Instant Gratification is the Mobile Expectation

A study by Microsoft revealed in 2015 that human beings have a shorter attention spans than goldfish—nine seconds for the small orange fish, and eight seconds for the average person. Optimizing digital commerce tactics for your customers limited attention span is essential for success. Digital commerce professionals know that speed and efficiency can boost profits and be a major competitive differentiator. Same-day delivery, one-click check-outs and some other convenience tactics all play to a mindset that all our customers have—instant gratification.

Instant gratification isn’t a new phenomenon, and the timeframe for when customers expect things to happen has shortened drastically as technology has advanced this past decade. The key technology that has led to shortening both our collective attention span and our desire for instant gratification are smart phones. People expect to have an efficient experience when accessing mobile sites and apps, and if either underwhelm, they’ll leave and may not come back.

Delivering a poor mobile experience can hurt key KPIs like bounce rate, page views, churn rate, retention rate, conversions etc. Most importantly, bottom-line profits will hurt. According to a 2017 report by ComScore, mobile now makes up 21% of all online spending. Therefore, the importance of having a speedy and user-friendly mobile experience cannot be understated.

Google research reveals some important key statistics on mobile site performance:

• More than half of mobile site visits are abandoned when load times exceed 3 seconds.
• 79% of consumers are less likely to purchase with a retailer again, if they were dissatisfied with their mobile site performance.
• Complex pages hurt conversions, with the number of page elements and images being the top factors.
  • Sessions that converted users had 38% less images—19 per page on average.
• DOM ready time (the time it takes for a pages HTML code to be received and parsed by the browser) and full-page load time are the top two factors that impact bounce rates.
  • Bounced sessions had 55% slower than non-bounced sessions—first page is the most important.
  • Average full-page load time for non-bounced sessions is 4.5 seconds
  • Average full-page load time for bounced sessions is 6.9 seconds

Essentially, the simpler and less weight you add to your mobile site pages, the better their load time performance and user experience will be, which will lend to better KPIs, more conversions and improved bottom-line performance. In 2015, Google developed a solution to help publishers and retailers achieve lightning fast mobile page load times. Their accelerated mobile pages (AMPs) allow retailers to build lightweight mobile pages that load close to instantly when linked to mobile search clicks.

Now, we know that mobile sites don’t convert all mobile purchases, apps of course, make up the remaining portion. Different steps need to be taken for delivering an efficient user experience on apps. If apps are determined clunky or provide an underwhelming user experience they’re likely to be deleted—raising churn rates and hurting future sales revenue. In fact, in 2016, Adobe reported that 50% of apps are only used 10 times, and over 20% of the time an app is only used once. The reason they sited was that consumers they interviewed claimed they deleted apps because they weren’t useful or usable. Clearly apps need to cater to our desire for instant gratification as well.

Google AMPs won’t help within apps, but some best practices to cater to your customer’s desire for instant gratification are:

• Foster a positive experience with the device. Avoid draining the battery, sending out too many notifications, and be sure to limit communication to those that are relevant.
• When asking users to create an account, limit the required information fields to those that are absolutely necessary and relevant. In exchange, have a winning rewards program or timely coupon offerings.
• Stay on top of operating system updates to ensure your app runs properly. Avoid app crashes by delivering timely updates and to reach the most consumers, be sure your app is iOS and Android compatible.

When catering to the growing mobile market, keep instant gratification top of mind. Optimize pages, ensure quick load times, and if you can swing it, put out a winning app.