3 Steps to Better Mobile Landing Pages for Tablets & Readers

With the growing popularity of tablets and internet-enabled e-readers, an increasing number of your prospects are going mobile — with something other than a smartphone. 

According to the Adobe Digital Index, tablet visits are projected to outpace smartphone visits by January 2013, and encompass 10% of overall website visits by 2014. Tablets have a larger screen, a more practical keyboard, and are typically connected to faster WiFi and 4G networks. These new devices present both a new frontier and a tremendous opportunity for online marketers; it’s time to start deploying mobile landing pages with the tablet in mind.

Three Steps for Better Mobile Landing Pages for Tablets

1. Videos: Most mobile best practices recommend that marketers defer interactive content to desktop landing pages, maintaining that simple images and text are best suited for mobile devices because of bandwidth and screen size. This is certainly true for smartphones, but because tablets have larger screens, higher resolutions, and more processing power, it’s no longer necessary to shy away from streaming video and interactive content on tablet devices. 
2. Work the Extra Room: Because some of the most popular tablets operate at ultra high resolutions, you have a lot of extra room to work with. Compared to traditional mobile landing pages, landing pages that are optimized for tablet use can display a larger amount of rich content, including images, widgets, social feeds, and forms.
3. Optimize for the Thumb: On desktop landing pages, clicks are precise, so you can afford to have smaller-sized clickable elements such as links, images, and buttons. On a tablet, visitors are using their fingers to navigate your landing page. Ensure that your landing pages have “thumb-sized” clickable elements to optimize for click-throughs and conversions.

Getting Creative with Mobile Landing Pages for Tablets

With the steady rise in both the popularity and use of tablets, the rewards associated with optimizing your landing pages for these devices will only increase. Getting creative with your tablet-optimized landing page and providing an enriched, app-like experience will only serve to boost your conversions both today and in the forseeable future.

Why Mobile Landing Pages are a Must

A mobile-optimized landing page made with LiveBall.If you’re not already launching mobile landing pages, then this stat may cause you to think twice. According to an article in Internet Retailer, mobile traffic accounted for 13% of web traffic in the fourth quarter of 2011. 

So why should this matter for your program? It’s simple. If you neglect the importance of optimizing for mobile visitors, you are losing out on a continuously growing number of prospects and possible leads.

Let’s discuss the top three reasons why you should be using mobile landing pages and why they are important for your conversion rate.

Why Mobile Landing Pages are Important

1. Confusion and frustration reduce conversions – Have you ever visited a landing page with your mobile device that wasn’t optimized for mobile visitors? You probably became frustrated pretty quickly after pinching at the screen again and again to resize it.  It’s also very likely that your frustration caused you to just move on to something else. Frustrating user experiences are not good for conversions. Redirecting mobile visitors to mobile optimized pages will help your mobile visitors focus their attention immediately on your conversion action, instead of resizing your page. 

If you are a LiveBall customer, LiveBall can handle this for you by automatically sensing mobile visitors and creating mobile-optimized versions of your landing pages for you. 

2. The need for speed – Most on-the-go visitors don’t have much time, and that means they want a quick and reliable experience. Avoid using Flash or other page elements that take too long to load or that aren’t compatible with mobile browsers. They will slow down your audience, and they greatly increase the risk that you’ll lose out on conversions. Similarly, when it comes to the design of your mobile pages make them easy and quick for visitors by editing your mobile pages down to only the absolute most important items for conversion. Long lead generation forms are a turn off to begin with, but on mobile pages they look even worse. Keep forms short so that your mobile visitors can convert quickly.  

3. Give good brand – Studies have shown that typically people remember negative events more strongly than positive ones. If a customer tries to visit a landing page that hasn’t been optimized for mobile, they are not only very likely to bounce, but they are also very likely to have formed a negative impression of your brand. Your landing pages are your first impressions, and first impressions matter a lot in online marketing. Give good brand by making sure your mobile visitors are served up an exciting, interesting, mobile-optimized landing page.

Mobile isn’t going away and landing pages that have been built with mobile web users in mind are a must-have.

If you’re a Liveball customer, and want to learn more about automatic mobile-optimization or how to make mobile-optimized landing pages please contact your account manager. If you don’t have their contact information handy, you can find our basic contact info here. 

4 Example QR Code Landing Page Strategies

Scan to find out how LiveBall can help you make QR code landing pages!Thinking about incorporating QR codes into your marketing plans? Go for it! QR codes are a great way to engage with visitors and to turn offline experiences into memorable online experiences. Here are four examples of how brands are engaging with their with customers through QR codes that lead to interesting, interactive landing pages

1. Chili’s

On Mobile Commerce Daily, I found a great read about how Chili’s used QR codes as part of their 8^th annual Create-A-Pepper campaign to raise money to fight cancer for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. With the QR code placed on coloring sheets and tables around the restaurant, visitors who scanned the QR code where taken to a landing page where they could donate via their smartphones.

2. HP

An incentive is what drew visitors to my next example. Mobile Commerce Daily tells of how HP partnered with Hearst to give readers a chance at winning a printer. In two different magazine outserts HP included QR codes and content focused increasing brand and product awareness. Those readers who scanned the QR codes were taken to a mobile landing page where they could fill out form in order to enter to win an HP printer.

3. Tesco

This example really screams revolution to me! On geek.com, I found this really cool story of one Korean grocery store chain that’s taking QR codes to a new level. Tesco wants to become the No. 1 grocery chain, without increasing its number of stores. How does it do it? With the power of mobile landing pages that essentially create virtual grocery stores. When someone sees an ad in subway/metro stations, they can scan the QR code and do grocery shopping online while waiting to board their next train. How’s that for thinking out of the box about QR codes?

