How to Make Sure Your Fashion Marketing is Mobile-Optimized

Mobile shopping has completely redefined how fashion and e-commerce businesses are run. Customers now do a significant amount of their day-to-day activities on mobile instead of a home desktop or laptop. According to Forrester Data, in 2016, consumers spent $60.2 billion shopping on their smartphones. That number is expected to rise to $93.5 billion in 2018, and $175.4 billion in 2022! If you’re not on mobile, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to connect with your community.

Don’t worry. Being on mobile doesn’t mean you need to have a standalone app to sell your products, like some of the larger retailers. You can still take a couple of very important steps to make your fashion marketing mobile-optimized. This ensures you’re reaching your customers where they are spending their time.

Here are a few recommendations to ensure you are optimizing your fashion marketing for your mobile audience:

Write short, snappy copy.

On mobile, your audience is on the go and probably has a short attention span. Typically, you’ll want to get straight to the point with short copy that doesn’t require them to scroll endlessly to read the whole thing. Stick with succinct copy on ads, social posts, and even your product descriptions. This is a great best practice anyway, even if your audience finds you on desktop!

There are of course exceptions to this rule. If you’re creating a piece of content that is focused on telling an important story about you, your business, or a product, feel free to take the time to write a lengthier piece here to really get the story right. But this should be an exception to the rule, not common practice.

Shorter copy is also your friend when it comes to copy that lives on images for ads or social posts. When your audience is looking at images on such a small smartphone screen, you want to make sure the words are big enough that they can comfortably read without needing to zoom in.

Resize your images for mobile and web so they load quickly.

Make sure that you are not using super high-resolution images unless it’s absolutely necessary. You can resize images for web and mobile so that they’re clear on smartphones and laptops, but they don’t need to be at the quality that you’d need for print.

Knowing that your audience is likely viewing your images on mobile means that things load more slowly. These days, few people have the patience to wait even 5 or 10 seconds for an image to load.

Ensure your website is mobile-optimized.

Most e-commerce platforms have this built in, but it’s a good practice to check and make sure everything’s working correctly anyway. When you build your fashion startup shop on a platform like Shopify, for example, most themes come with a mobile-optimized version.

However, things break, and sometimes the checkout process can be tricky. Check regularly that you can get through the whole purchase process without any issues. Look for odd-looking pages, broken forms, or other issues that look suspicious to a customer. Many shoppers will abandon their checkout if they’re on a smartphone and it’s not optimized for them. You want to make it as simple and seamless as possible.

When you review your site on mobile, you will also be able to see how images and copy flow together on a smaller screen. You might realize that your “shorter” copy isn’t quite short enough. You’ll also want to try and limit pop-ups and announcement bars on mobile. These tend to clutter up the screen and are much harder to click out of on mobile.

In addition, consider adding mobile payment options that your customers can use, rather than typing in their credit card information number by number. For example, many shops integrate with services like Paypal, Apple Pay, or Google Wallet. If your customer logs into one of those services, they store the payment information that you can access so that the customer doesn’t have to pull out their wallet at all.

Advertise on mobile.

If you know that most of your customers are finding you on mobile, try testing your advertising on mobile vs. desktop. You can create separate ad groups to target exclusively mobile vs. exclusively desktop, and you’ll get a better sense of how your customers are converting on each. Great mobile advertising channels for fashion startups include Facebook mobile, Instagram, and Pinterest mobile.

Instagram, specifically, is a great channel to give your customers a chance to shop on mobile. If you haven’t tried Shopping on Instagram, it’s a feature that lets you tag your products in both Instagram Stories and Posts. This means that customers who are interested can click right through to your shop to buy things they like.

Get emails, social follows, or even mobile phone numbers for your audience.

While a lot of customers are indeed ready to purchase on mobile, you should also consider a segment of your audience that might discover you on mobile, but isn’t ready to check out on their smartphones yet. You’ve still got an interesting opportunity here to capture that audience without pushing them to purchase right away.

Lead them to give you their email in exchange for a new customer discount. Or follow your Instagram channel so they can stay up to date on your new releases (or sales promotions). This way, you’re offering them a lower commitment option to stay in touch with you that they can do easily on mobile. After they see a few of your Instagram posts, or they see your latest email about a marketing promotion, they might be more inclined to purchase when they’re on their computer.

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Are you finding that more and more of your customers are coming to you on mobile? We’d love to hear how you’re connecting with your mobile audience for your fashion startup. What’s working (or not working) for you?