Tag: ibm

Holiday mobile commerce is exploding with spiking Black Friday digital sales

| December 2, 2013

Smartphones and tablets made up 37 percent of the traffic on shopping sites that day.

After a powerful push made over Thanksgiving, online spending and sales on Black Friday increased by 9 percent when compared to the same day last year, and 37 percent of that traffic came from holiday mobile commerce users.

The Benchmark real time reporting unit at IBM has released its data from that day.

The data covered 800 online retailers and took millions of different transactions into account. It examined the trends regarding online purchasing, including the holiday mobile commerce sales. When compared to 2012, all of the numbers were looking quite good, having increased over their previous figures. The average order value that was experienced on that date, for example, was $142.33. This was very promising for retailers who saw an average order value of $127.59 online on Thanksgiving, just a day before.

Holiday mobile commerce sales are playing an ever increasing role in those totals.

Holiday Mobile Commerce - Black Friday Digital Sales The shopping that has been occurring over smartphones and tablets has been steadily rising over the last year. This was made quite clear on Black Friday, when 37 percent of all online traffic came from these devices. When compared to the same date in 2012, this was an increase of a full percentage point. The sales that were made over these devices also remained strong, having represented 21 percent of all online sales.

Smartphones were much bigger players in online shopping than tablets, this year. They drove 24.5 percent of all of the traffic online, which was just a sliver over twice the contribution of tablets. Those latter gadgets drove 12.2 percent of the traffic. This makes it clear that at the moment smartphones are clearly the browsing device that people enjoy the most in the mobile sphere.

Equally, tablets owners made notably larger orders than smartphone owners. The average purchase made over a tablet came to $137.55. On the other hand, the average smartphone based holiday mobile commerce order came to $118.33. This indicates that shoppers will purchase more items or larger ticket items when they are working with a larger screen.

Mobile marketing to play an increasing role in strategies next year, says IBM

| November 27, 2013

Top execs are starting to increase the role of smartphones and tablets in their campaigns.

According to a survey that was conducted by IBM, which involved the participation of 600 senior managers, the majority of companies plan to boost their investments into mobile marketing over the next year to 18 months.

This research showed that chief marketing officers are becoming increasingly involved in the development of these strategies.

Leaders in mobile marketing strategy – which were defined as companies that have been able to create solid smartphone and tablet based strategies – have stated that mobility has “fundamentally changed how they do business.” Furthermore, the report from IBM went on to reveal that the majority of these leaders have been experiencing “measurable returns on mobile investments”.

Mobile marketing has changed the way in which execs are participating in company strategies.

Mobile Marketing - BusinessesFor instance, according to the research director for the IBM Institute for Business Value, Eric Lesser, in many enterprises, CIOs are still taking on an important role in the creation of mobile marketing strategies. However, among the leaders in the industry, there are additional people who are also involved in this process, which includes the chief marketing officer.

Lesser explained that “We heard about the importance of getting that voice of the customer into the hands of the engineer because of the importance of the customer experience in the mobile world.” He also pointed out that they have also been discovering “parallels between the mobile environment today and the early days of e-commerce in the late 1990s”. It was explained that in this mobile marketing, there was a considerable amount of activity and that a great deal of it was oriented toward the consumer, but that there was also a notable amount of internal fragmentation in companies.

He stated that various groups are now coming up with different applications, but that there isn’t a large amount of cross-organization coordination in terms of coming up with a coherent and solid mobile marketing strategy which not only takes what people are doing with consumers into account, but also how the channel itself “can be leveraged more effectively internally.”