will expand their exposure and gather a greater number of leads for their sales pipelines. This can happen, but online leads are different than those gathered by traditional lead generation practices.

In the online world, interest is generally more focused towards your website and its content since the majority of online visitors are unfamiliar with you and your company. Many visitors don’t know you or care about you much – they want to check out your stuff, for a variety of reasons. Online interest in your website, blog or social media posts is not the same as successfully calling a business, asking some questions and getting an appointment. Initial online interest is not enough to take to the bank since most of these leads are not yet ready–to-buy.

1) Manage and Qualify Leads through Inbound Marketing

If most of the people who first visit your website are not yet ready to buy, how do you identify those that will likely buy later? This challenge is handled effectively by the methods within a structured inbound marketing approach. This approach will manage your website visitors and nurture many to a point where they are actual qualified leads, ready-to-buy. You need a process to manage it all – something with rules, structure and a degree of automation to manage your online traffic efficiently and effectively. Marketing automation is a suite of tools designed specifically for these purposes.

2) Assist the Buyer’s Journey

The online visitor is a different buyer than the traditional buyer of yesterday. The Internet has empowered modern buyers to inquire and buy on their own terms. People are less influenced by disruptive advertising and pressured sales tactics. We all do online research of the products and services we are interested in, checking out websites and online resources until we reach a point of interest and trust to engage with a vendor. This process is described, fittingly, as the buyer’s journey. Our job as an online resource is to guide this journey to a point where the buyer is ready to engage with us.

3) Sell to the Right People, at the Right Time

If we try to aggressively (and personally) sell to every website visitor we will run ourselves ragged for a disproportionate rate of return. Website visits and even online inquiries are a bit like a wild west shoot-out; lots of action from many directions and sources. A structured qualification process is needed to identify those that you actually have a chance to do business with. Your sales process is precious, as is your time, so give your sales people a break and give them qualified leads. Let them sell when qualified buyers are ready-to-buy.

23 June 2015

The ABCs of Tone

“Tone” is an abstract but critical concept for marketing. Just like perfect pitch is rare in singing, perfect tone is equally rare. In general, tone refers to how you’re delivering your message to the audience, and it’s important to understand the importance of the right tone. In the end, tone is the reason people keep listening.

While it’s impossible to create a sure-fire formula for the perfect tone every time, there are considerations to improving your tone across all platforms. Just remember ABC and you’ll be well on your way to better marketing.

Image credit: kadirkaba / iStock / ThinkStock

Audience

As always, the more you know about your audience, the better your marketing message will be. Age, gender, relationship status, and more factors impact what tone will work best. However, do not focus on stereotypes and supposed best practice attempts (especially for groups such as millenials). Research your particular audience segment in depth and, preferably, read content generated by the target you want to hit. That will provide a better understanding of how to tailor your tone to your demographic.

Learn where your audience spends their time, what marketing messages they resonate best with, and the language the audience already uses. Once you do that, your message will go further.

Branding

Your own company’s brand guidelines should influence how you speak in advertising. Depending on the type of product and how you want to position yourself in the market, you could stick to terms like “informative” and “friendly,” or be more detailed about exact wording whenever you discuss the product or service. No matter what you do, keep it consistent throughout the marketing. It’s jarring to encounter wildly different tones within the same company, making consumers less likely to stick with your company.

Make sure your brand guidelines allow for the same general tone to translate across all channels you’re using.

Context

Each media channel out there has its own norms and best practices for effective language. While companies often go for similar messaging but different wording between traditional media channels— shorter, snappy headlines for outdoor and entertainment value for radio— they very frequently they fall flat online. How often have you seen a tweet copied from Facebook, or a blog post that looks like it comes straight out of a magazine? You should be adjusting your tone to the environment you’re putting it in, which includes how people use the channels.

Learn online media as much as you learn traditional media. You cannot simply copy/paste your traditional marketing tone on the web and expect it to work. Take the time to adjust, especially considering how much of your audience is online.

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Remember A, B, C, and you’ll find tone is as easy as 1, 2, 3.

18 June 2015

Add Your Website to Your Sales Team with these Steps

Organizations have come to realize that websites are not static, however many continue to treat their websites as a passive, though pretty, information piece. Your website is always available to anyone with Internet access. Wouldn’t it make sense to treat your website as your virtual salesperson, always at the ready to engage with any viable prospect who browses by.

