Tag: retail mobile marketing

Mobile marketing presents challenges to established retail

| November 18, 2015

Legacy brands face struggles that newer companies don’t seem to have to deal with.

Companies built in a more digital age seem to be making the transition to a smartphone-based economy with much greater ease than legacy retailers that have a long history that hasn’t had anything to do with mobile marketing.

Macy’s was one of the companies that has a long history but that has managed to keep up with mobile tech.

According to marketing exec Serena Potter from Macy’s, the company has observed a rapid migration of customers from their desktop computers over to smartphones. That said, despite the fact that the company has a long history in brick and mortar and e-commerce, it realized that it would be vital to place a considerable focus on m-commerce and mobile marketing if it wanted to keep up with the expectations of customers. That said, while she explained that “It wasn’t an obstacle for us as much as it was a steep learning curve.” She added that “You didn’t know what you didn’t know.”

There is a great deal more than the technology that must be mastered in order to implement successful mobile marketing.

macy's mobile marketingWhat traditional retailers are discovering as they attempt to implement mobile advertising strategies is that they can’t simply stick to the same concepts that have been successful throughout their history. Using smartphones as a marketing channel is not simply a matter of running the same types of ads on a smaller screen. Instead, there is a great deal that needs to be re-learned in terms of apps, the mobile web, loyalty programs, data collection and metrics to understand which campaigns have – and have not – been successful.

These same challenges are not quite as powerful among retailers that have been created more recently, with a mobile-first mindset already in place, said Potter. She explained that Macy’s had been focusing on desktop optimization for many years and had mastered that channel. It became highly predictable. However, with mobile marketing, “you have customers accessing different information, with different intent. A lot of research and a lot of discovery is happening and it’s all on the go,” she said.

Mobile marketing is changing the way retailers think about the in-store experience

| April 16, 2015

Brick and mortar shops are finding that smartphones present an important opportunity for advertising.

A new report from InReality, the first from this firm, which was entitled “Reality of Retail”, has shown that mobile marketing is starting to play an important role in-store due to the massive increase in the use of smartphones by consumers.

Despite the influx of mobile device use, in-store purchases still represent the largest percentage of retail sales.

In fact, 94 percent of retail sales in the United States are made in-store. That said, those shoppers are using their smartphones to an increasing extent while they are inside those shops, so it represents a very important opportunity for retailers to be able to connect with customers through mobile marketing. The InReality also went on to report that not all of the research that consumers are doing with regards to products that they want is being conducted online.

This means that mobile marketing in-store has a considerable chance to influence decisions.

Mobile Marketing - In-Store ExperienceThe participants in the research showed that 53 percent of shoppers prefer to learn more about the products that they are considering by going to the store itself. Among shoppers between the ages of 18 and 24 years, that percentage rose to 57 percent. Among the shoppers who do head to the brick and mortar shops, 75 percent reported that they use their mobile devices. This does not stop them from making the purchases inside the stores. Among those who did buy, one in four said that they had bought items using m-commerce.

That said, while traditional advertising in-store is still very important, InReality said that they will need to alter their strategies. Fifty six percent of shoppers explained that advertising has an impact on the decisions that they make while in-store. Only 12 percent feel that sales assistants in-store are “an important touchpoint in a purchase decision.” At the same time that 46 percent of shoppers say that loyalty programs help them to make their decisions, 71 percent of the users of loyalty programs will still use their smartphones while in-store in order to compare products and prices through mobile marketing tools.