With over 6 billion cell phone subscriptions worldwide and 1.2 billion active mobile-broadband subscriptions worldwide, if your business is not mobile-friendly, you are most likely missing out on a large number of potential customers and revenue.

No matter what your business model is, you need to at least have a mobile-site, if not a sales page. It doesn’t matter if you are selling hair gel or jet airplanes. According to StatCounter, global internet usage on mobile devices accounts for around 8.5% of all page views on websites. Smartphones, tablets, and e-readers are changing the way people spend their leisure time. Instead of using their laptop, they’ll browse for news, check the weather, and even shop for their favorite products. Besides these statistics, why else should you go mobile with your business?

Mobile Madness

Reports from comScore show that smartphones are being used by almost 42 percent of mobile users in the United States. With smartphone prices dropping each day, can you imagine what that number will look like next year?

It is also interesting to note that around 20 percent of users scanned products’ bar codes using an app on their smartphone, while 13 percent used their smartphones to compare prices in the store with those on the internet.

Mobile shopping is expected to explode in the next three years, with some estimates that it will exceed more than $115 billion dollars in purchases globally. Did you know that on Black Friday 2011, one of every ten purchases was completed using a smartphone?

The Pros of Going Mobile with Your Business

• Consumers are likely to use their phones to research products when they are physically searching for products. They are away from their PC and looking to buy. Don’t you want to be the site they’re visiting?
• Consumers’ usage of smartphones for product search is exploding and in the future, they will be less likely to use their desktop computer when they have a smaller version in their pocket.
• New trends in smartphone use draw in customers. Many businesses use QR codes that their phones can scan. Think of QR codes like a custom bar code that only smart phones can read. When a user sees one, they can scan it with their phone and will be taken to your website.
• Consumers use smartphones to kill time and as market research has shown year after year, spending money is a great time killer. Buying things generates a rush of endorphins to consumers’ brains.

The Cons of Going Mobile with Your Business

• You will need to invest in a “mobile site”; few sites lend themselves perfectly to the mobile browser experience. A site (or more specifically a page, or set of pages) will need to be designed specifically for mobile browsers to avoid a poor customer experience.
• If your website is not a sales page and is more of an interface that a customer interacts with, it may take longer to develop and could cost you a decent amount of money

Should You Go Mobile with Your Existing Business?

Your customer pool will determine how much of a mobile presence you should have. Online retailers need to have a much different level of mobile site than does a restaurant. Before deciding whether or not you want to build a mobile brand for your business, you need to look at a few factors. First off, do you have a website? If you do, can your customers benefit by using a mobile version of your site? Do your target demographics or customers that use smartphones on a daily basis?

The Cost of Going Mobile

When deciding to go mobile with your existing business, it can either be a painful process or something extremely simple. Mobile website builders exist online where you can create a site yourself in seconds. However, if you have something much more complicated, such as a large product catalog, it is best to hire a mobile web developer.

Mobile internet usage will continue to grow well into the future. If you want access to these targeted demographics for your business, you can’t go wrong with a mobile website.

Written by Jennifer May for cleanyournamefast.com, whose site is designed to serve customers even if they’re on the move. Customers seeking misdemeanor expungement California need the ability to access the sites services regardless of their proximity to wireline hookup.