Expect More From Your Website

Is your sales team directed to dress well, talk knowingly about the company, and then walk away from a prospect? I suspect your expectations are much greater. Salespeople are trained to ask questions and learn about the prospect, their goals and pain points, and determine how your company can help them. Then they are trained to ask for the sale. A salesperson must go beyond informing in order to make the sale. Why not include business development as an online goal and add your website to your sales team?

If you already have a well-functioning website that talks about your organization and has plenty of pretty photos and pithy marketing statements, then you may already be doing a decent job of supporting your brand. But that is still wasting what could be your organization’s greatest sales tool. Engaging with your market can certainly start with marketing-oriented positioning statements, along with photos and videos that highlight benefits of dealing with your organization. But that engagement can be moved through your sales funnel with the goal of nurturing a new customer. And that’s where inbound marketing comes into play.

The most effective route would be to subscribe to a structured inbound, or automated marketing software solution. There are many options and some are more suited for a specific size or type of organization, so do your homework. PROSAR deals mainly with SMEs; after our due diligence we partnered with and recommend SharpSpring. Regardless of which software you chose, there are inbound tactics that you can employ to make better use of your website.

Some Critical Steps to Make Your Website More Effective

Here are some basic, yet critical, steps to turn your website as an active and productive sales tool:

Determine goals and a process for your online sales nurturing
Develop a keyword and SEO strategy to guide your content and online efforts
Include (and continue to add) relevant and informative information targeted to your primary audience
Make sure that your site is accessible and AODA compliant (good for SEO and broadens your audience)
Support your online presence and drive website traffic with appropriate social media activity
Engage your audience with rich content (images, videos, interviews, infographics, animated presentations, etc.)
Provide additional, gated content and value-added resources (gather contact info and permission to contact)
Monitor website and online behaviour of your qualified leads
Develop automated email workflows to further engage and nurture your qualified leads
Determine the specific needs and pain points from your qualified needs, and demonstrate how you can help to address them
Include special offers and “sales asks” for leads as they progress through your sales funnel
Personal follow-up to gain more detailed information, hone your solution and close the sale (Yes, it typically still requires a person to make the sale.)

These are implemented via a content generation plan including regular blogging, calls-to-action, effective landing pages, dynamic email campaigns, ongoing website monitoring and assessment, and an over-arching strategic plan to guide the whole process. (A process which is structured and manageable with a good software solution.)

11 June 2015

How to Find Your Ideal Client

Or, perhaps more to the point, how to make sure your ideal client finds you. All organizations face this issue, and it can be especially challenging for small businesses. But done right, online inbound marketing puts you in the driver’s seat – you just need a roadmap for success.

a smartphone with a maps app overlaid on top of a map with a compass and pen — Oleksiy Mark/iStock/Thinkstock

In the same way that not everyone who walks into your physical “bricks and mortar” store is actually going to be a client, not everyone who visits your website or your social media channels will be a client either. So, how do you drive the real clients to your website? And once you’ve achieved that, how do you find them amid all the other site visitors? Is there a way to not only identify them, but also to separate them out for closer attention? There is… and it involves two terms: Segmentation and Target Marketing.

Segmentation and Target Marketing Defined

The online Business Dictionary defines market “Segmentation” as: “The process of defining and subdividing a large homogenous market into clearly identifiable segments having similar needs, wants, or demand characteristics.” This dictionary goes on to say: “Its objective is to design a marketing mix that precisely matches the expectations of customers in the targeted segment.” Which brings us to our second term…

Target Marketing involves breaking a market into segments and then focusing your marketing efforts on one or a few key segments so you can concentrate on understanding the needs and wants of that particular market intimately. The bottom line is that Target Marketing is about attracting customers who will buy what you’re selling.

Who is your Ideal Customer? The Art of Buyer Personas

If you’re going to target your ideal customer, obviously you need to know who that is. Before you try to identify specific people, groups, or organizations, take some time to define your ideal. What characteristics does your target buyer have? Go beyond just demographics such as age, gender, location, marital status, education level, and income bracket. What are some key personality traits that might make them a good fit for your products and services? What might their interests be? What motivates them? What might they be trying to achieve that your offering could help with? The more information you can determine about your ideal customer, the better you will understand them and the more effectively you will be able to tailor and deliver your messaging to them.

Use this information to develop one or more buyer personas. According to SharpSpring, a buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. Be as detailed as you can. Give each persona a name – Frank the Farmer, or Connie the Coffee Connoisseur – and have some fun with personality traits. Done well, buyer personas help to focus your marketing content and hone in on the right audience to reach out to with your message.

