| Inbound Lead Generation: eCommerce Marketing's Missing Link Posted on: Tuesday 14 April 2015 — 02:15 Posted by Everett If eCommerce businesses hope to remain competitive with Amazon, eBay, big box brands, and other online retail juggernauts, they'll need to learn how to conduct content marketing, lead generation, and contact nurturing as part of a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy. First, I will discuss some of the ways most online retailers are approaching email from the bottom of the funnel upward, and why this needs to be turned around. Then we can explore how to go about doing this within the framework of "Inbound Marketing" for eCommerce businesses. Lastly, popular marketing automation and email marketing solutions are discussed in the context of inbound marketing for eCommerce. Key differences between eCommerce and lead generation approaches to emailDifferent list growth strategiesEmail acquisition sources differ greatly between lead gen. sites and online stores. The biggest driver of email acquisition for most eCommerce businesses are their shoppers, especially when the business doesn't collect an email address for their contact database until the shopper provides it during the check-out process—possibly, not until the very end. With most B2B/B2C lead gen. websites, the entire purpose of every landing page is to get visitors to submit a contact form or pick up the phone. Often, the price tag for their products or services is much higher than those of an eCommerce site or involves recurring payments. In other words, what they're selling is more difficult to sell. People take longer to make those purchasing decisions. For this reason, leads—in the form of contact names and email addresses—are typically acquired and nurtured without having first become a customer. Contacts vs. leadsWhether it is a B2B or B2C website, lead gen. contacts (called leads) are thought of as potential customers (clients, subscribers, patients) who need to be nurtured to the point of becoming "sales qualified," meaning they'll eventually get a sales call or email that attempts to convert them into a customer. On the other hand, eCommerce contacts are often thought of primarily as existing customers to whom the marketing team can blast coupons and other offers by email. Retail sites typically don't capture leads at the top or middle of the funnel. Only once a shopper has checked out do they get added to the list. Historically, the buying cycle has been short enough that eCommerce sites could move many first-time visitors directly to customers in a single visit. But this has changed. Unless your brand is very strong—possibly a luxury brand or one with an offline retail presence—it is probably getting more difficult (i.e. expensive) to acquire new customers. At the same time, attrition rates are rising. Conversion optimization helps by converting more bottom of the funnel visitors. SEO helps drive more traffic into the site, but mostly for middle-of-funnel (category page) and bottom-of-funnel (product page) visitors who may not also be price/feature comparison shopping, or are unable to convert right away because of device or time limitations. Even savvy retailers publishing content for shoppers higher up in the funnel, such as buyer guides and reviews, aren't getting an email address and are missing a lot of opportunities because of it. Here's a thought. If your eCommerce site has a 10 percent conversion rate, you're doing pretty good by most standards. But what happened to the other 90 percent of those visitors? Will you have the opportunity to connect with them again? Even if you bump that up a few percentage points with retargeting, a lot of potential revenue has seeped out of your funnel without a trace. I don't mean to bash the eCommerce marketing community with generalizations. Most lead gen. sites aren't doing anything spectacular either, and a lot of opportunity is missed all around. There are many eCommerce brands doing great things marketing-wise. I'm a big fan of Crutchfield for their educational resources targeting early-funnel traffic, and Neman Tools, Saddleback Leather and Feltraiger for the stories they tell. Amazon is hard to beat when it comes to scalability, product suggestions and user-generated reviews. Sadly, most eCommerce sites (including many of the major household brands) still approach marketing in this way... The ol' bait n' switch: promising value and delivering spamEstablished eCommerce brands have gigantic mailing lists (compared with lead gen. counterparts), to whom they typically send out at least one email each week with "offers" like free shipping, $ off, buy-one-get-one, or % off their next purchase. The lists are minimally segmented, if at all. For example, there might be lists for repeat customers, best customers, unresponsive contacts, recent purchasers, shoppers with abandoned carts, purchases by category, etc. The missing points of segmentation include which campaign resulted in the initial contact (sometimes referred to as a cohort) and—most importantly—the persona and buying cycle stage that best applies to each contact. Online retailers often send frequent "blasts" to their entire list or to a few of the large segments mentioned above. Lack of segmentation means contacts aren't receiving emails based on their interests, problems, or buying cycle stage, but instead, are receiving what they perceive as "generic" emails. The result of these missing segments and the lack of overarching strategy looks something like this: My, What a Big LIST You Have! TIME reported in 2012 on stats