Your site’s speed is a snow-ball. It culminates somewhere into your brand’s ultimate profitability, impact, and experience.
What do you think defines that little gap between you and your biggest competitor? Your product quality or marketing dollars or brand strategy or distribution muscle? What is it?
Think carefully before you answer. Hint: Pfizer sites load 38% faster after the bounce rate was reduced by 20%? It matters so much when BMW adopts a mobile site– yes, traffic to BMW sales site can shoot from 8% to 30%?
How can something called AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages help Postbank with 58% more leads at a 37% lower cost per lead and an 11% higher click rate (that too, with an 8% lower cost)? It eke out 8.5% more hits overall at the same cost. It matters to eBay as it makes a 0.1 second improvement in load time. And that fetches it a 0.5% increase in ‘Add to Cart’ count?
Now, what if we told you that even a small push in the mobile speed can cascade into immense and positive improvements for the brand? We are not saying this randomly. There are 37 retail, travel, and luxury brands across Europe and the US which are echoing this insight. Now brace up for the big translation – as much as 8 to 10% jump in conversion rates can happen with a mere 0.1s change in load time!
This Report Will Shake You Up
A Deloitte report ‘Millisecond Make Millions’ unlocks a big revelation for brands. It is not enough to be on the device a customer holds. You have to make sure that you are as fast, if not faster, than your competition’s site. In fact, you have to be as fast as any distraction that will pull a customer away – in the blink of an eye. That’s some wake-up call for your brand’s digital strategy.Turns out that mobile speed performance has more implications on revenue KPIs and brand experience than what marketers could have expected so far.
The study noted some profound findings that make marketers sit down and chew the reality from a fresh angle:@
- Mobile site speed improvements tend to have a direct correlation to improved funnel progression
- Whenever mobile speed improves, page views and conversion rates – along with average order value – also climb up
- Verticals like travel and retail respond more strongly to improvement in bounce rates
- Instant gratification, self-service and mobile ubiquity have changed marketing dynamics for the online journeys of any brand
- Bounce-rate uplift can make mobile users stay on the page more, browse more, spend more and visit more views per session
- With a 0.1 second improvement, a 10.1% spike in conversion rate on mobile was noted
- Page Views per session increased by almost 3%
- Funnel progression also improves with better site performance and speed, especially in the latter stages of the conversion journey
- A 6.7% increase in sessions happens when the page speed improves
- A site speed improvement of 0.1s can lead to a jump of 21.6% from the first step of the form to the form-submission page
Look for the sub-text – what these numbers actually say?
It is not just because of the ubiquity of mobiles and a mobile-first culture that this report, incidentally, also underlines well. It is because of every step of the user journey matters in today’s time-starved, attention-deficient, and clutter-led world. Latency can lead to abandonment by customers. Slow downloads can actually hamper purchase decisions and lead to customer drop-outs. Page-load time is something that can wreak havoc for a brand in the smallest fraction, making customers give up and hop elsewhere.
You may be spending a lot of meeting hours, brainstorming energy, and marketing budgets in creating an alluring brand message but even if all that effort pulls a prospect to your site, it would just take a millisecond for the prospect to swing to the next option in the market. After all, it is all a matter of a click. The customer does not have to stretch his/her hand to another shelf. The thumb is enough to take him/her to another brand. Patience is running dry. The customer‘s tolerance for slow digital experience is too low to be risked today. Customers are too fragile today when it comes to loyalty. So even your established users may only need a tiny second as an excuse to turn their heads to another page.
While it is good to create sharp marketing campaigns and have a pull factor, do not push these customers away just because your site is not fast or smooth enough. After all, these are customers that you have brought in with a lot of money, hard work, and branding effort. Why turn them off due to a technological issue?
Invest in site improvements and create stronger engagements, conversions, advocacy, perception, loyalty, and journeys. That is what will lead to better bottom-lines.
It’s time to invest in a mobile-first and speed-at-all-costs mindset in your brand budget, team project plans, and tools of measurement. It’s time to be in the league of Pfizer, BMW, and eBay. Not because they are better brands but because they are faster and smarter brands.If you need help in getting your mobile site speed reviewed and enhanced, get in touch with our mobile tech team today at Highpurple.