4. Saks Fifth Avenue

I love this example from Saks in Mobile Commerce Daily. During the holidays storefront windows were utilized to display QR codes. When someone scanned the QR code they were sent to a mobile landing page with a two segmentation options: view the holiday show from New York or continue to shop via their smartphone. If they choose the show, they were taken to a video of Saks’ holiday show for the season. If they wanted to shop, they were sent to a page with tabbed links offering up categories from men’s, women’s and other shopping options.

QR codes are an opportunity to connect with your customers and to turn a scan into an experience. Remember, it’s not the technology, it’s how you use it. How do you currently utilize QR codes? Let us know in the comments!

Top 5 Tips for Mobile Landing Pages

Mobile marketing is skyrocketing in popularity. Just about everywhere you go, you see people on some sort of mobile device, communicating with the rest of the world while on the go. With so many opportunities through mobile, you better make sure your landing pages are also mobile-ready. If they’re not, you might be leaving money on the table.

When it comes to developing and effectively using mobile landing pages, consider some of these tips and resources for making mobile work for you.

Building Effective Mobile Landing Pages

1. One Finger Functionality Test

The old saying is “keep things simple.” Nothing’s more simple than using the one finger test for your mobile landing pages. If your visitor can use just one finger to interact and navigate your landing pages using their mobile devices, you’re golden.

This doesn’t mean any extras, like zooming, pinching or other extra work beyond using just one finger. If you make your visitor work too hard on your mobile landing pages, chances are they’ve already bounced out to another site.

2. Mobile Landing Pages Should Just Work

Your landing pages need to give your visitors what they need, when they hit your page. If you rely on additional extras, like flash, there could be issues that frustrate them to leave your landing pages.

When it comes to mobile landing pages, ensure you have everything in check. That means aligning your delivery with content providers that understand mobile and deliver it right. This will ensure your pages work on any device – from Apple to Android, your site needs compatibility. It’s not only a conversion optimization basic; it’s a marketing basic.

3. Short Forms for Mobile Landing Pages

Do you find long forms on landing pages a pain? Imagine those on mobile landing pages. On a mobile device, users are on a mission and if they must fill out long forms on their smart phone, the frustration factor will get the best of them and add to your abandon rate.

When it comes to mobile landing pages, think short forms. Yes, gathering information is crucial, but only get a few fields and then move the user on to more important tasks. 

4. Test, Test, Test Those Mobile Landing Pages

Others and myself preach it here on a regular basis: you must test your landing pages to get the maximum return on your investment - this is no different for mobile.

Test everything from messaging to images and positioning. Early testing helps find issues that make a big difference later on. When your mobile landing pages bring in more revenue, while reducing spending, you know you’re doing it right.

5. Use Analytics to Build Mobile Landing Pages

One method that helps your conversion optimization efforts is to scrutinize analytics, using an analysis program that tracks mobile users, such Liveball. By looking at the stats and figuring out the behavior of those users with mobile devices, you have what you need to optimize your landing pages.

Do More for Your Mobile Landing Pages

The above are just a few tips to get you going on landing page success on the mobile space. To find these and other tips and resources that make mobile landing pages work for you, check out our free guide: Top 10: Mobile Landing Page Tips.

After you read it, let us know what tips you plan to implement in your marketing mix!

Landing Pages for Social Media Marketing

Social media is all around us. From Facebook to Twitter, more people than ever use social networks to communicate with friends, family and colleagues. They also use them to follow brands and research recommendations about products and services. Using landing pages in your social media marketing can help you turn social interactions into social conversions. Let’s dig a little deeper and see how.

Get Social With Landing Pages

According to a wonderful post from Social Media Examiner, more businesses see increases in responses and leads with the addition of social media. In this post, they give us some great stats. Let’s talk about them and what they mean for how you can use landing pages in your social media efforts. 

1. Approximately 40% of social media users access their accounts through mobile devices. 

Today’s smart phones, tablets and other mobile devices allow us to access just about anything online.  As more people come to your landing page via social media, you can bet a good amount will use a mobile device.  For any social campaigns, you should be ready to automatically redirect mobile visitors to a mobile optimized version of your landing page.

2. Americans spend more time on Facebook than any other U.S. site.

 With over 800 million users, there’s a good chance you will see many prospects hit your Facebook properties. This means if you don’t have a Facebook presence, now’s the time to get it started. 

Using an iframe, you can pull a Liveball landing page into one of your Facebook tabs. For instance, these pages could include an opt-in box for your email list or get people to demo or to download a whitepaper.  Every LiveBall console comes with templates designed to fit the specialized size requirements of Facebook, helping you create Facebook specific landing pages with code or development resources.

3. 51% of Facebook users and 64% of Twitter users are more likely to buy from the brands they follow.

Wow – this one says a lot to me! With a loyal following on social networks, you will not only have a way to instantly communicate with prospects and customers, but you have a medium that earns trust faster – and that leads to more sales.

This means it’s important to stay active on your social networks to earn your prospects’ trust.  Keep in touch and market to these followers by use specific landing pages to offer free educational content, special offers or access to online events.  Make sure that you add social sharing buttons to these landing pages, so your fans can let their friends know about this cool whitepaper or demo they just saw.

How do you integrate social media with your landing pages? Leave us a comment to let us know!