10 ways to rev up revenues on mobile devices
Needless to say, for any modern brand with e-commerce capabilities, failing to optimize for customers shopping on mobile devices is a bad business move. Ready to ramp up the online revenues your outdoor brand realizes from purchases made on mobile devices? Consider implementing these 10 key tactics geared toward increasing mobile sales:
1. Optimize for mobile first
First and foremost, it’s critical to ensure that your brand’s website looks good and functions well on a variety of devices and screen sizes, from smartphones and tablets to laptops and desktops. And if you don’t already have one, this can be achieved by implementing a mobile-friendly, responsive design.
A mobile-optimized platform helps ensure that your brand’s website is accessible anytime and anywhere — which is particularly relevant for outdoor enthusiasts who are often on the move. This enhances the user experience through faster load times, responsive design and intuitive navigation, all of which are key in capturing and maintaining consumer interest. Moreover, mobile optimization plays a crucial role in search engine rankings, directly impacting your brand’s visibility and reach. By neglecting mobile optimization, outdoor brands risk alienating a large, mobile-reliant segment of their target market, ultimately limiting their online presence and sales.
2. Enhance your user experience (UX)
To help ensure that your mobile interface is intuitive and user-friendly, take steps to simplify your website’s navigation and search functionality. Features like large buttons, easy-to-read font sizes and a clean layout can help reduce bounce rates and increase consumer engagement.
A seamless user experience (UX) minimizes friction in the browsing and purchasing process, significantly impacting conversion rates and customer satisfaction. By providing a UX that is straightforward yet engaging, outdoor brands can effectively communicate their values, build trust and encourage repeat engagements. And especially for outdoor brands, where the connection between the product and the user’s lifestyle is so deeply intertwined, a good UX should go beyond mere convenience. It’s about creating an immersive, intuitive and emotionally resonant journey that aligns with the ethos of the outdoors. An especially effective outdoor-brand UX captures the essence of adventure and nature, reflecting these themes in website design, ease of navigation and content relevance. This holistic approach can help foster a sense of community and belonging among users, which is key to building brand loyalty in the outdoor market.
3. Ensure fast loading times
Consumers on mobile devices (and all devices, really) expect — and even demand — quick loading times. Consider the statistics: E-commerce sites with page-load times of 1 second or less convert 2.5 times more frequently than ones where pages take 5 seconds to load. And the average web page loads over 70% more quickly on a desktop device than on a mobile device.
To optimize your website’s speed for mobile devices, it’s critical to take steps such as compressing images and streamlining code, as fast mobile load times can be especially important when targeting outdoor consumers. Fast-loading sites cater to the on-the-go lifestyle of outdoor enthusiasts, who are often more likely than the typical consumer to access information from remote locations with varying internet speeds. Slow load times not only frustrate users, but they also lead to higher bounce rates, as potential customers are increasingly likely to abandon a site and seek alternatives as a page’s load time increases. This immediate loss of engagement can lead to a direct impact on sales and brand reputation. In addition, search engines like Google factor in site speed when ranking pages, meaning slower sites may suffer reduced visibility in search results, further diminishing the brand’s online presence.
4. Use high-quality product images and videos
The outdoor industry, even more than many others, relies heavily on the ability to visually communicate the allure and functionality of products in the context of the great outdoors. So to better connect with the outdoor enthusiast, it’s important to show your outdoor brand’s products in use in natural settings. And especially since outdoor products tend to be experience-based, using high-resolution images and videos can significantly impact consumers’ purchase decisions.
High-quality visuals serve as a bridge between the consumer and the experience the product promises. They evoke the sensory and emotional aspects of outdoor activities, whether it’s the ruggedness of a deep-woods hunting spot or the serenity of a fishing spot on the lake. Such imagery not only showcases the product effectively but also helps inspire and engage the audience, drawing them into a world where they can see themselves using and benefiting from the product. Additionally, in a digital age where consumers are bombarded with content, superior visuals help outdoor brands stand out, create a memorable online presence and build brand identity. Videos in particular can offer dynamic storytelling opportunities, allowing brands to demonstrate product use in real-life scenarios, highlight unique features and convey a sense of authenticity and adventure. Ultimately, high-quality images and videos are not just marketing tools, they are an integral part of the storytelling process, fostering an emotional connection with the audience and playing a pivotal role in driving consumer decisions in the outdoor market.
5. Provide a mobile-friendly checkout process
Especially given the nature of outdoor brands’ target market — outdoor enthusiasts who are often active, on the move and reliant on mobile devices — a simple, streamlined and efficient mobile checkout experience is critical. This demographic values ease and speed, mirroring their outdoor pursuits, and a cumbersome checkout process on mobile can be a significant deterrent to conversion.
A mobile-friendly checkout should offer a simple, intuitive interface with minimal steps or even one-click purchasing, along with support for various payment methods including mobile wallets like Apple Pay and Google Wallet. Additionally, features such as short, simple forms with autofill for personal information, a clear display of total costs including shipping and taxes, and the ability to easily modify or review orders will further enhance the user experience. Importantly, a secure and trustworthy checkout process fosters confidence and helps reduce cart-abandonment rates.
In the highly competitive outdoor market, where impulse buys and quick decisions are common, the ability of a brand to offer a seamless mobile checkout experience can significantly impact conversion rates, customer loyalty and overall sales. Ultimately, for outdoor brands, optimizing the mobile checkout process is not just about adapting to e-commerce trends, it’s about aligning with the lifestyle and preferences of the core audience to facilitate a smooth path to purchase.
