The Case For Responsive Design

By Susan Wall, Vice President of Marketing, Bronto Software

You’ve got an email from your favorite brand announcing a promotion too good to pass up. You’re on your lunch break, or on the train home, or just chilling on the couch with your smartphone and you click on the link. But you can’t shop. A pop-up obscures the text, the photos are rendered awkwardly, there are too many steps to purchase that are hard to navigate on a small screen. You give up.

But personal experience isn’t enough to persuade your company to invest resources in mobile design, so let’s look at some numbers. We recently commissioned a survey of 1,000 US adults to explore how people browse and buy online.

Here are a couple of numbers to think about:

• Smartphone ownership among U.S. adults has increased from 51% to 75% in the three years we have studied this phenomenon.
• Nearly two-thirds of smartphone-owning shoppers are using their device more frequently to buy items than they did 12 months ago.
• More than half of shoppers ages 18-24 use their smartphones to buy products.

The How and Why of Responsive Design

There are two components to responsive design: The website and the email. For your email, responsive design will likely require some compromises as different email providers have different requirements. The goal is an email that looks good across multiple providers and provides a smooth transition to the website. This last part is absolutely critical. If an email isn’t optimized for mobile devices, 80% of customers will simply delete it and 30% actually unsubscribe, according to research from email testing company Litmus.

Some retailers have decided to bypass the email-related issues by investing in an app. If your product is something people buy daily or weekly, an app makes sense (think coffee or pizza delivery). But most retailers aren’t selling to people that often. And well, let’s be frank, our phones are pretty cluttered with apps right now. In another survey we commissioned in 2015, 61% of smartphone users preferred mobile browsers for shopping, compared with 39% who preferred mobile apps.

How Mobile Boosts the Omnichannel Experience

Perhaps a better option is to focus on how you can integrate mobile into the omnichannel experience consumers are craving.

For instance, one of our customers who has a large brick and mortar footprint is deploying a text-to-join campaign to capture email addresses at checkout. Another customer segments their email sends to alert shoppers to new store openings or sales events specific to an individual store.

Why do you want these invites to be delivered in a way that looks good on mobile devices? You need to think like the harried, easily distracted consumers who use their smartphones to make life easier.

Maybe I love your brand’s products, but I worry about getting the wrong size, having to mail it back and waiting forever to get my credit. And your nearest store is too far of a drive. So an email delivered on a Saturday inviting me to the new, nearby store you’ve opened is going to get my attention. If I can easily navigate through that email on my phone (with a quick link to get directions) – I might decide to stop by.

This relates well to another key finding of our research: The emergence of the online-first shopper. Along with asking survey respondents about any changes in their device use, we asked whether they were visiting physical stores more or less frequently in the past 12 months. Thirty percent report shopping less frequently in stores, while 29% say they are shopping in-store more frequently.

Forty-three percent of respondents who report shopping more often in stores are age 25-34. And those with a household income under $75,000 also report shopping more frequently in stores. The youngest age group (18-24 year-olds) and respondents with the highest household income ($100,000 and higher) report shopping less frequently in-store in the last 12 months.

While the two segments balance each other in overall impact, it once again points to the value of mobile.

You want to capture the person shopping in stores less frequently on whatever device they come to you on. And for those who like shopping in stores, your mobile experience must entice them to visit the store or make it easier for them to buy online and return via the store or vice versa.

The Details of Being Mobile-Friendly

Mobile responsive extends beyond simply offering a message or website that is easy to read on a smartphone. Every aspect of the browsing and buying phase needs to be evaluated. Can the customer easily cart items? Is it easy to insert credit card information at checkout?

Take cart recovery tools, for example. Fifty-nine percent of the retailers we work with use one. But a disconnect on the responsive design front can make this tool much less effective. Here’s how: Let’s say the consumer browsed online and placed the item in the cart from a laptop before heading out to dinner. You’ve triggered the email to send two hours after a cart is abandoned. They check their email on their phone after dinner and think, “Yikes, I forgot to buy the pair of shoes I was looking at.’’

If the email doesn’t easily direct them to the website or if the website doesn’t allow a seamless buying experience, you could lose the sale. Worse, you could lose the sale to a competitor because now your customer is thinking that they really want those shoes and they’re going to head to a commerce site that works well from their phone.

They Are Going to Buy on the Phone – Make it Easy

We hope you don’t need any more incentive to look at responsive design for both your email and your website. The trend toward shopping online via a phone is here to stay. Making it easy for busy customers to use their phones to buy with you could be just the boost your ecommerce program needs.