The Advantage of Online Marketing

Working online using inbound marketing tactics gives you more power over your marketing efforts and outcomes. With an ad in a newspaper or magazine, you have no way to determine who has seen it, nor do you have any way to follow up with those who have. By contrast, online marketing allows you to discern who has seen your banner ad or other digital marketing content. Not only are you able to collect information about people who visit your ad, site, blog, or social media page, but you are also able to track that information over time, use it, and act on it:

follow up with a thank you for downloading an article,
respond with an email message or an offer, or even,
have a complete automated campaign set up that guides your prospect through several steps, providing gradually more detailed and more targeted information about your products and services.

You might start with an ad on social media or in an online publication, then provide a useful checklist that your buyer would find helpful in reaching their goals, and follow that up with a more detailed white paper on a topic they’ve expressed interest in during your interactions. This progression gives you more information about what they are looking for at the same time that you are leading them through your sales process and propelling them towards a buying decision.

Multi-faceted Results

If you do the following:

develop strong buyer personas
use these to define a relevant target audience
streamline your online marketing message for this audience
provide progressively more detailed or tailored content to meet the audience’s needs

You will see positive results on a number of different fronts:

Efficient use of time and resources
Cost effective marketing activities
More sales, increased revenues, and improved profit margins
Improved customer relationships and happier customers
Measurable progress and results throughout the entire customer engagement cycle

An important part of the mix is including smart SEO to help attract the right audience. Your content should follow and support your customer’s journey (for all target audiences). As a small business, it can be difficult to set aside the time needed upfront to establish solid buyer personas, to clearly define your target audience, and to create content that will resonate with them. However, experience tells us that these efforts will pay off in spades.

9 June 2015

Get Notified With Inbound Marketing

Knowledge is power. This phrase speaks of knowledge as an opportunity to improves one’s potential, reputation and influence. This holds true in the marketing world where the more current and accurate the information we have about our prospects, the higher likelihood we have in conducting some business.

Notification Horn — Valery_Plotnikov/iStock/Thinkstock

Get Notified

At the core of inbound marketing is the knowledge of your online contact/visitor’s behavior.

This behavior can be as basic as when emails are opened or as exotic as when a visitor returns to your website. The idea here is to respond to these events with immediate efforts to help your contacts advance further with their interest in your company and your products/services. Timing is everything. With the right tools, you can be notified in real-time.

Software tools from SharpSpring do this.

SharpSpring Auto-Notify

Our friends at SharpSpring offer great functionality with their auto-notify features. Identifying return visitors to your website is a foundation feature within SharpSpring and enabling auto-notify will let you know in real-time when this happens.

You can set this up in a number of configurations. Notify when any visitor returns to your website at whatever frequency you specify — be it twice, thrice, or whatever you choose. You can also receive notifications for returns to any specific pages on your website, such as a pricing or promotions page. Perhaps there are specific visitors that you want to be notified about. No problem. The possibilities are limited only by how much info you want in real time to help advance your business online.

Knowledge is Power

Being notified in real-time is an important piece in an inbound marketing strategy, but with what you do with this knowledge comes the real power. A well-timed phone call can extend your contact/visitor’s interest, giving you an opportunity to garner some further engagement with your business. If your contact is already and established client a well-timed email might be perfect (keeping CASL compliant and not spammy).

A prospect’s interest is gold in the sales process. Timing has always been critical in capitalizing on a prospect’s interest. Don’t leave it to chance. Instead of waiting for the orders to come floating in, power-up your online marketing by being proactive with your contact’s positive behavior.

2 June 2015

3 Marketing Lessons I Learned on Stage

With dance recital season upon us, and my free time about to be sucked up by the theatre, I thought I’d pick apart all the marketing skills acquired from over a decade of dancing. While the skills appear worlds apart, they share many of the same principles. Marketing is, at the end of the day, performing for an audience. You have a company vying for the attention of customers, and you want everybody’s eyes on you. Your marketing is how you generate that attention.

Guillermo Lobo / iStock / ThinkStock

1- Everything Builds

Starting off in beginner classes can be slow, frustrating, and not all that impressive. However, as you stick with it, the movements get more complex. You start to use the technique you’ve built into your body and mind. While all the endless practice seemed pointless at first, now that you’re leagues ahead you can see where all your practice was important.

