BHC was a client for more than 3 years. In that time, we went through a name change, a total rebrand, an entirely new website, and a lot of internal systems updates. When companies go through big upheaval and/or have an environment that breeds consistent change, it is difficult to step from the active role of digital branding into the role of consistent optimization. Working with BHC gave us the opportunity to understand how to optimize for a company that is consistent in how often they change. And it led us to one of their most successful projects: mobile optimization.
How We Identified the Mobile Optimization Issue For the Client
In a nutshell: we used data to back up our suggestion to rebuild!
For our ongoing clients, we send a monthly holistic marketing report. It includes the data, our analysis, and updates on our projects. The goal is to let our clients know how they’re doing and to identify weak spots in their holistic marketing. We choose our projects based on data trends and information pulled from our reports.
With the Berkeley Herbal Center, they had been in operation for over 25 years and they had many different folks working on their website over that time. They make sales through their website and didn’t see any issues with how their site was operating, though it had become tedious for their team to update the site and make changes.
We had been actively growing their social media and were drastically improving their traffic, so we had more data than ever about the behavior on their site. After a while, we noticed that with the improved social media presence, their mobile traffic was becoming their dominant traffic source. We also knew there were mobile responsiveness issues and the site really only functioned well on desktop.
So with that information, we used our data to help show this client just how much their sales and conversion was being negatively affected by their lack of a mobile responsive website.
There was just one issue now – BHC didn’t want to change the look of their website…
How We Approach Making Subtle Changes
When it comes to website optimization, it can be approached a few ways. You can build an entirely new website that has a new design and layout, completely optimized for mobile sales OR you can focus on reworking the tech stack or the “bones” behind the website to help it perform better on mobile.
BHC didn’t want to make cosmetic changes to their site. They love the empathy and the conversational tone that comes from their original site and they knew their audience wouldn’t like a drastic change. They aren’t an ecommerce website, and while they want to make consistent sales, they don’t want to lose their personality.
We resonate with that – and we also want to make sure that audience members have the best possible experience on a website. So we decided to rebuild their site with the exact same look and feel, but with new programs to help optimize for all devices.
This project solved issues like improper sizing and spacing on mobile, broken links, unwanted horizontal scrolling, making clear calls to action, and building new variations of product pages to more accessible for mobile users.
Results We Saw and the Future
After the optimizations, we started seeing a significantly lower mobile bounce rate coupled with more than DOUBLE the conversion rate.
And yes, that put the conversion rate on mobile at .84% and you might be thinking, “that is still too low!” We agree, and think the mobile optimization can go even further down the line. It is also crucial to note that Berkeley Herbal Center has a very niche audience – herbalists – and high ticket courses. So we expect most people to purchase via a larger, desktop, screen.
The future for this site is trending towards ever-more mobile traffic. While we put abandoned cart emails in place, we would also want to see site abandonment automated emails in place for folks that are visiting and already on the list.
Every website is always a work in progress. Not only do we pay attention to how well a site operates and know the proper kinds of optimization they need, we are always watching the latest site trends. We can tell the difference between a site created in 2018 and a site updated this year.
Interested in chatting with us about mobile optimization for your site?
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