Marketers are honing their strategies in order to time their ads to appeal to females with smartphones.
In the United States, approximately 85 percent of all shopping decisions are made by women, according to a tremendous amount of recent research, and this is making them a highly desired target for many mobile marketing campaigns.
According to many marketers, the key is to attract and influence them while they are in retail stores.
An in-store marketing provider called Swirl has released its own recommendations regarding the way in which retailers can become more appealing to female consumers as they shop, and how they can influence what they buy. One of the reasons that the strategy is seen as highly important in-store as opposed to before they even head out is that women like to be able to see and touch the products that they are thinking about buying, and they like the social experience of heading out to purchase products while they are with their friends and family.
Though this is not entirely new, the difference is that they have their smartphones with them and can be reached with mobile marketing.
This has made smartphones an extremely important device when it comes to making decisions about what to buy. Retailers are now starting to see this opportunity to communicate and interact with female shoppers to help to encourage them to buy their products through various forms of encouragement.
A study conducted involving 1,000 women shoppers determined that 76 percent had a preference for shopping for clothing and apparel while in-store – as opposed to buying online – and that only 22 percent favored buying this type of product online, and only 2 percent preferred to shop over smartphones or tablets.
That said, what mobile marketing experts have realized is that while women may not be making their actual purchase over smartphones and tablets, they are using those devices to inform themselves about what they are thinking about buying, as well as to find better prices and savings opportunities such as discount coupons. A survey recently commissioned by Google showed that more than 66 percent of smartphone owners use their devices to assist them with shopping while they are in a brick and mortar store.
The comScore technology news report indicated that there continues to be impressive growth of the smartphone audience in the United States. In fact, at the time of the study, there were an estimated 141 million people in the country who owned smartphones. This represented a mobile market penetration in the country of an astounding 59 percent.