How Mobile Commerce Impacts Industrial Instrumentation

More Users Are Researching & Shopping on Mobile Devices Than Ever

People are getting incredibly efficient with their phones. Interestingly enough, it’s not just how much content they consume, but what they actually do on their phone. Users can type 38 words per minute on their phone–only 25% slower than physical keyboards. Insider Intelligence also forecasts that mobile commerce will almost double its share of total retail sales by 2025. Industrial instrumentation is certainly not spared from these trends. In 2021, something significant happened for Instrumart: for the first time ever, the percentage of users coming to our website on a desktop device fell below 50%. In 2017, that number was above 70%. If you’re in sales or marketing, there is no hiding from the fact that more users are using their phones to travel through the sales funnel than ever before. This means that it has become less important to give people the information they need, and more important to give them the information when they need it.

Know Your Numbers

It’s a fool’s errand to create a website for your company and simply hope that customers will come knocking on your digital door. You have to understand user behavior for your website while also considering industry and global trends for website users. For example, by diving into our website analytics, we were able to arrive at two major conclusions: far more users are exploring our website on their mobile devices, and the audience of our website has gotten significantly younger.

Respond to the Trends

To follow these trends, our website was re-designed in late 2019 to simplify the user experience and also optimize for mobile performance. We wanted to meet our users where they were at while also tapping into global trends. The results have been quite substantial. By making it easier for users to find the products they need, we’ve increased the number of users who perform a search on our website by 70%. Similarly, by making the user experience simpler and easier to navigate, users are now spending less time on our product configurator on the way to making a purchase.

By making our website more accessible to a larger set of users, we’ve also noticed a significant increase in people who want to configure their industrial instrument on their phone or tablet. This is a significant trend for the industry. We sell over 150 brands of industrial instruments, and because of our 20+ applications engineers, we specialize in complex configurations of products. None of this changes how certain people purchase products, but it’s undeniable that potential customers are more likely to make more complex decisions on their phones.

Focus On What You Do Best

If there’s one industry-wide takeaway from these data points, it’s that there is a clear demand to make the purchasing process more accessible. This can mean re-working your website to be more mobile-friendly all the way through the sales funnel. It can also mean organizing your ad campaigns to be more mobile-friendly. Our Web and Marketing Teams are constantly finding ways to streamline the purchasing process. We take pride in our ability to adapt and make these changes, which is why the brands we work with trust us as one of their distributors.

This gets to the point of specialization. Many manufacturers are really good at developing and manufacturing complex industrial instruments, but struggle to develop an infrastructure to promote their products and address these industry trends. The distributor relationship is so important because it allows these manufacturers to get their products in front of the right buyers, at the right time, in the right way. If you are interested in learning more about the benefits of adding a distributor, we are happy to talk.

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