Mobile Marketing

Category: Mobile Marketing

Mobile commerce success doubles at Argos

Lucy | October 29, 2013

The company’s online transformation is now a year old and is proving to have been highly worthwhile.

Argos has announced that in the first half of its financial year, its mobile commerce has over doubled and is now representing 16 percent of its total online sales, only one year after having redesigned its entire digital existence.

Approximately 43 percent of all of its sales were made online, illustrating the growing importance of digital.

This figure includes the Check & Reserve service use, which experienced a 124 percent mobile commerce growth over smartphones and tablets, combined. This was led by a new app that was released for both of those devices. Overall, in the multichannel sales experienced by the company are now representing 52 percent of the total sales at Argos. During that period, it represented £899 million in sales.

At the same time, Homebase, an Argos sister company has also seen extensive mobile commerce growth.

Argos - Mobile Commerce Within the half year period, Homebase saw a growth in its own multichannel sales by 28 percent. Both of those companies are owned by Home Retail Group. Overall, that organization saw a rise in sales of 3 percent, reaching £2.6 billion within the 26 weeks that ended on August 31. This includes the figure contributed by mobile commerce.

At Argos, like-for-like sales increased by 2.3 percent, whereas at Homebase, those sales increased by 5.9 percent. That said, at the same time, there was a 70 decrease in pre-tax profits, which dropped to £14.2 million from having been £46.7 million during the same period in 2012. This is explained because last year the organization was able to benefit from a very large credit of £35 million. This year, it faced a cost of £12.6 million instead of a credit. This had to do with the expenses of its “restructuring actions” such as its digital transformation program.

At the same time, if all of those offline, online, and mobile commerce costs are not taken into account, then the benchmark pre-tax profits brought in £27.4 million, which is an increase of 53 percent over the £17.9 million that was seen last year.

Mobile marketing will receive a greater investment next year

Julie Campbell | October 28, 2013

Companies will be spending more to advertise and promote over that channel in the next 12 months.

A recent report on mobile marketing and commerce has determined that showrooming may not be considered to be as great of a threat as expected, as only 11 percent of retailers participating in a study claimed that they felt that it is a shopping behavior that could be harmful to their own revenues.

For this reason, many companies are pouring more money into the channel to help to boost their in store experience.

The research, which was published by BuyDesire and Econsultancy determined that most companies will be increasing their mobile marketing budgets over the next year and that this reflects a greater adoption of the channel, overall. They showed that out of every ten companies, seven have said that they would be increasing their spending in this area within the 12 months following the survey. The purpose is to keep up with the growth of the channel.

Only a small number of companies are currently using mobile marketing at the moment.

However, the current trends are changing and although the majority of companies are not using mobile marketing at the moment, they are changing their tunes and will primarily be doing so within the next year in some shape or form. They will be incorporating these technologies into their overall strategies on a growing basis.

The survey was conducted by the company from July through August and involved the participation of over 500 agency and in-house marketers. Among them, almost one third (29 percent) intend to use tablet optimized websites for the first time in the next year, with a considerable growth in location based mobile marketing (22 percent) and m-commerce (20 percent).

According to an Econsultancy research analysis, Bola Awoniyi, who spoke about these mobile marketing study results, “The research makes it clear we are at a tipping point with regards to mobile marketing and m-commerce. More companies that have been treading water with mobile technology will be taking the plunge in the near future.” It was also seen that only 11 percent feel threatened in any way by showrooming, even though 67 percent noted that the in-store use of smartphones was rising.