Can on-the-go users enjoy your winery’s website on their mobile?

Today, many customers will try to access your winery’s website and content from a smartphone or a tablet.  In addition, one of the trends in the wine ecommerce industry is a trend towards mobile commerce.

On the go users search on their mobiles pretty what exactly what they used to do on PC’s; they look things up, they check email, they click on links, they shop, and they buy wine and use apps. When out tasting wine, many consumers use their IPhone or IPad to find directions and maps, information about winery tasting room hours, etc. They won’t wait to get home to look up your winery.

A winery’s livelihood is dependent on having a website that is smartly designed, highly search engine friendly, totally secure, and easy to navigate.  Most winery websites are not very mobile friendly, causing the user to enlarge various parts of the screen and scroll around attempting to find the information they were looking for.  If your content is too hard to read or incomplete, you might be losing customers to your competition.

A timely report about mobile consumers in British Columbia by mobile agency iamota and research firm Insights West revealed the opportunities in connecting with consumers via their smartphones.

Image by: Smartphone Insights Report; A page from the Smartphone Insights Report.

• 79% of smartphone owners in British Columbia expect good mobile experiences from brands they like and trust.
• 54% are less likely to do business with brands providing poor mobile experiences.
• Half of smartphone owners having paid for something via their smartphone and very interested in doing more so in the future.
• Of those who have bought something with their phone, 34 per cent have used an app that has an authorized connection to their credit card.

“Providing customers with a high quality and engaging mobile experience has moved from a nice to have to a need to have for brands in today’s marketplace,” says Pete Smyth, CEO of iamota. “Brands need to keep pace with consumers and need to shift from doing mobile to disrupting and differentiating with mobile, or risk losing business to a competitor that’s doing it right.”

“The big surprise in this survey was how quickly consumers have taken to mobile and their heightened expectations from brands,” adds Steve Mossop, CEO of Insights West. ”

Download a complete infographic

http://www.bcbusiness.ca/files/Brands-Beware.pdf

For on the go travellers, does your Website make the grade?

Try surfing your winery’s website on your mobile phone. Does your website make the grade?  If you have Flash photo galleries, they won’t display on an iPhone and the performance isn’t great on Android phones. With Flash, many people will quickly lose patience and go elsewhere rather than watch your site load. If you have sizeable PDF downloads, they can’t be downloaded on a smartphone.

It’s no surprise that smart wineries are integrating mobile as part of their overall marketing strategy.  A mobile website is extremely important to catch foot traffic coming into your winery. Do you have a mobile version of your website- one that looks great on a small screen and is easy to navigate?

Whether your goals are driving website hits, or creating memorable social media interaction, you need a dynamic web presence. For wineries, it’s relatively simple to get a mobile website.  Innovative wine ecommerce platforms – such as Blackboxx  (http://blackboxx.biz) – offer a mobile solution. Your web designer has more tools than ever to help you build a mobile website that’s optimized and enhanced to meet their viewing needs.

Responsive web design is a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices. With mobile, tablet, etc. growing, it’s a great time for wineries to explore responsive designs.  Smart wineries optimize their site for mobile use with a new responsive layout that automatically adjusts to fit any phone or tablet screen.

Make your website into a more powerful tool in your marketing endeavors.  When developing your mobile winery website, you will need to consider the following requirements:

• Smart Design
• Mobile-Responsive Design
• Search Engine Friendly (SEO)
• Easily Updated
• Social Media Tools
• Secure and PCI Compliant Stores

Like your desktop-sized website, your mobile site should be engaging and allow customers full access to your inventory of wine, site search with filtering, product details, account management, and of most of all, the ability to make purchases, join your wine club or give gifts from your mobile device.

Has your winery integrated mobile as part of your overall marketing strategy?