To celebrate our new office move, the 51Degrees.mobi team took to the streets of Reading for an evening filled with tasty food and beverages. We stopped off at the handmade burger Co restaurant that was recently opened in Reading at the start of the year. We all had a great experience, with fantastic food and a great environment; however, there was something that left a sour taste in our mobile mouths.
When browsing their media offering at the table I came across a small leaflet that offered free seeds by signing up to their website. I scanned the QR code, and expected to be able to sign up quickly and get back to eating my delicious burger. Instead I was eventually greeted with their heavy big screen, desktop website.
On closely zoomed inspection I found that the seeds were no longer available due to large amounts of people signing up to the website, so instead they offered a 20% discount voucher to be used on our next visit. “Brilliant!” I thought to myself, as I searched for a link to the new offer, eventually finding it hidden within the text.
Finally, I had reached the signup page and proceeded to enter my details to gain my 20% voucher. In total I had loaded 3.2MB of data over two pages, which equates to about 35p spent on data (based on 3 UK pay-as-you-go data rates).
More importantly I ended up being turned off by the lack of a good mobile experience, and considering I was led to the website in store via a QR code this should really be a big priority.
I also managed to scan a QR code from a postcard in a Carluccio's restaurant last week. This time, I was greeted with a far more light-weight 319kb mobile version of their website. This took seconds to load on my 3G connection and took me straight to the signup page. I was able to register in seconds and get back to enjoying my meal.
There was a catch however, my colleague also scanned the QR code with his Nokia Windows Phone and was greeted with the big screen website. This shows how you can take steps to create a great mobile optimised web page, but without a great device detection solution like 51Degrees.mobi you can still offer your customers a poor mobile experience.
Bounce rates from mobile devices were reported to be 10% higher than their desktop counterparts during 2012. Either this is caused by impatient mobile users, or more commonly the lack of an optimised mobile landing page. Compuware also found that for every customer that experiences a poor mobile web page, 61% are unlikely to return. This could be heavily detrimental for customers visiting eCommerce sites, causing a large loss of mobile sales.
As mobile web traffic increases, businesses will be forced to offer a great mobile experience to all of their potential customers. 51Degrees.mobi already help mobilise over 650,000 websites around the globe. Find out more about how 51Degrees.mobi mobile device detection can help you to mobilise your website.