How to Design Your Mobile Marketing Calls to Action

Automotive marketers still tend to think of mobile as a subset of the internet. If you look at your stats on any given week, however, you’ll see that it’s either a majority or near-majority of your traffic. It is the internet.

Desktop is now the subset, so if you don’t get incredibly good at converting mobile, you’re working on a declining audience. This article will discuss something that may sound trivial at first, but is essential to a strong mobile strategy:

Make sure your calls to action are fat-finger-friendly.

If you imagine the context of your mobile visitors, you’ll start to realize that you’re competing on the cutting edge of the attention economy. This is borne out from the data: If you glance at your analytics, you’ll see that your mobile session time is on average shorter than desktop, your bounce rate on mobile is higher, and your mobile pages per session are fewer.

You need to grab visitors’ attention and focus quickly, and then get them to take an action immediately. For example, imagine the following mobile users:

Facebook Freddy: Freddy is browsing Facebook on his mobile device. He’s probably on a bus or he’s sitting—let’s be honest here—in the bathroom. He sees an ad for your car in his feed and decides to press it. This is the moment you need to convert him, because he could finish his activity and drop you with a simple swipe of the finger. Grab him while he’s hot.

Commuting Kara: Kara is at a bus or train stop on her way to work. She’s flipping through a car dealership site because she and her spouse are discussing a new vehicle. Maybe he sent it to her on iMessage, and Kara’s clicked the link. Again, we’re talking a possible interruption at any second while Kara goes through her morning routine of articles and websites.

Lunch Break Larry: Larry’s eating lunch at his desk or waiting for a buddy in the workplace kitchen area. He’s going to be flipping through your site for a few brief moments, but will be distracted by his lunch shortly. Again, don’t let him swipe you away.

The common denominator is that most of these mobile interactions are happening in awkward interstitial moments during a person’s day. These people are not comfortably sitting at a desk or reclining with a laptop. They’re in motion, they’re perched on a bench, or they’re quickly walking into a building from a parking lot.

Next, let’s look at the common calls to action in mobile screenshots 1 and 2 in the illustration above. Note the following issues for users:

The chat box isn’t mobile optimized.
The fields are too small.
There are too many fields to fill out on mobile.
They have busy screens, which are hard to focus attention on.

The problem with these mobile interfaces is that fat fingers in motion aren’t going to be able to fill them out. Not with ease or without mistakes, at least.

Therefore, when you’re working with your call-to-action provider—the technology you use to make your website more effective and targeted—you need to make sure that you’re using calls to action that are designed to convert and simple for the fast-paced mobile user.

For example, in mobile screenshot 3 in the illustration above, note its user-friendly attributes:

It has an attention-grabbing header.
The layout is clean, with few fields.
It includes a clear button for conversion.
It is easily dismissible.

It still includes the name and phone number fields, but they’re easy for the person to fill in because the call to action is swiped up from the bottom, and the fields are relatively large. The button is clear.

Designing for mobile is always a challenge. Don’t rely on your website to grab those conversions because it is busy trying to speak to lots of buyers. Use focused calls to action that are served up to targeted segments—“mobile returning visitors” versus “mobile new visitors,” for example.

Just make sure the engagements are designed and triggered in a way that makes it very easy for folks to convert. If you take these steps, you’ll see an immediate lift in your conversion rate.

Remember: Mobile is the internet, and if it’s overlooked, you’ll see a significant drop in your website conversions and engagements.

Ilana Zur is head of customer outreach at AutoLeadStar, a lead-engagement platform for auto dealerships that specializes in person-level analytics and lead capture to convert more of dealer websites’ traffic into qualified leads. Ilana loves learning about new dealerships and partnership opportunities, so feel free to reach out to [email protected].