from Responsys that the average online retailer sent out between five and six emails the week after Thanksgiving. Around the same time, the Wall Street Journal reported that the top 100 online retailers sent an average of 177 emails apiece to each of their contacts in 2011. Averaged out, that's somewhere between three and four emails each week that the contact is receiving from these retailers. The better to SPAM you with! A 2014 whitepaper from SimpleRelevance titled Email Fail: An In-Depth Evaluation of Top 20 Internet Retailer's Email Personalization Capabilities ( PDF) found that, while 70 percent of marketing executives believed personalization was of "utmost importance" to their business... "Only 17 percent of marketing leaders are going beyond basic transactional data to deliver personalized messages to consumers." Speaking of email overload, the same report found that some major online retailers sent ten or more emails per week! The result?All too often, the eCommerce business will carry around big, dead lists of contacts who don't even bother reading their emails anymore. They end up scrambling toward other channels to "drive more demand," but because the real problems were never addressed, this ends up increasing new customer acquisition costs. The cycle looks something like this:
It's like trying to fill your funnel with a bucket full of holes, some of them patched with band-aids. The real problems
So, what's the answer?Inbound marketing allows online retailers to stop competing with Amazon and other "price focused" competitors with leaky funnels, and to instead focus on:
Each of these areas will be covered in more detail below. First, let's take a quick step back and define what it is we're talking about here. Inbound marketing: a primerA lot of people think "inbound marketing" is just a way some SEO agencies are re-cloaking themselves to avoid negative associations with search engine optimization. Others think it's synonymous with "internet marketing." I think it goes more like this: Inbound marketing is to Internet marketing as SEO is to inbound marketing: One piece of a larger whole. There are many ways to define inbound marketing. A cursory review of definitions from several trusted sources reveals some fundamental similarities : Rand Fishkin "Inbound Marketing is the practice of earning traffic and attention for your business on the web rather than buying it or interrupting people to get it. Inbound channels include organic search, social media, community-building content, opt-in email, word of mouth, and many others. Inbound marketing is particularly powerful because it appeals to what people are looking for and what they want, rather than trying to get between them and what they're trying to do with advertising. Inbound's also powerful due to the flywheel-effect it creates. The more you invest in Inbound and the more success you have, the less effort required to earn additional benefit." Mike King "Inbound Marketing is a collection of marketing activities that leverage remarkable content to penetrate earned media channels such as Organic Search, Social Media, Email, News and the Blogosphere with the goal of engaging prospects when they are specifically interested in what the brand has to offer." This quote is from 2012, and is still just as accurate today. It's from an Inbound.org comment thread where you can also see many other takes on it from the likes of Ian Lurie, Jonathon Colman, and Larry Kim. Inflow "Inbound Marketing is a multi-channel, buyer-centric approach to online marketing that involves attracting, engaging, nurturing and converting potential customers from wherever they are in the buying cycle." From Inflow's Inbound Services page. Wikipedia "Inbound marketing refers to marketing activities that bring visitors in, rather than marketers having to go out to get prospects' attention. Inbound marketing earns the attention of customers, makes the company easy to be found, and draws customers to the website by producing interesting content." From Inbound Marketing - Wikipedia. Larry Kim"Inbound marketing" refers to marketing activities that bring leads and customers in when they're ready, rather than you having to go out and wave your arms to try to get people's attention." Via Marketing Land in 2013. You can also read more of Larry Kim's interpretation, along with many others, on Inbound.org. Hubspot "Instead of the old outbound marketing methods of buying ads, buying email lists, and praying for leads, inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and product, where they naturally want to be." Via Hubspot, a marketing automation platform for inbound marketing. When everyone has their own definition of something, it helps to think about what they have in common, as opposed to how they differ. In the case of inbound, this includes concepts such as:
Running your first eCommerce inbound marketing campaignAudience personas—priority no. 1The magic happens when retailers begin to hyper-segment their list based on buyer personas and other relevant information (i.e. what they've downloaded, what they've purchased, if they abandoned their cart...). This all starts with audience research to develop personas. If you need more information on persona development, try these resources:
