I’ve been thinking a lot about mobile and its impact on b2b recently. There is a popular view that in a b2b setting the impact of mobile is relatively modest, with the exception of those people in very mobile jobs such as farmers perhaps. This is main reason why there have been very few examples of decent b2b apps beyond simple news sites. 

However, a key stat which emerged over the past week got me thinking. On Monday eConsultancy reported that 41% of email is now read on smart phones. Given the importance of email in the nurture programmes of all our key brands I got to wondering what happens to those emails that end up on our target customers’ smart phones. A reasonable hypothesis is not much. If the site to which the email is linking is not a mobile (or adaptively designed) site the experience is likely to be so poor my guess is the conversion rate is practically zero.

If we were to convert b2b sites to adaptive designs (and my guess is most are not) and then optimise the mobile landing pages for mobile conversion the effect could be dramatic. At the very least our conversion rate should nearly double (from the 41% of traffic currently not converting at all). But the story might be even better than that. Context matters. If I’m sitting at my desk busy with work you might argue that I would be less likely to click on a distracting link than when I’m checking emails on my phone during down-time on the train or in an airport.

Fortunately we now have some tools to help us test this all out.  Google AdWords have just launchedthe ability target ads specifically to different kinds of devices and at different times of days. And the analytics to help track this have been enhanced, too.

So, will we see a big jump in b2b conversion rates? I hope so.