In marketing, you’re often starting from 0, or close to it. You’re learning basic principles that sound like you can do in your sleep— like S.M.A.R.T. marketing goals— and you often feel like you’re going at a snail’s pace. You want to do the skills you see larger companies implementing.

However, until you learn the basic skills, and practice them until they’re second nature, you won’t be able to perform at the same level as more advanced marketers.

2- You Get What You Give

Dance requires a certain amount of commitment, and not just time wise. Mentally and emotionally, the best dancers lay their heart out on stage. If you start to resent the time commitment and physical toll, then your performances suffer. People who skip practice or only give half of what they’ve got don’t do as well. They get passed up for roles, don’t advance past mediocrity, and generally stay in the shadow of more passionate dancers.

Marketing requires similar commitment. If you don’t put your time into really utilizing the tools to their best advantages, developing a strategy, and generating prime content, then you lose out. Readers can tell when your heart’s not in it. And when they start to notice that, they will simply pass you by.

3- Be a Performer

There is a large debate in dance: is it better to be a performer or technician?

Ideally, you want to be both. The best of the best blend technical perfection with an emotive performance, rendering the audience enthralled because both their hearts and minds are captured. However, most people lean one or the other. A technician will create a masterful display of skill, but will almost always be passed up for the much more emotionally enchanting performer. Somebody who neglects the actual performance will end up with a soulless piece.

Marketing is the same. People are more likely to forgive improper technique than they are to forgive not connecting with the company. Maybe you didn’t hit the suggested practices every time, but you believed in what you produced and it showed. That will get you much farther winning the crowd than forgetting the bottom line of marketing: you want to connect with your audience.

27 May 2015

5 Reasons to Choose Marketing Automation for Your Inbound Marketing Business Solution

There are many reasons to use automated marketing to improve the power of your inbound marketing. Automated marketing is proven to help you attract more potential customers, convert them to leads, close sales, and delight customers into repeat customers. Here are 5 reasons to invest in automated marketing today.

arrow cutting through maze diagonally — eabff / iStock / ThinkStock

1) Marketing Automation Will Allow You to Automatically Measure ROI

One of the greatest things about marketing automation is that it allows you to track ROI through analytics and reports, so you can easily and clearly prove its value. Analytics can include everything from tracking the results of email campaigns (opens, click-throughs, etc.), website and page visits, digital ad campaigns, eCommerce analytics, forms (new leads, new subscriptions, etc.) and more. Not only can you track results, you can take this data and act on it to improve results and move leads closer to a sale.

2) View and Act on Real-time Results

There is no need to wait for results. Marketing automation will automatically collect data and act on it according to workflows and automation tasks you set-up in advance.

It is exciting to deploy an email campaign and watch the email opens and click-through rate update in real-time and to see your automated workflows fire and do the work for you. It is even more so when you check back just hours later and the numbers have increased again. Finally, it is important to know that if you choose to, you have the power, to act on the intel you get immediately, at any time, in any way you wish and to change your course of action to optimize results.

3) Marketing Automation is Accessible

There are many affordable automated marketing solutions available today, offering a variety of different tools to suit any size of business, type of business, and budget.

Marketing automation is also accessible in the sense that it is user-friendly. Many automated marketing software companies offer plenty of resources and support to clients to help you learn: what the tools are for, how to use them, and how to improve results.

4) Marketing Automation is Reliable

Several automated marketing software companies have proven (and continue to prove) great strength and consistency in helping to generate results, intelligently keep track of data, and improve the marketing-to-sales process.

Because marketing automation is “smart”, as long as you pre-program the workflows, the software will “think” for you and act for you based on the behaviour of your contacts, leads, and customers (often) in real-time.

5) Marketing Automation Will Save You and Your Company Money and Time

By concentrating the efforts of your sales team on a greater number of warm leads acquired and nurtured through marketing automation, you’re likely to see a much greater number of sales. Your sales team will have to spend less time cold-calling and sending bulk emails to unqualified leads, and instead will have more time to invest in leads who are most likely to result in sales.

Marketing automation allows you to get a lot more business while having to invest a fraction of the money and time involved in the traditional marketing-to-sales process.

In addition, many affordable eCommerce-compatible solutions are available to optimize your online sales, such as SharpSpring’s eCommerce integrations, which will help you gather analytics and act on data to increase sales.

