Tag: emarketer

Digital commerce is gaining more attention than it ever has in the past. As more people begin to base their lives on mobile technology, they are finding ways to shop for and purchase products online using little more than their smartphone. E-commerce has long been a growing market, but the growing interest people are showing in mobile payments has lead to a boom in the digital world.

In the coming years, digital commerce may play a significantly bigger role in the retail market than it already does. Many retailers have already taken note of the importance of having an Internet presence, but relatively few have invested heavily in the e-commerce space. Retailers have long relied on traditional forms of engagement, seeing the digital world as a potential threat to their brick and mortar stores. In the coming years, these retailers may have to revise their outlook on the digital world if they want to keep engaging consumers effectively.

A recent report from eMarketer shows that mobile payments are playing a bigger role in the retail space. The report shows that, in the U.S. alone, mobile commerce revenue is expected to reach $118 billion by 2018. This growth is due to the growing number of people that are using smartphones throughout the country. An estimated 25% of the country’s adult population currently owns and uses a smartphone for mobile commerce.

In India, mobile shopping is becoming more popular. The country has become the fastest growing e-commerce market in the Asia Pacific region, according to a study from Gartner. Retailers are beginning to embrace the fact that they have to find ways to engage consumers in new ways or risk losing to their competition. As such, they have begun adopting mobile engagement strategies.

While digital commerce is growing in power, traditional commerce is still favored by most consumers. Many people are interested in the convenience that the digital space has to offer, but are not convinced that a smartphone can replace their credit or debit cards. This ideology may change in the future, especially as digital platforms become more robust and convenient.

Consumers are opting for a cross channel experience more than ever before while shopping in an average day.

Despite many different mobile marketing strategies and attempts at campaigns that will provide consumers with the ideal cross channel experience that will be able to reach them in a meaningful way that will encourage them to act on what they have seen.

The average consumer will easily hop from laptop to smartphone or tablet to a brick and mortar store for one purchase.

While mobile marketing companies know that this is the case, actually figuring out how to track any given consumer from one platform to the next has provided them with a highly challenging experience. This is among the reasons that many client side marketers have revealed that advertising and promoting over a string of different channels is among their lead priorities as of May 2014, when a study was conducted by Econsultancy in association with Oracle Marketing Cloud.

Over two thirds of the respondents said that cross channel and mobile marketing are a primary goal.

However, just because they have been taking aim at more than one platform, it doesn’t mean that they are necessarily seeing the results of their efforts. For instance, eMarketer recently stated in a report about the study that “43 percent said that they could understand their consumers’ journeys and change their marketing mix as a result, while 30 percent had implemented teams to work on integrated marketing.”

Moreover, that firm also explained that under twenty percent of the participants in the study were capable of actually measuring the financial results of having made cross channel efforts. This is problematic when taking into consideration the importance of the outcomes of online and mobile marketing, among other efforts. Moreover, these same respondents also said that they were even less able to be able to measure their customer retention rate as a result of advertising over a range of different channels.

Possibly more striking was that a mere 7 percent of the participants felt that their companies were actually ready to successfully take part in cross-channel advertising. On the whole, 62 percent of the respondents felt that their efforts were not aligned across each channel. Only 10 percent felt that their strategies that included several channels – such as radio, television, print, online, and mobile marketing – aligned from one touchpoint to the next.