Author: Julie Campbell

Keynote Systems has watched this considerable improvement but believes that the retailer could do better.

Since the start of the year, J.C. Penney has seen a considerable upswing in the movement of its mcommerce website on the Keynote Mobile Commerce Performance Index, having added icing to the cake when it made its way into the top ten spot last week.

In the week ending on January 27, the retailer leapt upward by five places.

That week, Keynote ranked J.C. Penney in the tenth spot. This is a considerable improvement over its rank at 21st, which it held at the start of the month. It also helps to show the difference that the department store chain has made to its mcommerce site in order to improve its overall performance. It has been implementing a range of different improvements to the website in order to provide consumers with an improved overall experience and better its score on the index.

The company made significant improvements to its mcommerce site in two critical areas.

These areas were in its successful load time, and in the percentage of times that it was able to fully load successfully. In the most recent week that Keynote issued its ranks, it reported that the J.C. Penney mcommerce homepage was able to load successfully 99.5 percent of the time. The week before, its percentage of successful loads was 99.24.

Furthermore, the retailer was also able to shrink the amount of time that it took to be able to successfully and fully load the homepage. Last week’s average loading time was 9.25 seconds, which was measurably lower than its 9.31 seconds average from the week before that.

While this represents a tremendous improvement in the performance and rank at J.C. Penney’s mcommerce site, the Keynote Systems report did make a number of suggestions that would allow the retailer to jump its rank up to the top 5 positions. They said that the primary focus should be the speed at which the homepage was loading, as its other top ten sites all have a completed successful load speed average that is between 2 and 3 seconds less than the retailer’s most recent achievement.

The results of a recent study have just been released and indicate that retail banking is losing its enthusiasm.

A new Pitney Bowes study has shown that only just half of all retail banking marketers feel strongly that their social media marketing campaigns are successful.

One third of those in that industry feel that their campaigns aren’t effective at all.

These companies have also indicated that they will be adjusting their social media marketing budgets in order to reflect those belief. The study indicated that while the sector does intend to continue their efforts throughout this year, there has been a considerable loss of confidence in the positive effects that it will generate. This lack of certainty over its value to the business is shrinking the investments that are being made into this field.

Social media marketing will remain a focus for retail banks and credit unions despite the struggles.

Even as those organizations battle with their understanding of how important social media marketing can be to the financial industry, they intend to hang on, at least for this year. That said, the study has shown that the approach over that channel for 2013 will be a considerably more cautious one than it will be for other industries.

Kieran Kilmartin, from Pitney Bowes Software, expressed that one of the primary concerns voiced in the study, which was that “Well-intentioned marketers in retail banks could inadvertently turn customers off by irritating them with their social media behaviors.”

The independent study was conducted by Vanson Bourne, having been commissioned by Pitney Bowes Software. It looked specifically into social media marketing effectiveness and performed a comparison between its trends among the various marketing directors with the attitudes that customers hold toward the technique. Consumers surveyed were from the United States, Germany, Australia, France, and the United Kingdom.

The research also looked at seven different business sectors, in total. These included retail banking, insurance, the public sector, utilities, telecoms, and fast-moving consumer goods. It examined the perspectives and opinions that each of these areas held for social media marketing. Specifically in retail banking, the opinions are split down the middle in terms of their confidence in the impact it can have on the profitability of the organization.