We develop for ecommerce on the Magento platform. As such we try to keep a close eye on what is going on with their brand and their organisation. Perusing their blog today we came across a short blog entry sharing a few lessons about developing for mobile that we thought was advice worth sharing. Tom Lodge, Senior eCommerce Architect at Magento, talked to the senior eCommerce Manager for Marricone MD and the CEO of Charlotte Tilbury Beauty Ltd about their experience transitioning their respective brands into mobile and came up with three main commonalities between the companies: ‘less is more’, a ‘focus on content’, and an emphasis on ‘deepening engagement’.
One of the big commonalities between the two brands was a severely restricted budget and so were unable to implement the recommended fully-responsive design, or launch separate mobile sites. Instead, they were able to use some HTML5 work-arounds offered by Magento meaning that they were able to build a mobile stop gap that allowed them to bring their ecommerce to a streamlined format for visitors coming through mobile. A big take away from this process was that their most beneficial design templates were the ones with the simplest navigation that allowed visitor to access more granular information if necessary.
Both companies also reported positive response to rich content. The site structure is just that, structure and the largest benefit is that it was able to help cut the clutter necessary to display otherwise complicated visual formats. Getting video to be an integral part of the mobile browsing experience was a priority of both executives as it ‘inspired’ customers to seek out other products that they didn’t come searching for originally.
Finally, they both incorporated their mobile sites to ‘deepen engagement’ with customers by making the sites integral to both in-store marketing activities and email marketing in terms of in site applications. While both reported positive receptions and, the email marketing campaign delivered a 31% increase in CTR from emails and a 27% increase in conversions.