Once personas are developed, retailers should choose one on which to focus. A complete campaign strategy should be developed around this persona, with the aim of providing the "right value" to them at the "right time" in their buyer's journey. Ready to get started?We've developed a quick-start guide in the form of a checklist for eCommerce marketers who want to get started with inbound marketing, which you can access below. Hands-on experience running one campaign will teach you more about inbound marketing than a dozen articles. My advice: Just do one. You will make mistakes. Learn from them and get better each time. Example inbound marketing campaignBelow is an example of how a hypothetical inbound marketing campaign might play out, assuming you have completed all of the steps in the checklist above. Imagine you handle marketing for an online retailer of high-end sporting goods. AT Hiker Tommy campaign: From awareness to purchaseWhen segmenting visitors and customers for a "high-end sporting goods / camping retailer" based on the East Coast, you identified a segment of "Trail Hikers." These are people with disposable income who care about high-quality gear, and will pay top dollar if they know it is tested and reliable. The top trail on their list of destinations is the Appalachian Trail (AT). Top of the Funnel: SEO & Strategic Content Marketing Tommy's first action is to do "top of the funnel" research from search engines (one reason why SEO is still so important to a complete inbound marketing strategy). A search for "Hiking the Appalachian Trail" turns up your article titled "What NOT to Pack When Hiking the Appalachian Trail," which lists common items that are bulky/heavy, and highlights slimmer, lighter alternatives from your online catalog. It also highlights the difference between cheap gear and the kind that won't let you down on your 2,181 mile journey through the wilderness of Appalachia, something you learned was important to Tommy when developing his persona. This allows you to get the company's value proposition of "tested, high-end, quality gear only" in front of readers very early in their buyer's journey—important if you want to differentiate your site from all of the retailers racing Amazon to the bottom of their profit margins. So far you have yet to make "contact" with AT Hiker Tommy. The key to "acquiring" a contact before the potential customer is ready to make a purchase is to provide something of value to that specific type of person (i.e. their persona) at that specific point in time (i.e. their buying cycle stage). In this case, we need to provide value to AT Hiker Tommy while he is getting started on his research about hiking the Appalachian Trail. He has an idea of what gear not to bring, as well as some lighter, higher-end options sold on your site. At this point, however, he is not ready to buy anything without researching the trail more. This is where retailers lose most of their potential customers. But not you. Not this time... Middle of the funnel: Content offers, personalization, social & email nurturing On the "What NOT to Pack When Hiking the Appalachian Trail" article (and probably several others), you have placed a call-to-action (CTA) in the form of a button that offers something like: Download our Free 122-page Guide to Hiking the Appalachian Trail This takes Tommy to a landing page showcasing some of the quotes from the book, and highlighting things like: "We interviewed over 50 'thru-hikers' who completed the AT and have curated and organized the best first-hand tips, along with our own significant research to develop a free eBook that should answer most of your questions about the trail." By entering their email address potential customers agree to allow you to send them the free PDF downloadable guide to hiking the AT, and other relevant information about hiking. An automated email is sent with a link to the downloadable PDF guide, and several other useful content links, such as "The AT Hiker's Guide to Gear for the Appalachian Trail"—content designed to move Tommy further toward the purchase of hiking gear. If Tommy still has not made a purchase within the next two weeks, another automated email is sent asking for feedback about the PDF guide (providing the link again), and to again provide the link to the "AT Hiker's Guide to Gear..." along with a compelling offer just for him, perhaps "Get 20% off your first hiking gear purchase, and a free wall map of the AT!" Having Tommy's email address also allows you to hyper-target him on social channels, while also leveraging his initial visit to initiate retargeting efforts. Bottom of the funnel: Email nurturing & strategic, segmented offersEventually Tommy makes a purchase, and he may or may not receive further emails related to this campaign, such as post-purchase emails for reviews, up-sells and cross-sells. Upon checkout, Tommy checked the box to opt-in to weekly promotional emails. He is now on multiple lists. Your marketing automation system will automatically update Tommy's status from "Contact" or lead, to "Customer" and potentially remove or deactivate him from the marketing automation system database. This is accomplished either by default integration features, or with the help of integration tools like Zapier and IFTTT. You have now nurtured Tommy from his initial research on Google all the way to his first purchase without ever having sent a spammy newsletter email full of irrelevant coupons and other offers. However, now that he is a loyal customer, Tommy finds value in these bottom-of-funnel email offers. And this is just the startEvery inbound marketing campaign will have its own mix of appropriate channels. This post has focused mostly on email because acquiring the initial permission to contact the person is what fuels most of the other features offered by marketing automation systems, including:
Three more things...
