Win­ning mobile moments is essen­tial for brands and busi­ness­es. You must be wher­ev­er con­sumers are, but you also must meet their expec­ta­tions and pro­vide a great mobile expe­ri­ence. Is a bad mobile expe­ri­ence cost­ing you con­ver­sions and sales right now?

More con­sumers own mobile phones than tooth­brush­es. Yet, mar­keters “suck at con­vert­ing mobile vis­i­tors,” accord­ing to Mar­got da Cun­ha, con­tent mar­ket­ing spe­cial­ist at Word­Stream, a SaaS search mar­ket­ing plat­form. So what do brands and busi­ness­es need to know to make it as easy as pos­si­ble for con­sumers to con­vert, regard­less of device?

Dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing experts recent­ly dove deep at SMX Advanced to pro­vide prac­ti­cal advice on how to boost mobile con­ver­sion rates. Here are their 10 best tips.

1. Streamline Task Completion

Brands should ask for the least amount of nec­es­sary infor­ma­tion when try­ing to con­vince con­sumers to sign up for newslet­ters on mobile devices, accord­ing to Lisa Williams, pres­i­dent of Sus­tain­able Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing. That means request­ing, say, a consumer’s birth­day, as Adi­das does, is per­haps super­flu­ous at that par­tic­u­lar point in time.

“Keep it con­cise, fast, quick,” Williams said. “Get peo­ple to com­plete it and move on.”

A good exam­ple is 1–800 Con­tacts, which allows con­sumers to sub­mit pre­scrip­tions with pho­tos, she said.

“Any­thing you can do to short­en time of con­ver­sion is big,” da Cun­ha said.

2. Enable Cross-Device Flow

Per Williams, by 2017, the aver­age con­sumer will have sev­en devices, and, per Phoebe Han­ley, direc­tor of ad man­age­ment at social ad com­pa­ny Social­Code, 32 per­cent of desk­top con­ver­sions start with mobile search.

And that means brands should make it easy for con­sumers to use mul­ti­ple devices along the path to pur­chase. That includes pop­u­lat­ing infor­ma­tion from a recent search on oth­er devices so they don’t have to start their search­es all over again when using a dif­fer­ent device.

Williams points to research­ing a Dyson vac­u­um on her phone and then find­ing the same vac­u­um on the Bed, Bath & Beyond web­site on anoth­er device when she returned lat­er.

“You want there to be a flow,” Williams said. “Bed, Bath & Beyond did a great job of show­ing me the exact Dyson mod­el I was look­ing at it so I didn’t have to work so hard.”

3. A Conversion Is A Conversion

In oth­er words, desk­top con­ver­sions are OK, too.

Han­ley notes there are cer­tain occa­sions when con­sumers sim­ply feel more com­fort­able con­vert­ing on a desk­top, such as when they are look­ing for an insur­ance quote and need to pro­vide a lot of per­son­al infor­ma­tion. Mar­keters should take that into con­sid­er­a­tion.

4. Don’t Forget Location

Williams also not­ed search queries for “near me” are increas­ing. Mar­keters should keep phys­i­cal loca­tion in mind and cater to loca­tion-based queries to best cap­ture con­sumer inter­est and intent.

5. Perform User Testing

Again, while she notes it is “awe­some” for brands to ask con­sumers how they are doing, there is a time and place for user test­ing, Williams said. For exam­ple, a pop-up from Best Buy ask­ing mobile con­sumers for feed­back before they have done any­thing at all on the mobile site is ill-timed.

6. Send Reminders

Design­er dress rental ser­vice Rent the Run­way, for exam­ple, will send users reminders about poten­tial pur­chas­es when they add dates to a cal­en­dar about upcom­ing events. That makes it easy for con­sumers to remem­ber a spe­cial occa­sion is approach­ing and to poten­tial­ly com­plete the pur­chase.

7. Speak To On-The-Go Searchers With A Short Attention Span

“It’s all about micro-moments,” da Cun­ha said. “[Mobile searchers’] atten­tion is eas­i­ly dis­tract­ed. They are search­ing while doing oth­er things and a mobile strat­e­gy needs to keep this in mind.”

In addi­tion, she said Google is improv­ing its mobile user expe­ri­ence so searchers can do more faster through search results pages pre­cise­ly because they are so eas­i­ly dis­tract­ed. This includes evolv­ing ver­ti­cal mobile ad for­mats for sev­er­al indus­tries, such as auto­mo­tive and trav­el.

“The new mobile ad for­mats cap­ture micro-moments,” da Cun­ha said. “The old for­mat was a plain text ad that was not that excit­ing, but now for the auto­mo­tive [indus­try], you have carousel ads to swipe through to see new [car] mod­els.”

Per Han­ley, beau­ti­ful new ad units like this, which some­times even include video, allow mar­keters to tell bet­ter sto­ries and pro­vide “lim­it­less cre­ative options.”

In the mean­time, brands in oth­er indus­tries can work to make sure their ads are mobile-pre­ferred because they will see high­er CTRs and con­ver­sion rates.

“Mobile con­ver­sion rates suck,” da Cun­ha said. “You want to try out new mobile ad for­mats and add ad exten­sions.”

In addi­tion, da Cun­ha said mar­keters should strive to be the first to try out new mobile ad for­mats, which can set them apart and grab con­ver­sions from com­peti­tors.

8. Don’t Necessarily Target Mobile Keywords

Per da Cun­ha, 15 per­cent of Google search­es are unique and have nev­er been searched for before. In fact, she goes as far as say­ing mobile key­words are actu­al­ly dying and mar­keters should instead try out dynam­ic search ads.

“Tar­get­ing key­words is on its way out,” she said. “PPC is becom­ing more auto­mat­ed.”

Fur­ther, she adds, “Chas­ing key­words on mobile is a fool’s game.”

9. Include Mobile In The Lead Generation Process

If a brand has a real­ly bad mobile expe­ri­ence, it may not get cer­tain cus­tomers – like mil­len­ni­als – back, Williams said.

10. Test, Learn, Scale

“Mobile is the Wild West,” Han­ley said. “You kind of want to be first peo­ple there. The return will be huge if you’re the first per­son.”

In addi­tion, per Williams, sim­ply being the first com­pa­ny that comes to mind when try­ing to solve a prob­lem may, in the end, be the best way to con­vert, regard­less of device.

What are some ways you’ve suc­cess­ful­ly boost­ed your mobile con­ver­sion rates?