The mobile user experience has been ignored for too long. The latest data on mobile usage show that sales figures can suffer, if businesses don’t adapt site designs to accommodate smartphone and tablet users. Below are five key reasons you should work to improve the mobile user experience.

1. Buying is Shifting to Mobile

Ten percent of e-commerce consumer spending now takes place on mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets. What’s more, this percentage is growing more than twice as fast as traditional e-commerce, according to research by comScore. Retailers must offer a good mobile UX if they want to capture a slice of this growing market.

2. Customers Don’t Come Back After a Bad Mobile UX

If customers have a bad experience on a mobile site, they won’t come back. In a recent survey, 61 percent of users said that they are less likely to return to a mobile site after a poor experience. The longer businesses put off implementing adaptive design on a website, the greater the risk that users will have a bad experience and decide not to return.

3. Poor Mobile UX Can Affect SEO

Offering a poor experience to mobile customers could sabotage your SEO strategy. Search engines, such as Google, measure the bounce rate of your site — the number of visitors who take one look at your site and immediately hit the back button. If you have a high bounce rate, your site may appear lower in search engine results pages, which means that customers can’t find it as easily.

4. Mobile UX Affects Conversion Rates

A better user experience can lead to better conversion rates among mobile users. The e-retailer Beyond the Rack noticed that conversion rates among its smartphone shoppers were abysmally low at only 0.56 percent. The most likely reason for this low conversion rate was that customers had to zoom in and out and swipe around the desktop site to read content and view images of products. After adopting an adaptive design that uses HTML5 to display a mobile-friendly version of the site, when a user accesses it from a smartphone or tablet, the retailer saw its mobile sales quadruple. HTML5 is the modern form of HTML that allows some site elements to display differently depending on the type of device used to access the site. By using HTML5, web designers don’t have to think about designing for tablets vs phones vs desktops, as all users can be accommodated using the same adaptive design.

5. Mobile Email Design Could Improve Sales

Email marketing can be highly effective, when you market to customers who have already indicated an interest in what you have to offer by providing their email address. However, if you are sending out emails that don’t display properly on mobiles and tablets, then you are missing out on this important opportunity. Responsive email design ensures that emails display properly for mobile, tablet and desktop users, which can increase the number of email recipients clicking through to the site and making a purchase.You can’t afford to miss out on mobile-user customers by having a site that doesn’t meet the needs of mobile users. Contact your design agency to make sure that all the designs used on your site and in your email marketing.