Current state of the inbound marketing industryInbound has, for the the most part, been applied to businesses in which the website objective is to generate leads for a sales team to follow-up with and close the deal. An examination of various marketing automation platforms—a key component of scalable inbound marketing programs—highlights this issue. Popular marketing automation systemsMost of the major marketing automation systems can be be used very effectively as the backbone of an inbound marketing program for eCommerce businesses. However, only one of them (Silverpop) has made significant efforts to court the eCommerce market with content and out-of-box features. The next closest thing is Hubspot, so let's start with those two: Silverpop - an IBMⓇ Company Unlike the other platforms below, right out of the box Silverpop allows marketers to tap into very specific behaviors, including the items purchased or left in the cart. You can easily segment based on metrics like the Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value (RFM) of purchases: You can automate personalized shopping cart abandonment recovery emails: You can integrate with many leading brands offering complementary services, including: couponing, CRM, analytics, email deliverability enhancement, social and most major eCommerce platforms. What you can't do with Silverpop is blog, find pricing info on their website, get a free trial on their website or have a modern-looking user experience. Sounds like an IBMⓇ company, doesn't it? HubSpot Out of all the marketing automation platforms on this list, HubSpot is the most capable of handling "inbound marketing" campaigns from start to finish. This should come as no surprise, given the phrase is credited to Brian Halligan, HubSpot's co-founder and CEO. While they don't specifically cater to eCommerce marketing needs with the same gusto they give to lead gen. marketing, HubSpot does have an eCommerce landing page and a demo landing page for eCommerce leads, which suggests that their own personas include eCommerce marketers. Additionally, there is some good content on their blog written specifically for eCommerce. HubSpot has allowed some key partners to develop plug-ins that integrate with leading eCommerce platforms. This approach works well with curation, and is not dissimilar to how Google handles Android or Apple handles their approved apps. The Magento Connector for HubSpot, which costs $80 per month, was developed by EYEMAGiNE, a creative design firm for eCommerce websites. A similar HubSpot-approved third-party integration is on the way for Bigcommerce. Another eCommerce integration for Hubspot is a Shopify plug-in called HubShoply, which was developed by Groove Commerce and costs $100 per month. You can also use HubSpot's native integration capabilities with Zapier to sync data between HubSpot and most major eCommerce SaaS vendors, including the ones above, as well as WooCommerce, Shopify, PayPal, Infusionsoft and more. However, the same could be said of some of the other marketing automation platforms, and using these third-party solutions can sometimes feel like fitting a square peg into a round hole. HubSpot can and does handle inbound marketing for eCommerce websites. All of the features are there, or easy enough to integrate. But let's put some pressure on them to up their eCommerce game even more. The least they can do is put an eCommerce link in the footer: Despite the lack of clear navigation to their eCommerce content, HubSpot seems to be paying more attention to the needs of eCommerce businesses than the rest of the platforms below. Marketo Nothing about Marketo's in-house marketing strategy suggests "Ecommerce Director Bob" might be one of their personas. The description for each of their marketing automation packages (from Spark to Enterprise) mentions that it is "for B2B" websites. Driving Sales could apply to a retail business so I clicked on the link. Nope. Clearly, this is for lead generation. Passing "purchase-ready leads" over to your "sales reps" is a good example of the type of language used throughout the site. Make no mistake, Marketo is a top-notch marketing automation platform. Powerful and clean, it's a shame they don't launch a full-scale eCommerce version of their core product. In the meantime, there's the Magento Integration for Marketo Plug-in developed by an agency out of Australia called Hoosh Marketing. I've never used this integration, but it's part of Marketo's LaunchPoint directory, which I imagine is vetted, and Hoosh seems like a reputable agency. Their pricing page is blurred and gated, which is annoying, but perhaps they'll come on here and tell everyone how much they charge. As with all others except Silverpop, the Marketo navigation provides no easy paths to landing pages that would appeal to "Ecommerce Director Bob." Pardot This option is a SalesForce product, so—though I've never had the opportunity to use it—I can imagine Pardot is heavy on B2B/Sales and very light on B2C marketing for retail sites. The hero image on their homepage says as much. Eloqua / OMC Eloqua, now part of the Oracle Marketing Cloud (OMC), has a landing page for the retail industry, on which they proclaim: "Retail marketers know that the path to lifelong loyalty and increased revenue goes through building and growing deep client relationships." Since when did retail marketers start calling customers clients? The Integration tab on OMC's "...Retail.html" page helpfully informs eCommerce marketers that their sales teams can continue using CRM systems like SalesForce and Microsoft Dynamics but doesn't mention anything about eCommerce platforms and other SaaS solutions for eCommerce businesses. OthersThere are many other players in this arena. Though I haven't used them yet, three I would love to try out are SharpSpring, Hatchbuck and Act-On. But none of them appear to be any better suited to handle the concerns of eCommerce websites. Where there's a gap, there's opportunityThe purpose of the section