Author: Lucy

Mobile marketing in apps may provide an exceptional ROI in 2013

| December 24, 2012

mobile marketing appsAdvertising within these applications will be important to generating wealth next year.

While recent research continues its highlighting of the degree to which consumers say that they dislike mobile marketing, the figures regarding the channel’s performance are strongly suggesting the opposite.

Analyses of campaigns for smartphones and tablets alike are showing that they are highly effective.

Despite the fact that consumers don’t like the pesky ads that are appearing within their applications, the data is still showing that they are engaged by this mobile marketing and that it is encouraging them to spend money. Occasionally, this even means large purchases, and they’re doing it over their smartphones and tablets.

A rising number of analysts are releasing their figures that are demonstrating this same mobile marketing trend.

According to these statistics, it looks as though standard, smartphone, and tablet commerce could all stand to greatly benefit from an explosion of mobile marketing within applications. Though this had already been suspected by the completion of the third quarter of the year, it has been far more solidified from the results of the holiday season so far.

Shoppers over the last couple of weeks have made this the most successful time for mobile marketing in the history of online purchasing. The “biggest mobile shopping day” on record for eBay occurred on December 9. The volume from smartphones and tablets skyrocketed by 133 percent over the largest purchasing day in 2011.

Moreover, it is also being suggested that the impact of mobile marketing isn’t simply limited to the purchases that are measured due to the fact that they are made directly through the smartphone or tablet on which the ad has been viewed. Steve Yankovich, the vice president of mobile at eBay, suggested that one third of all of the transactions that the company receives have been “touched” by mobile, regardless of what device has been used for making the final purchase.

This means that the eventual purchases that are made by users are highly influenced by mobile marketing and what they see on the gadgets that display the ads. It also suggests that the channel will become far more central to the efforts and campaigns that are implemented in 2013.

Mobile payments from iZettle are moving into another European country

| December 21, 2012

mobile payments izettleThe latest addition to the company’s availability is in Spain, raising its number of E.U. countries to seven.

The increasingly popular mobile payments startup from Sweden, iZettle, has just announced that it is taking its first steps into Spain, which has boosted its availability in the European Union to include seven different countries.

The service provides small businesses with a way to receive credit card transactions over smartphones.

The company is already offering mobile payments options to small businesses in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Germany. It has also brought Visa transactions to Finland, Norway, and Denmark as of November 2012. They were able to accomplish this goal following the settlement of an issue between the two companies that had been outstanding.

The mobile payments will be expanding to Spain with an eye on small and struggling businesses.

The expansion into Spain is meant to provide small business owners who “are hurting” with new mobile payments options, said an mcommerce news release by the company. At the moment, there is no subscription fee for the company’s services and there is no minimum monthly fee. Instead, it charges a flat 2.75 percent per transaction.

The service works for either Android or iOS devices, and the mobile payments are compatible with all of the major credit cards including Amex, Visa, and MasterCard. This places iZettle in direct competition with a number of other companies that are offering comparable services within the European small business marketplace.

For example, there is a German startup called Payleven that is providing mobile payments services for Germany, Spain, Poland, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Another example is Elavon, which is also headquartered in Europe and has just recently expanded into Ireland as of October, after being active exclusively in the United Kingdom until then.

Among the most recent mobile payments companies to make its way into the European marketplace is a company from Holland called Adyen. It is similar to iZettle in that it functions on both iOS and Android, but it is designed for large retailers so that they can make a point of sale in any location that there is an employee, in order to reduce lineups at the checkout counters.