Retailers are starting to master mobile marketing

A fully optimised experience across devices is the holy grail for ecommerce and retail marketers. Getting mobile right has often been the sticking point. Now marketers are starting to get their head around what good mobile marketing looks like and are beginning to implement it. Digital Doughnut surveyed over 100 retail executives and heads of ecommerce, asking them about their mobile strategy and the resources they had in place for managing it. At a time of massive disruption by mobile in both the in-store and online retail sectors, the findings make for interesting reading.

Mobile capabilities

Now it's 2016 retailers are finally starting to really get a handle on mobile. A few years ago departments were floundering around without a strategy, but now about a third or more consider themselves advanced, and the majority of the rest consider themselves to be 'getting there'. Only 10-20% consider themselves to be behind the…

Review and improve your UX on mobile using the Smart Insights  RACE Planning Framework

Should we be focusing our mobile marketing activities on the device, or the consumer? Allow me to rewind the clock, briefly, and explain why this matters: Back in 2004, when I got started in mobile, our expectations about a great mobile customer experience were blinkered by the capabilities of the handset. Nokia dominated the handset market, with 9 of the top 10 best selling handsets that year - some came with a colour display, most provided polyphonic ringtones, (very) basic games, and desktop tools.  But no camera, no Bluetooth. The ‘mobile internet’ was a tedious affair delivered on a smaller screen, accessed via an even smaller keypad, over patchy 3G coverage, using WAP (‘Wireless Application Protocol’, or ‘WAP is crap’ for short).  Hats off to the brands that tackled mobile then - usually focussing on…

New infographic shows key stats to bear in mind when building your digital marketing strategy

Now that mobile accounts for over half of all web traffic and the mobile web is beginning to mature, it's important that marketers fully understand the ramifications of the seismic shift in device use. This infographic gives a few quick and useful ideas for getting started. It's based around the idea that the key to success with mobile marketing is to be there, bit quick and be noticed.  These are certainly useful areas to base the basics of your strategy around, although there is obviously a lot more to mobile marketing that that! If you're currently looking at your mobile marketing strategy, then check out our newly updated 7 steps mobile marketing guide. Thanks to Katapult for publishing this infographic…

Showing the huge impact of mobile marketing across web, social, display and email

The rapid rise of smartphone and tablet adoption has affected almost every aspect of digital marketing. The impact ranges from the most recent Advanced Mobile Pages to Google's smartphone search results through to the lower conversion rates on smartphones, use of social media on mobile and ensuring that our emails are mobile-friendly. In our latest infographic with JBH Marketing, we've brought together all the most important changes in a single infographic to highlight the areas needing attention. The tipping point has now been passed, and large sites like Google and Facebook are now seeing a considerable majority of their traffic coming from mobile devices. …

New study shows how shoppers are using their Smartphones in store

We're all familiar with 'showrooming', where people visit a shop to compare products and then buy it online later, often at a cheaper price. Until a few years ago, buying online generally entailed going home, logging on and remembering exactly what is was you fancied buying back when you were in store. Easily done with big ticket items like laptops, fridges or bikes, but not so easy with products like clothes or food. Generally by the time you get home you've forgotten exactly what it was you were looking at. But the massive advance in mobile technology over the past few years means that now pretty much every consumer has a computer in their pocket capable of checking prices in seconds. No longer is there any need to remember what you were looking at for when you get home, the whole showrooming…

How mobile marketing can support bricks and mortar retail

Did you know that 1 in 3 online purchases during this year’s Black Friday were completed on a mobile device? Mobile is now considered a channel in its own right – which is great news for offline retail. That’s right, offline retail. Contrary to what you may think, mobile commerce does not spell the end of real world shopping, it can actually save it! Merchants who understand that a consumer’s dollars are green no matter where he or she buys, and are able to communicate with them as they constantly move across multiple touchpoints – will reap the rewards. Thanks to mobile, that movement can be glued together. Here’s how:

Targeting users based on their location

One of the major components of a perfect marriage between the physical and digital worlds…

Planning a mobile marketing strategy

'The year of mobile’ has been quoted many times over the past 5 or even 10 years as organisations tentatively decide if this will be the year to invest in their mobile proposition. A recent study by comScore suggests the dawn of mobile marketing becoming a mainstream channel is finally upon us with a recent report claiming that mobile usage (combining mobile web browsing and mobile apps) accounts for 60% of time spent consuming digital media compared to 40% via desktop. This suggests the importance of creating a mobile marketing strategy and in this post I will highlight some key components of this and case studies to illustrate where a mobile strategy has been implemented. The chart below enhances this significant change in media platform usage since May 2013 to June 2014, displaying a fundamental shift to mobile browsing: …

6 trends for future consumer mobile use

With the current rapid rise in mobile usage, it's interesting to see these predictions of the path of the mobile consumer into the future. This infographic from Vouchercloud identifies six streams shaping, changing use in mobile devices: 1. Cloud and Mobile Data: By 2018, 90% of mobile traffic will be from cloud applications including video/audio streaming, social networking, online gaming and online storage. 2. Mobile Commerce: M-Commerce is expected to grow over the next 4 years, as already 90% of consumers are using their smartphones for 'pre-shopping'. Did you know that more than 50% of Amazon shoppers bought their purchases online in the first quarter of this year! 3. Mobile in Retail: Retailers are focusing on interactive in-store experiences, in future, they will use more QR codes and NFC (Near Field Communication), for engagement and ease of payment with voucher and discount offers. 4. Mobile Visuals: Anticipated growth in mobile video as consumers…

Maximise Google to improve your mobile search

'Truly great search is all about turning intentions into actions, lightning fast. In the early days of Google, users would type in a query, we’d return ten blue links, and they’d move on happy', says Google in its AdWords blog. That’s not enough today’s mobile users. 50% of mobile interactions start with a search, and users want more from that search.  'When searching for great local restaurants, they want places to eat right there on the results page, not another click or two away. It’s the same with hotels, flight options, directions and shopping', the blog continues. Google, a self-proclaimed ‘mobile first’ company, has invested heavily in technology, slick marketing and an extensive suite of search tools to drive consumer demand and assist marketers in taking advantage of the opportunity to delivered personalised, time and location sensitive results. Google estimates that mobile search is growing 8 times faster…

We're fast approaching 2014, the year when mobile analyst Mary Meeker predicted that mobile Internet traffic would overtake desktop traffic. Her latest annual KPCB Internet trends report from May 2013 showed that we're not quite there yet, with mobile traffic up to 15 per cent of global internet traffic in May 2013 – up from 10 per cent in May 2012, and six per cent in May 2011.  This compilation of mobile marketing statistics to consider for your 2014 planning shows that in many consumer sectors, the importance of mobile marketing is obscured by this average figure. In this talk for Smart Insights I started by showing that 2013 was the year that many businesses started to prioritise integrating mobile marketing with other channels to the level it deserves. Retail week reported that 60% of retailers listed omni-channel as their top  business priority for 2013. Meanwhile Joseph Tripodi of Coca Cola…