above wasn't to highlight deficiencies in the tools themselves, but to illustrate a gap in who they are being marketed to and developed for. So far, most of your eCommerce competitors probably aren't using tools like these because they are not marketed to by the platforms, and don't know how to apply the technology to online retail in a way that would justify the expense. The thing is, a tool is just a toolThe key concepts behind inbound marketing apply just as much to online retail as they do to lead generation. In order to "do inbound marketing," a marketing automation system isn't even strictly necessary (in theory). They just help make the activities scalable for most businesses. They also bring a lot of different marketing activities under one roof, which saves time and allows data to be moved and utilized between channels and systems. For example, what a customer is doing on social could influence the emails they receive, or content they see on your site. Here are some potential uses for most of the platforms above: Automated marketing uses
Content marketing uses
Reporting uses
Assuming you don't have the budget for a marketing automation system, but already have a good email marketing platform, you can still get started with inbound marketing. Eventually, however, you may want to graduate to a dedicated marketing automation solution to reap the full benefits. Email marketing platformsMost of the marketing automation systems claim to replace your email marketing platform, while many email marketing platforms claim to be marketing automation systems. Neither statement is completely accurate. Marketing automation systems, especially those created specifically for the type of "inbound" campaigns described above, provide a powerful suite of tools all in one place. On the other hand, dedicated email platforms tend to offer "email marketing" features that are better, and more robust, than those offered by marketing automation systems. Some of them are also considerably cheaper—such as MailChimp—but those are often light on even the email-specific features for eCommerce. A different type of campaignEmail "blasts" in the form of B.O.G.O., $10 off or free shipping offers can still be very successful in generating incremental revenue boosts — especially for existing customers and seasonal campaigns. The conversion rate on a 20% off coupon sent to existing customers, for instance, would likely pulverize the conversion rate of an email going out to middle-of-funnel contacts with a link to content (at least with how CR is currently being calculated by email platforms). Inbound marketing campaigns can also offer quick wins, but they tend to focus mostly on non-customers after the first segmentation campaign (a campaign for the purpose of segmenting your list, such as an incentivised survey). This means lower initial conversion rates, but long-term success with the growth of new customers. Here's a good bet if works with your budget: Rely on a marketing automation system for inbound marketing to drive new customer acquisition from initial visit to first purchase, while using a good email marketing platform to run your "promotional email" campaigns to existing customers. If you have to choose one or the other, I'd go with a robust marketing automation system. Some of the most popular email platforms used by eCommerce businesses, with a focus on how they handle various Inbound Marketing activities, include: Bronto This platform builds in features like abandoned cart recovery, advanced email list segmentation and automated email workflows that nurture contacts over time. They also offer a host of eCommerce-related features that you just don't get with marketing automation systems like Hubspot and Marketo. This includes easy integration with a variety of eCommerce platforms like ATG, Demandware, Magento, Miva Merchant, Mozu and MarketLive, not to mention apps for coupons, product recommendations, social shopping and more. Integration with enterprise eCommerce platforms is one reason why Bronto is seen over and over again when browsing the Internet Retailer Top 500 reports. On the other hand, Bronto—like the rest of these email platforms—doesn't have many of the features that assist with content marketing outside of emails. As an "inbound" marketing automation system, it is incomplete because it focuses almost solely on one channel: email. Vertical Response Another juggernaut in eCommerce email marketing platforms, Vertical Response, has even fewer inbound-related features than Bronto, though it is a good email platform with a free version that includes up to 1,000 contacts and 4,000 emails per month (i.e. 4 emails to a full list of 1,000). Oracle Marketing Cloud (OMC) Responsys (the email platform), like Eloqua (the marketing automation system) was gobbled up by Oracle and is now part of their "Marketing Cloud." It has been my experience that when a big technology firm like IBM or Oracle buys a great product, it isn't "great" for the users. Time will tell. Listrak Out of the established email platforms for eCommerce, Listrak may do the best job at positioning themselves as a full inbound marketing platform. Listrak's value proposition is that they're an "Omnichannel" solution. Everything is all in one "Single, Integrated Digital Marketing Platform for Retailers." The homepage image promises solutions for Email, Mobile, Social, Web and In-Store channels. I haven't had the opportunity to work with Listrak yet, but would love to hear feedback in the comments on whether they could handle the kind of persona-based content marketing and automated email nurturing campaigns described in the example campaign above. Key takeawaysCongratulations for making this far! Here are a few things I hope you'll take away from this post:
Tools, resources, and further readingThere is a lot of great content on the topic of Inbound marketing, some of which has greatly informed my own understanding and approach. Here are a few resources you may find useful as well.
