Many retailers appear to be oblivious to the function e-commerce and specifically contextual advertising is set to perform Christmas spending this year, with 40% of physical sales digitally influenced and click-and-collect nearly doubling to #2.5bn, boosting earnings over the festive season to #42.2bn, according to new study by Deloitte.
If you are a retailer, this time of year indicates the start of a high-volume, high-stakes opportunity for your company and one where your clients will no doubt label you as’naughty or nice’ and you just have a few weeks left to take advantage of it for a different year.
Knowing the mobile user experience is very important for every marketer to increase their Christmas campaign’s effectiveness. Most consumers now have continuous connectivity – if this is by smart phone tablet computer or pc, and they are’always on, always connected’. At this moment now, 1.75 billion people in the world own a smartphone with the US having 173 million smartphone users, making up nearly 72% of the mobile market there (comScore).
Online shopping on phones has recently overtaken desktop computer for the first time – 52% of site visits are now made via a mobile, while 36% of UK online sales are now finished on a smartphone or tablet. 84 percent of multi-screen experiences involve smartphones, and most interactions start with them [IMRG Capgemini Quarterly Benchmarking Report].
It is crucial not to overlook how significant tablet computer users are also. 72% of tablet computer owners make purchases from their devices on a weekly basis [Google]. 52% of tablet computer users say they prefer to store using their tablet rather than their PC [Alexander Interactive] and tablet users spend 50 percent over PC users and are 3x more likely to buy than smartphone visitors [Adobe].
Brands will need to bear in mind that king. Context is gained through location, through proximity, through weather and during likes and dislikes. Context is a big data mobile play and can be the differentiator which makes mobile advertising the perfect medium for truly relevant messaging.
The world has changed; the Web of Everything and how your customer connects to it is your great macro-trend that’s augmenting and altering shopping patterns. Consumption has moved into one seamless experience, both physical and virtual. So getting your mobile strategy is becoming as vital as even having a site in the first place.
So what is in it for your customer? There are definitely data privacy challenges that have to be addressed when studying context aware promotion. Every detector in the client’s smartphone can offer info about what is going on in their world – from compasses providing management and altimeters establishing which floor of a building they are on.
Here are my hints for making contextual data work for you this Christmas
1. Offer location based store info when your email is started
A client’s local shop information should always be included in your email campaigns. However, the challenge for marketers is understanding where the client believes local – near home? Near their job? Somewhere else?
Instead of second guess that’s the most important, just direct your client to their nearest store when the email is opened, using GPS information as a benchmark when opened on a mobile device. If the email is opened onto a desktop, then use its IP address cross-referenced with previous store purchase data, which will help identify their closest shop.
2. Increase conversion rates by timing searching based email campaigns
Efforts triggered by browsing behavior can drive conversion speeds up to 10x greater than standard advertising campaigns. In-store, online or societal participation behavioural data may be used to automatically trigger a campaign send.
As the message is delivered when the client has revealed they are’in the marketplace’ to purchase, they can be gently pushed to convert without reverting to price based incentives. The optimal time to send a campaign , and indeed the channel through which it ought to be routed should be an integral part of the campaign planning and continuing optimization program.
3. Make mobile engagement easy
Dwell time to get an email could be as little as three minutes. On mobile devices especially, the key to ensuring the success of a campaign would be that the visual presentation of calls to action. These need to stick out on the page and be immediately recognisable when the page is rapidly scanned.
On mobile devices, display resolution and space can make it tricky to pick up on more subtle layouts. Make sure it is clear to the reader what the email is all about, why the email is related to the receiver and what they can do to discover more.
Companies who wish to attain cellular success need to think about how to deliver content to such clients. It is not good enough simply to adapt a desktop strategy to fit mobile users as they have differing requirements.
With 80% of smartphone users using their mobiles for shopping research and 80% of those doing their study in store, price transparency is critically essential for smartphone clients. Showrooming is rising as smartphone penetration increases. How can you reduce the number of store walkouts in the result of smartphone use?
4. Turn showroomers into webroomers
Webrooming will result in $1.8 trillion in sales by 2017, while e-commerce sales should reach $370 billion in 2017 – Webrooming is where retail’s future winners will predominate [Forrester Research]. According to a Harris poll in the US, 69 percent of individuals webroom while just 46% showroom.
A good example of a successful webrooming technique was revealed by Lowe’s home improvement stores in america, who used a Vine mobile campaign to encourage customers to create and post brief six-second video clips of the home improvement solutions. This is a perfect illustration of how a brand gives users useful and appropriate data in a mobile-friendly way and ultimately drives these cellular shoppers into a local store.
Webrooming is in a critical intersection of the digital and physical worlds. Showrooming may be a issue, but webrooming may be the alternative. Closing the online and offline in-store loop is currently possible, which is considerably more important for retailers to make sure their marketing success. ‘By placing mobile in the middle of the omni-channel strategy, retailers and brands will enable a new level of interaction, participation, loyalty and conversation. And revenue.’ [FitForCommerce]. Both the merchant and the customer will benefit from this marketing initiative. At every step, think of what your mobile customers need when they interact with your organization.
5. Beacon technology
Beacons, or iBeacons, are a significant new retail technology, being quickly adopted by merchants and businesses with a bricks-and-mortar presence. Utilizing Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), they empower location-based targeted mobile marketing options. Beacons combine the gap between offline and online advertising and also have a large part to play at the near future of retail. They allow you to send real time messages to clients’ smartphones when they are in a concrete environment. This offers context-aware advertising to get a cellular world – beacon technology informs a marketer if their client visits a store; it permits predictive recommendation technology which functions up-to-the-second content in the precise instant the client opens their email or visits their website; also provides insights that effortlessly generate a really personalised experience.
The future of shopping rests on some incontrovertible facts: social networking is here to stay, the typical consumer is mobile, increasingly local… and likely female. CMOs want the technologies that perfectly connects them with this growing demographic. An true mobile approach does this. With big data capabilities it’s now possible to collect, store, analyse and control an unprecedented quantity of information in fractional quantities of time. Match that with a pertinent and real-time messaging platform and company can attain true context aware marketing, wherever the customer could be.