BONUS: Blend Traditional Media and Marketing Automation to Optimize Both

Traditional media isn’t dead. In fact, with marketing automation you can mix traditional marketing with automated marketing in order to optimize the effects of traditional media. For example, (1) create a landing page on your website with a promotion and a form that must be filled out to access the promotion, (2) send a piece of direct mail to a qualified list with a clear call-to-action to the landing page, (3) monitor results, collect a list, send personalized emails to the list.

In short, there are many reasons to choose automated marketing for your inbound marketing business solution. It is reliable, accessible, measurable, and can work together with traditional media to generate impressive results.

21 May 2015

Is Your Brand Relevant?

Many years ago, we dealt with a local retail clothing chain that catered to a young demographic. They were very aware of their market’s needs and wants, and the importance of how well their brand reflected that market. The owner was relatively young himself, but a very intelligent fellow with valuable experience and good business instincts. Often, when we presented a campaign, he would stare at it for a while and muse over the creative or messaging. He would say something along the lines of “This isn’t anything like I had in mind… but let’s consider how it might play out and what it can do for our brand.” Nine times out of ten he endorsed the campaign. Only part of the credit goes to our team. A large part of the credit goes to the client: first of all for providing us with the insight to fully appreciate his market; and then to remove any ego from his decision and apply his business and market knowledge to best support his brand.

He understood that his brand wasn’t about him or what he thought was cool. He fully realized that his store’s brand needed to be relevant to his market. And he understood his audience well enough to consider each campaign from their perspective. He figuratively walked a mile in their shoes before deciding whether he felt the campaign was a hit or miss. (Check out Marketing and Sales Strategy: The Need For Focus.)

Regardless of whether you produce a product or provide a service, and whether your focus is B2C or B2B — you have a target market that must somehow connect with you in order to choose to deal with you. In order to resonate with your market, they need to be aware of you and feel inclined to learn more. Branding achieves this by grabbing their interest and effectively communicating that you are relevant to them.

Sounds easy, but it’s anything but. And, like anything somewhat complex, it is a process. It’s not simply a matter of creating a cool logo and tantalizing tagline… not that they are typically simple to do. (Check out The Four Pillars to Building a Brand that Builds Your Company.) Without an actual brand strategy and ongoing stewardship, even well-crafted components are only a façade which your market will quickly see through. In my example above, the clothing store hired carefully and trained their staff extensively so that the in-store experience was the essence of their brand. All material, from promotional signage to applications to staff memos were written and designed to reflect the store’s tone and raison d’être. All staff understood the mission and bought into the vison. They had a comprehensive strategy that considered all the touch points for staff and customers. Do you?

To help your organization in putting together such a strategy, consider:

who is your target market
what are their wants, needs, and problems
why do you care
what do you want your message to be
why should they care
how can you reach your target market
what are the touch points to reinforce your brand

This list is not comprehensive, nor should it trivialize the process of establishing a strategic branding plan. It may require a lot of research and planning and writing, and then even more work to implement, monitor and maintain. But it is well worth the investment, for a strong brand is one of the most valuable assets an organization can attain.

What would you add to the list of considerations above?

13 May 2015

S.M.A.R.T Marketing Goals

It should come as no surprise that goals are important for your business and marketing strategy. They drive you forward and act as the X on the proverbial map to the buried treasure of success. However, it’s never quite so easy to stick to that advice. Day to day operations shorten your vision, making it hard to keep goals in mind. If you’re not constantly engaging with your goals, then the old adage “out of sight, out of mind” applies — and your business suffers.

That’s why S.M.A.R.T. goals are so important. By breaking them down into specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely steps, you’re more likely to keep them in mind and put them on place when looking at your business processes. As a result, you make strides towards them and reap the rewards.

Specific

Relate it to directly something in particular that you want to achieve. A website goal could be specific in terms of visits or conversions. Try to be as small as possible for each goal, so they don’t get overwhelming. If you want to focus on both visits and conversions, write a separate goal for each.

Measurable

Make sure it has a number. You can’t tell how well you’re reaching your goal if you don’t have a yardstick for what “reaching the goal” looks like. It also should tie into metrics you can gather on your site; if you’re not gathering metrics on your online properties, you have no way of knowing if you’re succeeding or not.

Attainable

If your goal is more ambitious than the top 25% of companies can attain, or even more than your direct competition is doing, then you may never reach it. While there are some people who change the game and break all barriers, those are the anomalies. You’re better off starting realistic and working your way up to game breaking strategy.