6. Leverage personalized marketing
In the outdoor market, consumers seek experiences and products that resonate with their personal outdoor adventures, whether these involve hunting, fishing, camping, hiking or other activities. And personalized marketing leverages consumer data to allow outdoor brands to deliver targeted content, recommendations and offers that align with these specific interests and past purchasing behaviors.
This approach creates a more relevant and engaging experience for the consumer, fostering a greater sense of connection and understanding with the brand. For example, a customer who frequently purchases bowhunting gear might appreciate receiving content and offers related to effective bowhunting tactics, equipment innovations and exclusive bowhunting events.
Using personalization tactics, digital communications such as website content, emails, online advertisements, push notifications and SMS messages can be tailored based on user preferences and browsing history. They can offer customers and prospects uniquely relevant information about sales, new arrivals or items left in the cart. And ultimately, by employing personalized marketing strategies, outdoor brands can increase the effectiveness of their marketing efforts, leading to higher conversion rates, increased customer retention and a stronger brand-customer relationship.
7. Harness social media
For outdoor brands, harnessing social media in the marketing strategy can serve as a powerful tool for connecting with the community-driven and experience-oriented outdoor audience. Social media platforms offer unique opportunities for outdoor brands to showcase their products in action, share inspiring content and engage directly with consumers. And social media’s visual and interactive nature is particularly effective for outdoor brands, as it allows for the vivid portrayal of the outdoor lifestyle — from breathtaking landscapes to the thrill of adventure sports. This not only enhances brand visibility but also helps foster an emotional connection with the audience.
Further, social media platforms provide valuable data and insights into consumer preferences and behaviors, enabling brands to tailor their marketing strategies effectively. They also facilitate targeted advertising, community building through hashtags and influencer partnerships, all of which can significantly amplify a brand’s reach and resonance. And by leveraging user-generated content, such as customers sharing their own outdoor experiences with the brand’s products, companies can build authenticity and trust.
8. Step up SEO for mobile
With the increasing prevalence of smartphones and tablets, a significant portion of consumers now search for products and information on the go. And for outdoor brands, whose target audience often includes tech-savvy and mobile-reliant adventurers, optimizing for mobile search engine optimization (SEO) is particularly critical to visibility and engagement. Mobile SEO helps ensure that your website appears prominently in search results on mobile devices, which is essential given that mobile searches often have different rankings compared to desktop. This optimization includes responsive website design, fast loading times and mobile-friendly content, helping ensure an optimal viewing experience across all devices.
Further, mobile search behavior often involves local and voice search, making it important to incorporate local SEO strategies, conversational keywords that align with how people naturally speak, and keywords that are relevant to the outdoor and local market. By prioritizing mobile SEO, outdoor brands can more effectively reach their audience at the precise moment they are seeking information or ready to make a purchase, thereby increasing traffic, enhancing the user experience and ultimately driving sales.
9. Encourage reviews and ratings
According to statistics, nearly half of today’s consumers say they trust online reviews as much as recommendations from friends and relatives — and nearly 55% of consumers check four or more reviews before purchasing a product. So it makes sense that reviews, both positive and negative, can greatly influence consumers’ buying decisions. And especially in the outdoor industry, where products are often used in challenging environments and situations, potential customers look for reassurance about the quality, durability and functionality of products. Online reviews and ratings provide this assurance from a community of peers who have already experienced the offering under consideration. They also offer authentic, user-generated content that can help validate a brand’s claims, build credibility and foster a sense of community among users.
Positive reviews can boost an outdoor brand’s reputation and visibility, as many consumers start their purchase journey with online research and heavily rely on feedback from other users. Further, when generating their search rankings, search engines often prioritize products with higher numbers of reviews, helping increase the online visibility of brands with large numbers of them. And by encouraging customers to submit reviews and ratings, brands can get invaluable from-the-source guidance on ways to improve their product offerings and customer service.
10. Implement analytics for continuous improvement
To better understand user behavior, it’s important to regularly analyze your mobile traffic and sales data — and then to use this data to continuously improve the mobile shopping experience for your website visitors.
In an industry driven by evolving consumer needs and technological advancements, analytics offer invaluable insights into customer behaviors, preferences and trends. And by meticulously tracking and analyzing data from your outdoor brand’s website traffic, social media engagement, sales patterns and customer feedback, you can gain a deeper understanding of your market. This understanding can be invaluable for making informed decisions, whether it’s refining marketing campaigns, enhancing product design, optimizing the user experience or identifying emerging market opportunities.
Further, analytics enable brands to measure the effectiveness of their strategies and tactics, allowing for data-driven adjustments that improve performance and ROI. For example, understanding which products resonate with specific demographics can help guide inventory management and promotional efforts. And customer-journey analytics can help reveal pain points and areas for enhancement in the purchasing process. Ultimately, leveraging analytics and using it to facilitate continuous improvement can empower your outdoor brand to stay ahead of the curve, personalize marketing efforts and build stronger, longer-lasting relationships with customers.
Is your outdoors-oriented brand ready to maximize its mobile revenues? Here at TBA Outdoors, not only are we e-commerce experts, but we’re also adept at harnessing the growing popularity of mobile shopping to boost your brand’s bottom line.
But that’s not all. As a fully integrated marketing firm, we can cover the entire spectrum of your brand’s marketing needs — all in one place. Whether you’re looking for help in areas like branding strategy and market research or need assistance with analytics, creative, social media, e-commerce, public relations, video production and more, we’ve got you covered. To explore how we can help your outdoor brand amplify the effectiveness of all its marketing efforts, reach out to our team of outdoors-obsessed marketing pros today.