“Have you tried breastfeeding a baby and using a laptop at the same time?”
A couple of years ago, this off-the-cuff remark from a new mum in a focus group vividly brought to life how becoming a parent changes everything, including mundane 21st Century chores like checking emails. However, in just two years, this insight has become almost irrelevant.
Only last month Kantar Worldpanel found that more than 50% of its UK panel owned a smartphone. Studies from the USA regularly report that new moms are even more likely to own smartphones than the rest of the population. In 2011 Babycenter found that more than half of ‘smartphone moms’ specifically upgraded to a new device because they were about to become a parent.
Mums are mobile, because they have to be. When mums look back at the early days after their baby’s birth they often describe “the zombie weeks” in only hazy detail. Daily routines go out of the window. Increasingly, the constant within all this is mum’s mobile. It announces the birth: photos from the maternity suite are posted on Facebook and Twitter or sent to pre-arranged contact lists. It’s her lifeline to the outside world during long midnight feeds. It helps her get advice and reassurance for the multitude of little worries and concerns that crop up every day as she learns how to be a parent and to trust her own intuition, and it’s even easy to use while she’s breastfeeding!
The Real Adventure is proud to have worked with the Cow & Gate and Aptamil brands for many years. During last year mums were increasingly using their mobiles to visit these websites, with traffic rising sharply every month. The share of visits from mobiles was several times higher than for FMCG branded sites.
It was clear that the Aptamil website needed to give mums as good an experience on their mobile as on a desktop. We redesigned and simplified templates, developed a more intuitive navigation based on the most popular content sections, and promoted Aptamil’s 24/7 free careline advice services for mums more strongly. We made use of Wapple‘s technology to deliver these designs in real-time to every handset.
Since we launched the site, the results have surprised even us! Search traffic from mobile devices has doubled in the 4 months since the fully mobilised site went live, and more than 35% of visits to aptamil.co.uk are now from a mobile. Page views of the Careline Livechat page have increased five-fold.
Aptamil mobile visits
If the growth rates continue, the majority of Aptamil’s visits will be from a mobile by late summer, and will have doubled in just 9 months after we mobilised the site.
Mobilising aptamil.co.uk has enabled the brand to reach more mums as they use their mobiles to search for information and support. It delivers a better experience to mobile visitors, with clear design, intuitive navigation and easy access to both content and the expertise of the careline team.
Two years ago most mums couldn’t easily check emails while feeding their baby, and the marketing industry was proudly labelling mobile as “the third screen”. But as smartphone ownership drives past 50%, mobile is fast becoming the First Screen, and mums are at the front of this dynamic. All brands need to understand how their consumers want to engage with them, and deliver them the right experience in the right channels.
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