As the popularity of smartphones and tablets continues to explode, more people are accessing the web from mobile devices than ever before. In fact, one recent market study projects that more people in the U.S. will access the web from mobile devices than from desktop computers or other traditional means by 2015—but are your online campaigns prepared for this shift?
Despite some strong evidence suggesting that mobile traffic is ‘here to stay’, a huge number of online marketers haven’t optimized their landing pages for mobile devices because they believe that their landing experiences are either too complex or too difficult to translate to mobile platforms.
Mobile optimization doesn’t have to be a challenge, however. You can quickly translate even the most complex microsite into a beautiful, intuitive app-like experience by following these five microsite design best practices:
Stay proportional.
Microsites are all about delivering a large amount of high-value interactive content to your visitors, and your mobile pages are no different. However, it’s important to consider the proportions of various types of content (i.e., text, images, and widgets) when optimizing your pages for mobile visitors. For example, mobile pages that are disproportionately image-heavy may take longer to load depending on mobile hardware and cellular coverage. On the opposite end of the spectrum, text-rich mobile pages face different ergonomical challenges that lend to decreased conversion.
Find a healthy balance of copy and images for your mobile microsite to achieve the greatest chance for success.
Stick to standards.
When designing your mobile microsites, be sure to stick to both the layouts and page elements that will appear familiar to your visitors. Avoid using unfamiliar web fonts and small or hard-to-use page controls for your interactive content. Also, don’t assume that your mobile visitors will pinch to zoom or adjust their screens to manuveur around or manipulate elements like tabs or buttons on your microsite; instead, keep your pages consistent regardless of the device from which your visitors are arriving.
Get on top of things.
Mobile visitors are—somewhat by nature—easily distracted, and most have fleeting attention spans. That’s why it’s so important to keep key page elements like forms or calls-to-action towards the ‘top’ of your mobile microsite. Just like in desktop landing pages, keeping all of your important content ‘above the fold’ ensures that your visitors can reach the conversion goal without adding extra friction by forcing users to scroll to respond.
Keep it simple, keep it quick.
In order to both capture the attention of your mobile visitors and garner a response, it’s important to deliver your value proposition in a clear and concise manner, allowing your visitors to quickly navigate through your tabs and find the content that they’re looking for. Once your visitors arrive at that page, the copy should be short enough to digest in a matter of seconds.
Test everything.
Occasionally, every marketer bears witness to results that simply defy conventional wisdom. That’s why testing is such an important part of mobile optimization: despite what may have worked in the past, your visitors will ultimately dictate your microsite’s performance. Be sure to deploy multiple iterations of your mobile microsite and test each page both independently and holistically in order to achieve optimal results for your brand.
Mobile microsites combine all of the benefits of desktop pages, and when designed properly, these landing pages are a great way to display a large amount of value to a segmented mobile audience. Always keep your visitors’ experience at the forefront of your mobile landing page design, and you can start to earn those extra mobile responses!
Read more: Will Facebook Kill The Micro-Site Star?