Relevant

It should relate to what you do. If your business goals are about sales, you want goals that measure how many sales you make. Social engagement is nice to know about, but unless social engagement ties directly into your sales funnel, a goal focusing on it is irrelevant. That being said, don’t ignore something that is genuinely relevant.

Timely

As the old saying goes, “a goal without a deadline is just a wish.” If you don’t set a time limit for when the goal should be reached, and don’t hold yourself to that deadline, then your goals will continue slipping out of reach.

Takeaway

Breaking down a goal along the S.M.A.R.T. checklist creates more manageable steps that you can actually achieve. If success is the buried treasure, S.M.A.R.T. goals are the instructions on how to get there.

6 May 2015

The New Mobile-Friendly Website Imperative: What All Top Businesses Already Know

A mobile-friendly website is more important for businesses now than ever. To be mobile-friendly, a website must be designed with Responsive Web Design (RWD) in mind – meaning the content is designed to automatically adapt and restructure itself to work on smaller mobile screens.

Until a couple weeks ago, it was simply considered good business practice to become mobile-friendly, but Google has officially made it an online imperative. A couple weeks ago, Google’s search engine made a change that strongly and automatically prioritizes mobile-friendly sites over those that are not. This means that those without a mobile-friendly site will be pushed down the search results pages, making them not only harder to find, but also potentially landing them beneath their mobile-friendly competitors. This change can result in less web traffic to non-mobile-friendly sites, potentially resulting in lost sales.

A non-mobile-friendly site now says one of a few things about a company, either: it cannot or will not spend the money to go mobile, it doesn’t care, or that it is completely oblivious to the needs of its market. The future is changing and its time to adapt or face losing out on missed opportunities.

If this hasn’t convinced the undecided, here are a few more of the many other reasons to become (and suggestions for becoming) mobile-friendly.

1) Make it easy and straightforward.

A company should make navigating their website as effortless as possible. This will allow users to have a positive experience and encourage them to more fully engage with the brand. It will also encourage them learn about the company and allow them to easily find what they are looking for. Annoyance caused by a difficult to navigate site can translate to them leaving earlier than you would have liked (or expected). Whether or not there is great content on the site, if it is difficult to find, view or interact with on mobile, it won’t matter. The great online content in the world won’t appear so wonderful if it is hard to access and difficult to read. It’s not just what you say, the method and framework you use to convey it is equally important.

2) Focus on mCommerce: Don’t limit yourself to eCommerce

If you do eCommerce, it’s become even more of an imperative to focus on improving your mCommerce (mobile online commerce). In fact, by the end of 2015, mCommerce is projected to account for 40% of all global eCommerce transactions, and 1/3 of all U.S. eCommerce transactions. The numbers are on their way there already: in Q1 2015, smartphone share of mCommerce transactions has grown more than 10% in the U.S.

Importantly, in Q1 2015 in the U.S., while the conversion rates are higher with desktop, smartphones garner much more traffic than desktop, resulting in more paid online transactions overall.

Other non-western markets see mobile mCommerce conversions accounting for as much as 4x more transactions. Improvements are being made everyday in Western markets by companies to improve the mobile shopping experience and improve their mobile conversion rates. This Q1 2015 Criteo report on the State of Mobile Commerce says a focus will be placed improving the product browsing experience and mobile payment process in Western markets.

Another insight from the report: Mobile purchases tend to happen during consumers’ leisure hours before and after work, while desktop transactions tend to happen at work. So, if you want to capture consumers outside of work hours: be sure to go mobile-friendly.

3) Heed the Rule of Thumb.

Two fingers (thumb and pointer finger) are required to expand small text and images on non-mobile-friendly sites. If people need to do this to navigate a site or consume online content on a smartphone (or tablet), then they will feel that it requires too much effort. If a company’s online content is not easy to select and use with a fat thumb (or single finger), then they should think about RWD. Today, more and more people prefer to use their thumb (sometimes thumbs) to text and to click on online content from a smartphone. (And, while a single pointer finger might be used more often on a tablet than a thumb would – a single digit doing less work is preferred).

Finally, think about how and where people use their smartphones. Many people hold their phone in one hand, and use the other hand to do other things, such as: hold onto the subway bars or carry a coffee. This makes using two fingers to expand and read text nearly impossible. It is key for companies to optimize their sites for this “in-between” time, as well – time that customers could be spending on their websites becoming more familiar with the company or making a purchase.

In short, the mobile imperative can no longer be ignored. Companies who were waiting for a time to act must do so now, in order to stay competitive in this ever-evolving online world.