Category: Mobile Commerce

The latest report from Millennial Media has revealed that this industry is a powerful smartphone ad user.

Millennial Media has now released its most recent SMART report, which seeks to offer a deeper look at the restaurant industry, and in this edition, it has indicated that mobile marketing plays an important role among restaurants.

The report has provided considerable insight into the use of these smartphone friendly ads by these businesses.

Among the mobile marketing statistics that were provided in the report was one that indicated that 80 percent of restaurant campaigns targeting smartphone users includes a page or site that features a store locator. This is extremely notable, because when Millennial Media compared that figure to the average of all total campaigns over its platform, businesses as a whole were using that feature only 15 percent of the time.

The ad network also determined that restaurants have more searchable mobile marketing campaigns than the average.

What it found was that among the mobile marketing campaigns of restaurants, 70 percent allowed consumers to search their site from their smartphones. The average among all of the platform users, was much lower, at 24 percent.

The primary goal for restaurant mobile marketing campaigns – that is, in 80 percent of cases – was to boost foot traffic to their locations. The MM platform overall saw the same goal for their campaigns in only 9 percent of businesses.

In the first quarter of this year, the leading spending vertical was Telecom, and this experienced a year over year increase in spending by 102 percent. The next three leading verticals after Telecom were Entertainment, Finance, and Retail.

The mobile marketing and commerce report showed that when all was said and done, there were eight different verticals that experienced growth in their spending that was 100 percent or greater when compared to the same time in 2012. The leader was Sports, which saw growth in its spending by 600 percent, compared to Q1 2012.

The three leading mobile marketing campaign goals for brands and marketers, said the SMART report, were “Sustained In-Market Presence,” followed by “Driving Site/Mobile Traffic,” and finally “Driving Registrations.”

One in ten purchases made in the coffee shops across the United States are made using smartphones.

According to the coffeehouse chain’s own statistics, which have just been released, mobile payments are now accounting for over ten percent of all transactions that are made within its American stores.

The purchases are being made over Android, iPhone, BlackBerry devices in the United States.

The Starbucks Card Mobile App allows customers in the coffee stores to be able to pay for their coffees and treats through the use of their smartphones with mobile payments based on barcode scans at the checkout. The chief financial officer at Starbucks, who is also the chief accounting officer, Troy Alstead, explained that this method of paying for products is “a very sticky transaction by virtue of the fact that people have preloaded their money that we hold for them in anticipation of that coming transaction.”

Alstead explained that mobile payments also provide the opportunity to gain an understanding of their customers.

He explained that by using mobile payments, it gives Starbucks “an ability for us to harvest that information and really determine the most effective ways over time to understand our customer to target products toward them and the appropriate ways to reach them with our messages.” He also noted that in total, the transactions made using the Starbucks Card – using both the mobile app and the actual plastic card – make up nearly a third of all of the purchases made in the United States.

Recently, the company said that the card is now making up approximately 4 million mobile payments transactions every week. This is twice the 2 million transactions that were occurring by the end of 2012 every week. Furthermore, the purchases made over the Starbucks Card Mobile App are now making up a much larger proportion of North American digital wallet transactions than their primary rivals, such as the high profile Isis and Google Wallet. This, according to data issued by Berg Insight earlier in June.

CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, has stated that the company will be boosting its m-commerce services throughout the year and that mobile payments are only expected to grow.