The value of mobile marketing simply cannot be ignored. Unfortunately, for a lot of small businesses, it is. As a company we work primarily with small businesses. Their bottom line is our bottom line so to speak because everything we do is towards helping them be more successful online. We know that the more successful they are because of our efforts and work the better off we all are, it’s the nature of the business just as it should be.

We’ve developed some tremendously effective and low cost mobile marketing programs to help our clients but convincing them to use them has been very difficult and frustrating. And that is very unfortunate because ultimately it is only going to help them make more money.

One example is the mobile website or a website that is responsive to screen size. Even though we have an excellent mobile website program that is very low cost, offers a state of the art online webbuilder so they can easily update their mobile website and makes it easy to have a mobile website, getting clients to act on it is difficult at best. Yet, there are a ton of third-party studies and statistics that show that mobile commerce is huge these days, in fact, according to many studies I’ve seen is 20% or more of all online commerce. Trying to convince the small business retailer though of the need to be optimized well for mobile has been proving difficult.

We’ve finally convinced our largest client of the need for a mobile shopping cart simply because the data cannot be ignored, he’s likely lost tens of thousands of dollars in annual revenue for not listening to us in the past on this subject and we showed him the data to back it up. We presented him with the last 2 years of web analytics on his site. It probably would have been even worse if we had of looked at his data since he became a client about 6 years ago but we only looked at the last 2 years. A couple of things were obvious. One was that last year, 10% of all of his traffic was from mobile. This year it has doubled to over 20%. His conversion of people using a desktop is around 3%. For mobile it was .48%. God bless those .48% visitors that went thru the aggravation of ordering from their mobile phone because with a non-responsive website it would have been a real hassle. I tried it and it was very frustrating. The point I made to him, using some very reasonable assumptions based upon the available data, was that if the mobile experience was one that was optimized for mobile and thus more attractive to the visitor for the ordering process, and if he only converted at 50% of his desktop conversion, he lost 6 figures in the last 12 months alone because of not being optimized for mobile. Finally, point was well taken.

If you have not optimized your website for the mobile experience, you need to. Regardless of the type of business you are in, do it if only for the experience of your visitor. You cannot say how they are going to find you and everyone has a smart phone these days and uses it to look up things on the web. And if you have ecommerce, you simply cannot afford to ignore it as it could easily represent 20% or more of your business (or lack of it if you don’t optimize for mobile). You don’t need to take my word for it, simply do some research on the internet of mobile use and mobile ecommerce and you will find plenty of data supporting the explosive growth in mobile and why it is valuable and should not be ignored.

And while I am on the subject, there is a pet peeve I have about many sites using mobile redirects. The worst is a redirect that detects my mobile phone and sends me to a mobile site that is not the same as the main website and won’t let me go back to the main website. For sites that are not automatically responsive we use a simply JavaScript that detects screensize and when a small screensize is detected asks them via a popup if they’d like the mobile website. This way they have a choice and are not locked in to the mobile website as they can go back to the main website anytime they want.