Bjarke Svendsen's List: TechTrends 2010

• “If you are a retailer today and you’re not offering the customer the ability to participate in commerce whenever and wherever they want and another retailer does, you’re going to have a problem.”
• But the retailers that have jumped into m-commerce are learning valuable lessons about the best designs for mobile phones, how to market to consumers through mobile devices, and the special opportunity to tie the mobile phone—which most consumers carry with them always—with in-store shopping.
• Already, 32% of Americans, 97.3 million of 304 million, have used a conventional mobile phone or smartphone to access the Internet
• On a typical day, 19% of Americans, or 57.8 million individuals, use the Internet on a mobile phone, up from 11% two years ago.
• And perhaps mobile commerce is not for every retailer,
• “Retailers have to look at their customers and mobile traffic to their e-commerce site,” Baird says. “If you have young customers with thumbs glued to phones 24/7, then mobile is a good bet. If you have baby boomer or retiree customers with moderate or fixed incomes, then it’s probably not a big priority.”
• Retailers must decide when—not if—they will launch m-commerce sites or apps, says m-commerce analyst Ian Fogg in a Forrester Research Inc. report titled “Why Mobile’s Time Has Come.” “Failure to pick the right approach now will lead to others seizing control of the new landscape that extends to every minute of consumers’ lives, 24/7,” he states.
• And size does not matter.
• “M-commerce is likely to follow the history of exponential growth previously experienced by the e-commerce surge,”
• “Given the significant amount of growth in the mobile channel we’ve already seen this year, I believe the tipping point for online retailers to start developing a mobile strategy has already passed
• While 102 retailers have built special web sites designed for conventional mobile phones and/or smartphones, many of these same merchants have also gone the route of building dedicated applications—or apps—for specific phones, mostly for the iPhone. Some merchants have gone the app route without building a mobile-optimized site.
• the cost of entering m-commerce via a vendor’s technology is relatively small.
• “The question today is, if you’re an e-retailer, why wouldn’t you do this?”
• Whether handled through a vendor or in-house, responsibility for m-commerce typically resides within some combination of the e-commerce, marketing, merchandising and I.T. departments.
• Staff members in each of these departments must learn some new skills, primarily, understanding what a mobile shopper is trying to accomplish and how he’s trying to accomplish it compared with a web shopper.
• Marketing staff, for example, may realize efforts need to focus on the speed with which a customer can buy or on a specific product category as opposed to special promotions.
• Basic skills needed for mobile commerce are roughly similar to those required in e-commerce,
• it was important to open with big presentations of select featured products
• • Ide til Change. Brug app til kundeklub og highlightede produkter
    
• the fewer products it offered on mobile, the higher the conversion.
• The opt-in text message list for its Moosejaw Madness marketing program has topped 3,000. The retailer routinely asks customers for silly responses oriented around the brand, and it has achieved response rates as high as 54%
• . As for order tracking, 25% of Moosejaw’s entire customer base use the text message program.
• 77% of retail chains see high value in mobile commerce as a way to connect the online world with physical stores, according to a new study from Retail Systems Researc
• h. “Store-based retailers view mobile as an opportunity to connect their various channels,”

• he mobile channel also is serving 1-800-Flowers.com well. For example, the retailer included banners and copy for its mobile site and apps in e-mail marketing before Mother’s Day this year. It sent out special text messages with 20%-off coupon codes to its opt-in text list members. It included mentions of mobile in newspaper and television ads and in its catalog.

   

  It also ran a banner ad on its home page that directed shoppers to Apple’s App Store where shoppers could download its app. And it even plunged into the uncharted waters of mobile app advertising—placing ads for its mobile app within the apps of others. In these ads were coupon codes for 20% off Mother’s Day orders.

  “We wanted to make sure everyone was aware of our mobile opportunities,” Ranford says. “Mother’s Day gave us an opportunity to really get mobile out in front of people. And we used existing internal channels like print advertising and e-mail marketing with large budgets to help mobile. In the end we got a 42% join rate to our text message promotions list, 173% mobile sales increase year over year for the Mother’s Day period, and a 46% increase in app downloads week over week.”
• 200% year-over-year increase in m-commerce sales. “Everything is really coming together. It’s a revenue driver for us,” Ranford says. “It was an emerging channel two years ago and now it has emerged.”

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