Tag: mobile marketing trends

Shopify’s latest acquisition will help business market their online stores with messaging apps.

The Canadian e-commerce company recently announced that it will be acquiring Kit CRM, a virtual marketing assistant that uses simple text messaging to assist businesses in accomplishing their marketing needs for their online stores. Businesses that connect Kit to their store can manage their social marketing with this virtual marketing assistant, which works with five online marketplaces. Acquiring Kit will give Shopify a notable conversational commerce opportunity.

This marketing trend could help business owners run their operations with greater effectiveness.

Conversational commerce is a major up-and-coming marking trend. According to Small Business Trends, it primarily pertains to using messaging and chat interfaces to interact with companies, brands, services, etc. that until this point have had no real place in the “bidirectional, asynchronous messaging context.” With the help of this marketing tool, end-users and customers are able to talk to brands via instant messaging applications like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Slack, and others.

The Chief Marketing Officer at Shopify, Craig Miller, commented on the recent acquisition announcement saying that Shopify believes messaging apps are the doorway for the internet on mobile and that conversational commerce represents a massive opportunity for their company.

Conversational commerce could change the way consumers make online purchase decisions.

In addition to acquiring Kit, Shopify has also been busy with developing commerce bots for Facebook Messenger that will enable business owners to have improved interactive and engaging communications directly with their customers.

In recent years, messaging apps have significantly increased in popularity to the point that in some cases they’ve become more popular than social media platforms. With this level of popularity, conversational commerce may end up proving to be a fundamental shift from standard commerce. It may also end up changing the way that consumers make online buying choices and even how they communicate.

“Kit addresses a real pain point for merchants and is one of our most highly rated apps in the Shopify App Store. We look forward to having the Kit team join Shopify and help us define the future of conversational commerce together,” Miller stated.

A recent data analysis has found that retailers, brands and restaurants will be spending more on smartphone ads.

Digital savings experience, RetailMeNot Inc, has recently released its report on a recent study it conducted, titled “The Rise of Mobile Marketing Spend in Retail,” in which it stated that restaurants, retailers and brands will be investing more of their advertising budgets in the smartphone channel.

The study looked into the responses of over 200 retail marketing execs with authority over ad budgets.

The most notable point from this study was that among all the participants in the survey, 87 percent said that they had the intention to make a larger investment into mobile marketing this year. This was the case across all the different retail categories. It was noted that the marketers were shifting the way the budgets would be spent, sending more toward mobile ads and other smartphone based opportunities, while withdrawing funds from certain other more traditional channels.

This trend toward mobile marketing occurs as consumers engage less often with print newspapers, catalogs and TV.

According to RetailMeNot CMO, Marissa Tarleton, “We’ve seen increased interest from our retail partners working to better understand how mobile marketing channels like RetailMeNot can help them drive brand awareness, traffic online and in-store, and ultimately sales.”

She also pointed out that retail marketing leaders have been looking to make larger investments into digital media by way of mobile advertising. Attribution capabilities are assisting in allowing those marketers to gain a more thorough understanding of the overall positive impact of what they spend in this area.

Tarleton underscored the fact that the outcome of this survey only further supports the feedback that RetailMeNot has already been receiving from its retail partners. Such feedback includes the opinion that many traditional marketers are finding it increasingly difficult to move as quickly as is necessary toward a new mobile marketing direction while still being able to take the necessary time to go over the metrics and understand what is or is not paying off in terms of the impact their investments are actually having. It looks as though the challenges of this transition are highly commonplace.