Are you considering moving your online community to a responsive design? Google reports that more searches take place on mobile devices than on computers now, and Mary Meeker indicates in her Mobile Internet Trends report that people spend more time per day on their mobile device than they do on desktop/laptops or any other device. Our smartphones and tablets are where we turn first to go online, check out a brand, shop and find answers to our questions. With increasing mobile device usage, we therefore expect to interact with brands across all of our electronic devices and have a consistent experience. How often have you typed in a URL on your smartphone or tablet only to have the desktop version of the site come up with that teeny tiny font and content that is nearly impossible to navigate? Did you stay? No, we didn’t either.
Which brings us to your online community. This is a place where you want people highly engaged, you want them contributing, you want them to have an exceptional customer experience that they will get across every touchpoint with your brand. If they try to access your community on a mobile device and your desktop version comes up, or the mobile version feels static or cumbersome to interact with, guess what? You are going to lose people. We don’t want that to happen either.
Google is a great example of a brand acting fast as they were one of the first to adapt the new Lithium Responsive feature. Loree Draude, Head of Communities and Social Engagement, Global Customer Experience at Google said, “The goal of our new Google Advertiser community is to help customers better understand and utilize our growing list of new product features. To do this, we have created a fantastic new user experience in our Lithium Community – revamping the overall look and feel (particularly for mobile) using Lithium’s responsive design, and bringing in valuable content from various sources that is easily discoverable.”
If you’re still not convinced of the advantages, here are five reasons to go responsive:
- Consistent brand and user experience across all devices. This is, by far, the number one reason, because customers simply expect consistency and they are more device-agnostic than ever – meaning they no longer differentiate what they can do by device, but expect to be able to do the same tasks on all devices. Mobile has become a way of life and is therefore table-stakes.
- Better Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and simplified analytics. Google favors responsive design and penalizes content that is replicated across versions. A responsive design makes your content easier to find and enhances the SEO power that Lithium already incorporates in our design. It’s also easier to track analytics on responsive, as you no longer have to track various sites separately enabling simpler monitoring and analysis.
- More engaged visitors. With people more likely to interact with your community on mobile, a responsive design makes engaging easier, it also allows people to interact with you wherever they are, meaning they can be in-store and search for info on your community and get the answer they need. Wherever they are in the moment, they can engage in your community.
- Lower total cost of ownership, as you no longer have to design, develop and maintain multiple community sites for different devices. In the long term, responsive will save you money, time and resources not only in technology investment, but in the maintenance and upkeep of different sites as it reduces redundancy.
- Increased vibrancy as visitors find it easier to participate. Let’s face it, if it’s easy to access, view and participate in, people will not hesitate to participate in your community via their mobile devices. The easier it is to participate, the more engagement you receive and therefore the more vibrant your community is. Higher NPS scores will result.
Lithium offers a Responsive design of our community platform which will enable you to provide a seamless customer experience across all devices with a flexible layout that automatically adjusts to the optimized viewing and navigational experience best suited for the device.
If you are an existing Lithium customer interested in learning more about Responsive, contact your Customer Success Manager.
Related Blogs
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