GoMo: Ryland Homes’ mobile-friendly site helps drive home sales and achieves more cost-effective conversions

As we continue to help businesses make their sites more mobile-friendly with the GoMo initiative, we’ll be illustrating the impact of mobile site best practices by spotlighting how a range of companies have created great mobile experiences for their users. Today, we look at the mobile success strategies of Ryland Homes.

One of America’s top five production new-home builders, Ryland Homes relies heavily on web-based sales and marketing efforts to sell directly to home-buyers. With a steady increase in mobile traffic to the Ryland desktop site, the company recognized it needed a mobile strategy to support its growing base of on-the-go prospects. “Our customers are out there moving around with their mobile phones, and they need to find things very quickly,” says Diane Morrison, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Ryland Homes, who drove the company’s mobile site initiative.

Ryland Homes used the following GoMo mobile site best practices to bring its mobile site to life:  
                                

Keep it Quick

Content was prioritized for mobile, with the most in-demand content included for fast access, from maps and photos to model details and quick move-in homes.

Simplify Navigation

The team employed intuitive site navigation features such as a persistent “Back”  and “Home” buttons, consistent colors and buttons, and a vertical-scrolling design.

Be Thumb-friendly

Ryland’s mobile site uses buttons instead of links. “It’s better than trying to get your finger to hit the little spot where the underlined text is,” notes Jason Grovert, The Ryland Group’s Chief Technology Officer.

Make it Accessible

Ryland uses jQuery Mobile software and responsive web design to load the site variation that works best with each user’s smartphone or tablet.  “There are different needs, and different ways that users interact with the mobile site that we had to design for and adapt to,” Grovert explains.

Make it Easy to Convert

The mobile site increases conversions with clickable phone numbers, location-based driving directions to communities, and brief information request forms.

Make it Local

The development team took advantage of uniquely mobile functionality such as device location detection to direct users to nearby Ryland communities.

Use Mobile Site Redirects

The Ryland Homes site intelligently detects which device type a user is visiting from and serves up the appropriate desktop or mobile optimized website. By adding a “View full site” link to the bottom of all pages of the mobile site, Ryland provides mobile users the option to always access the full version of their website.

Listen, Learn and Iterate

Ryland continues to iterate and improve on the current site (which launched in March 2011), and is planning additional features such as tell-a-friend and model floor-plans. The team also produced an iPhone app, but Grovert says, their strategy was “web first, not app first,” because of the mobile web’s wider device coverage.

The Ryland team also uses locally targeted, mobile-only Google AdWords campaigns to drive site traffic, not only spurring leads and conversions, but also saving the company approximately 30 percent per-conversion compared to the cost-per-conversion for desktop web-targeted AdWords campaigns.

Ryland’s mobile site has built on its success from day one, with traffic up an impressive 300 percent by August from its March launch. In July, Ryland Homes also logged its first home sale that began with a mobile lead. That milestone, along with steadily increasing site traffic, Morrison says, are “early-on proof that the mobile site is really working for us.”

Download the full PDF version of the Ryland Homes case study. To learn more about how to make your website mobile-friendly, register for our webinar “Making Mobile-Friendly Websites: Best Practices in Action,” which will take place on November 10 at 11 am PST/ 2 pm EST.  And visit HowToGoMo.com to get more resources and tools to Go Mobile!

Posted by Dai Pham, Google Mobile Ads Marketing

GoMo: Ryland Homes’ mobile-friendly site helps drive home sales and achieves more cost-effective conversions
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