Category: Mobile Marketing

New report shows that mobile shopping activity continues to rise throughout the US

Custora, an electronic marketing service provider, has released a new report concerning the factors that are driving mobile commerce activity in the U.S. Over the past four years, mobile payments have seen a dramatic rise, finding their way into various industries and with more people showing interest in mobile transactions. Mobile commerce has seen the majority of its growth occur in the retail industry, where retail sales from smartphones and tablets have reached $42 billion as of t he end of 2013.

E-mail is driving more activity than social media

There are many factors driving the growth of the mobile space, but e-mail is one of the most influential of these factors. One common consensus among businesses is that the best way to engage mobile consumers is through social media. While this is true to some extent, e-mail is still the best way to drive commerce activity among these consumers. According to Custora, e-mail drive 26.7% of sales on smartphones and 23.1% on tablets. By comparison, social media only drove 0.6% of sales on smartphones and 0.2% on tablets. E-mail remains one of the most powerful marketing tools available to businesses today, despite the fact that e-mail services do not have the same flare as social media platforms.

Consumers are beginning to favor tablets over smartphones

Custora’s data shows that consumers are becoming more willing to shop from their smartphones and tablets as well. Between January and March of this year, 12% of online shoppers made purchases from more than one mobile device. Shoppers are beginning to favor tablets over smartphones as well, due to the better shopping experience that these devices offer.

Smartphones may be the primary mobile commerce tool among online shoppers for some time

Currently, the iPad is the most popular tablet device for online shoppers, accounting for 79.9% of tablet commerce. Amazon’s Kindle Fire is gaining momentum, however, as more consumers begin to use their tablets to shop online. Overall, smartphones are likely to remain the primary mobile commerce tool among consumers.

New mobile ad platform raises $7 million in funding.

mNectar, an app promotion startup, has created a new mobile advertising platform called Playable, which allows gamers to demo a game on their mobile device before they choose to download or purchase it, and the company has raised $7 million in Series A funding from New Enterprise Associate (NEA).

The new groundbreaking mobile ad platform provides consumers with a better shopping experience.

In an interview with GamesBeat, CEO and founder of mNectar, Wally Nguyen, said “We created this company to solve the problems of mobile advertising.” He added that “Our ads give you a chance to instantly sample games and apps. We can connect people with the right apps.”

According to Nguyen, their “playable ads” improve the shopping experience of potential mobile game buyers as they browse through new game options. “Today, everything else doesn’t tell you what you are getting,” Nguyen commented. It is the hope of mNectar to solve the app discovery problem that so many mobile app developers have due to the huge amount of mobile game competition that exists within app stores, which makes the chance of being discovered quite difficult.

The CEO of mNectar said that the firm is equipping mobile ads with cloud delivery and mobile app virtualization. This enables consumers to try out a playable demo of an app or a game prior to downloading it. This results in higher advertising revenue for application developers and produces an experience that is more enjoyable for mobile users.

The interactive ads are many times more effective than other mobile advertising.

Presently, the majority of mobile users depend on friend recommendations, app ranking lists and app reviews in order to determine which game to play. Standard ads, such as pop-ups, banners and videos, do not give the consumer any real indication of what the actual gameplay would be like.

The user retention rates of interactive advertisements are four times more effective compared to other types of ads like interstitials and they are two times better than mobile video ads. According to Nguyen, these results have received verification by independent ad measurement firms.

Playable gives users the chance to experience the real product for a brief time. This helps them to instantly decide whether or not the game or app is worth downloading or buying. The CEO explained that the unique mobile advertising platform leads to fewer retention issues because users know precisely what they will be getting when they download the app.