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Again, no mention of eCommerce or retail, but clear navigation to lead gen and sales.
| How to Keep your Site Fast for Mobile-Friendly Posted on: Monday 13 April 2015 — 02:16 Posted by Zoompf Cindy Krum recently published a must-read primer on the upcoming Mobile-Friendly changes which I highly recommend checking out before proceeding. Got it? Good. With the mad rush to optimize mobile sites prior to April 21st, it can be very easy to sacrifice performance in the process. Lest we forget, Google has mentioned on multiple occasions that website performance is also a factor in search ranking, first in 2010 for desktop sites and again in 2013 for mobile sites. In this post I'm going to cover a few high-level best practices to keep in mind during your mobile site (re)design efforts. In addition, I suggest you also peruse Google's excellent documentation on mobile-friendly websites. Measuring your mobile site performanceThe first step to improving your mobile performance is to measure where you're starting. There are a number of excellent free and paid resources to do so, but two of my favorites are Google Chrome's built-in Developer Tools and WebPageTest. For the sake of simplicity, I'll be using Chrome Developer Tools in this article. Not a developer? Don't worry, using the Chrome tools are real easy:
You'll see a nifty screen with lots of juicy info. Most importantly, at the top there's a drop-down with many different mobile and tablet emulators. Pretty cool. Now, select a device of interest, say Apple iPhone 6. Enter your site address in the address bar, hit enter and voila! You're now seeing your site rendered as an iPhone 6 would see it. Scroll down to the bottom to see some interesting performance stats like total page load time, size of the page, and the total number of requests. Hit the "Network" tab for a particularly helpful waterfall diagram view, as shown below: Now let's get started... Optimize those images for mobileAccording to the HTTP Archive, images on average account for over 60% of your total page content. Pretty intuitive, images rule the web. Go ahead and check your own page with Chrome Developer Tools and you'll likely see similar numbers. When downloading over relatively slow mobile connections speeds, the impact of large images on your site performance can be even more severe. While it's always a best practice to optimize your site using lossless and lossy image optimization techniques, there's another consideration for mobile: Should you even be downloading that image to begin with? That big, beautiful 1600px wide "hero" image you use on your desktop site might be completely wasted on the smaller display of a phone or tablet, even if that tablet as a high resolution or "retina" screen. The solution? Consider loading a smaller image just for your mobile users. Be careful, though; there's a "right" and "wrong" way of doing this. Quick aside: for this example, and your mobile site in general, make sure you're specifying the viewport meta tag in the head section of your page. Basically, this tells the mobile browser you have a responsive mobile site, and not to try to auto-scale a large desktop site down to mobile resolution (ugly!). Additionally if this tag is not present, you will get different results in your Chrome tests below. The "wrong" wayResponsive design makes heavy use of CSS media queries to style your site differently at the smaller viewport sizes used by mobile devices, so an obvious approach to swap out your images might go something like this: This code displays one image when the screen resolution is wide, and a different/smaller image when the resolution is smaller. This looks just fine on the rendered page, but there's a big problem: both images get downloaded! To verify, load this sample in Chrome and you'll see something like this: Well that's not good; in fact that's even worse! You are wasting time and bandwidth downloading an image that won't even be shown! The right way Instead, consider using the Loading in Chrome tools, you'll now see this: Only the mobile image was loaded... much better! Of course, there is one caveat: to use Takeaway: Where possible, use the CSS media queries and the Consider ditching jQueryWhat? Did you read that correctly? jQuery is THE library of choice for writing JavaScript, how can you live without it? jQuery is indeed quite useful, but recall one if its original design goals was to provide a consistent interface that matches the W3C recommended API across wildly diverse browsers with different (and often broken) standards implementations. jQuery let's you avoid writing "if Internet Explorer do this, else do that" code. BUT, jQuery's unifying interface is much less necessary on mobile. Mobile is dominated by WebKit-derived browsers such as Safari or Chrome, so there are fewer issues to abstract away. And weighing in at a hefty 200 KB, jQuery is still a significant library to download, even with liberal use of caching. Even after you compress and minify jQuery, you are dealing with around 30KB. But wait, you say; you still want the simplified JavaScript interface jQuery provides? It is pretty nice - so consider Zeptojs instead. While not as fully featured as jQuery, it weighs in at a mere 5 KB in size compressed, roughly 6 times smaller! Since Zepto is largely API compatible with jQuery you shouldn't have to rewrite any code to use it. For most basic JavaScript sites, Zepto is more than sufficient. Takeaway: Minimize the third party libraries you include, and consider using Zeptojs as an alternative to jQuery if your JavaScript needs are basic. Review your caching settingsSmart web developers reduce the size of their resources to minimize page load times. Really smart web developers avoid the need to download those resources in the first place. This is where browser caching comes in. If your images, CSS, or JavaScript rarely change, consider caching them. This way your users only download the resource once, and the next time they hit your site the link is already sitting their on their local machine (or phone or tablet), just waiting to be used. Mobify has a nice primer on setting caching headers, and there are many great free tools that can test your caching settings including the super cool REDbot, WooRank, and our own Zoompf. If you're running an Apache or nginx webserver, consider enabling mod_pagespeed to simplify your caching configuration. If you have a WordPress site, the W3 Total Cache plugin is excellent. Takeaway: Caching is one of the most effective performance optimizations you can make, and matters more then ever for mobile sites. Review your caching policies and apply caching to your large, infrequently changing libraries and images. Love animated GIFs? Your browser doesn't!Animated GIFs have seen quite the resurgence of late, but the format is dated and showing its age. Dating back almost 30 years, animated GIFs are bloated and cumbersome to download, especially when your animated GIF is a short movie clip. Consider using HTML5 video instead of an animated film GIF. All modern browsers support it, and HTML5 videos are typically 10% or less the size of an equivalent animated GIF. Another option is Imgur. When you upload animated GIFs to Imgur, they will automatically convert the animation into a format they call GIFV. GIFV is essentially just an HTML5 video, but with a significantly optimized size. Imgur manages the hosting of your videos, and optionally serves the file up at GIFV or GIF depending on the capabilities of your users' browser (although most all modern browsers support HTML5 video). Takeaway: Try and avoid animated GIFs for movie clips or complex animations. Modern video protocols used by HTML5 video and GIFV offer significant performance boosts and reduced download times for your users. The future: HTTP/2The web is slowly evolving towards HTTP/2, and not a moment too soon. HTTP/1.1 is over 15 years old and showing signs of its age, especially when it comes to unreliable/intermittent connectivity in mobile devices. HTTP/2 already enjoys widespread browser and server support. While I wouldn't recommend rushing into an HTTP/2 adoption for the April 21st Mobile-Friendly change, future support for this protocol should definitely be on your roadmap. You can read more about HTTP/2 and its future impact on SEO and web performance in my earlier post. Takeaway: Plan to adopt HTTP/2 on your future roadmap, it's coming! In closingBuilding a responsive, mobile-friendly website is more than tweaking styles and tags to please the Google crawler. There are nuanced, mobile specific considerations that, if ignored, can significantly slow down your mobile site and kill your user experience. Fortunately there are numerous free tools to help you evaluate your mobile site performance, including WebPageTest, Chrome Developer Tools, Google PageSpeed Insights, and Zoompf's Free Report. And of course, make sure to test with Google's own mobile-friendly test tool. Now...go forth and start optimizing! Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! |
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