As more ecommerce store owners and brick-and-mortar retailers rush to create mobile commerce versions of their ecommerce sites, mobile-friendly content is also becoming more important. While many of the same criteria for web and ecommerce copywriting also apply for mcommerce, there are a few differences that ecommerce store owners, web developers, and anyone responsible for crafting mobile site copy should keep in mind.
Keep It Simple
This advice is commonly given out to writers in general, since succinct copy is better than wordy, rambling prose that takes forever to get to the point. Internet users have short attention plans, aren’t expecting to have to read novels when they look for information online, and are often distracted by chat windows and other websites while browsing ecommerce sites.
Since mobile browsing is often a secondary activity, mobile users are even more distracted for these same reasons. Mobile browsing is often done while waiting for a bus, standing in line at a coffee shop, or waiting for a friend to show up at a restaurant, which means that mobile shoppers are usually looking for quick and easy product information.
Bottom Line: Be short, succinct, to the point, and save the long-winded verbiage for other mediums. Too much information can lead to confusion. so make it easy for your customers to navigate your mcommerce site and find what they are looking for.
Too much information can make navigation difficult
Get Their Attention
Think about Twitter updates that you’ve seen and Tweets that you’ve written. Specifically, think of the headlines that you’ve used. 140 characters forces us to write headlines that grab the reader’s attention. When I started using Twitter for business purposes, I learned fairly quickly to leave my summaries out of my Tweet headlines.
So instead of this:
Aura Talbott’s New Blog Post Focuses On Mobile Commerce Copywriting And How To Make It Work
I’d use this:
Mobile Commerce Copywriting Essentials
and then include a byline (by Aura Talbott in my case) underneath. Of course, if you are writing a headline about a new product or a storewide sale, you won’t need this byline, but the same rules about attention-grabbing still apply.
Bottom Line: Include the most relevant information in your headlines, and leave the rest to the body of the copy.
Smartphone screens are small. Your copy needs to fit in order to be effective.
Size Matters
If you compare a mobile site to an ecommerce site, you’ll notice that in some cases, the content on the mobile version doesn’t’ seem to fit as well on the screen as the content on the ecommerce version. This happens when the people responsible for writing the content and developing the look and feel for a mobile site don’t take time to account for the fact that smartphone screens are well, smaller, than the average desktop or laptop screen.
Choose your images and text blocks carefully, and eliminate any non-essential graphics, images, or blocks of text from the mobile version of your site. Again, simplicity is the key, and mobile consumers are looking for fast access to information.
Bottom Line: Work with your developer to make sure that your site is optimized for mobile.
If you have a mobile site, and/or have some great mobile commerce copywriting tips to share, leave a comment and let us know. We’ll be posting up more mobile commerce-related blogs in the future, especially if we get a lot of requests for them.
Miva