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Adobe releases findings on new mobile survey.

Key findings:

Mobile websites are the predominant presence of businesses in the mobile channel, accounting for the bulk of their mobile traffic and surpassing the traffic generated by downloadable mobile applications. More than 80% of the respondents said they were planning or have already deployed a mobile commerce website versus 8% with a downloadable application-only strategy.

Respondents identified four key areas of execution for their mobile strategy: 1) promotions, 2) commerce, 3) product information display, and 4) branding. Promotions emerged as the top strategic element, followed by online commerce.

Rich, full-screen image zoom and videos are the most effective ways to browse or display products, according to a majority of the respondents. Grid viewing of thumbnails is deemed most effective for browsing multiple product images.

Overall, visual merchandising features are deployed by less than one-third of the respondents. However, as many as 81% of the respondents indicated they are planning to deploy those features, suggesting richer mobile experiences will be created over the coming months. Fully 96% of the respondents ranked catalogs & brochures, alternative images, and zoom & pan as most effective.

US retailers are actively pursuing the mobile channel to enhance customer engagement and loyalty: 73% have some type of mobile initiative in place and 20% of are in the process of evaluating the mobile channel, according to a survey from Forbes Insights, in association with Research In Motion (RIM).

Fully one-third of surveyed retail executives describe their early mobile efforts as either widely implemented (10%) or rapidly expanding (24%).

Nearly one-half of retailers (47%) say they want to capture “first-mover advantage” as their customers go mobile, whereas 23% say they are adopting mobile to keep up with their competitors and 20% are taking an incremental approach to the mobile channel.

Below, other findings from the study, Retail’s Mobility Imperative, which surveyed more than 300 executives at top US retailers.

Retailers are now at varying levels of sophistication in their mobile efforts. Fundamental tactics such as mobile ads (35%) and mobile websites (36%) are the most common, while other retailers are moving into more customer service-related applications (33%) and transaction-based tactics, such as mobile coupons (29%).

Kuffer Marketing GmbH recently announced that its iPhone mobile coupon app, dubbed “Gutscheinbuk” or “Voucher Book, was downloaded 50,000 times in the first three days after launch — or an average of once every 15 sec.  In no time at all, the app rose to become one of the Top 5 apps for Germany in the Apple App Store.

To be fair, “Voucher Book” was already a wildly popular coupon-based Website in Germany that offered a simplistic approach to offering money-off coupons, but its mobile success is still worth mention.  The site had been around for the past four years and currently boasts over 7,500 active coupons that are now available via its iPhone app.

The simplistic nature of the app both from a retailer’s point-of-view and the end-user is what’s helped catapult the app to the top.  A retailer that uses Voucher Book can manage its own coupons using a variety of metrics –- selecting distinct offers to be sent at different times of day, or in different cities for example.  As a user, you can simply open the app and select what kind of voucher you’re interested in and Voucher Book delivers anything that’s useable within a short distance of them.

Overall, the app’s success is a boon to mobile coupons in general, which are just now starting to catch on in a big way.  Whether it’s a traditional method like Voucher Book or the “Groupon” model, mobile coupons are here to stay.

The success of the app points to a larger trend. Apps that seem to have the most success tend to be mobile extensions of user’s favorite websites, ostensibly making them a CRM channel.

A lack of analytics, audience size and fragmentation are among the problems still facing mobile marketers despite the growth mobile media consumptions, according to a new report from digital agency 360i. When it comes to research on mobile usage and advertising, for instance, the firm points out that it’s often not as extensive as that covering Web sites and Internet users.

That puts the onus on marketers to focus on gathering data from their own mobile initiatives. Marketers need to analyze how mobile users are accessing their mobile sites and how those behavior patterns match up with what users are doing online,” advises 360i. “This can be even more complicated if there are separate mobile sites and applications.”

The agency also acknowledges that fragmentation among handset types, operating systems is an ongoing hurdle that confronts advertisers in the mobile realm. The fractured landscape makes it tougher to target audiences and develop creative units that work across all devices included in a media plan.

Closely related to the fragmentation problem is that of audience scale in mobile. In the coming years, for instance, mobile search will grow faster than global Web searches, but mobile query volume by 2012 will still only amount to about a quarter of searches on the PC-based Web. That often leaves marketers with a choice of targeting iPhone users or trying to reach a broader audience across different devices and operating systems.

The 360i report also highlights the paradox that advertising costs in mobile tend to be too high or too low. Ad rates tend to be higher than what marketers are used to paying for equivalent inventory online. While the premium can be justified by higher brand impact, it can also make ads harder to sell.

“Alternatively, marketers will often run mobile campaigns with minuscule trial budgets so the impact underwhelms, and there isn’t a chance to optimize the campaign,” according to 360i. Advertisers then end up dismissing the medium as ineffective.

Mobile also simply involves formats and technologies distinct from online advertising from text messaging to check-in deals to mobile barcodes. That means marketers face a big learning curve before exploiting ad and commerce opportunities via mobile.

That all said, the agency encourages marketers to overcome these obstacles because of the growing audience shift from the PC to connected devices. “We’re now at a turning point where mobile usage is prominent enough for it to be a viable marketing channel for any kind of marketer or brand, the report states. “At some point, mobile media usage will likely rival and surpass Internet usage, and this will fundamentally change how marketers find and build relationships with their target audience.”

Gartner predicted earlier this year that mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access devices worldwide by 2013. It estimates the installed base of smartphones and browser-equipped phones will reach 1.82 billion units by 2013, eclipsing the total of 1.78 billion PCs.

If people start using Facebook to check in from bars, restaurants, stores and other places via cell phones, that could drive up both the company’s mobile user base and activity among existing mobile users. That in turn could spur more retailers and other businesses to offer mobile coupons or set up mobile rewards programs in conjunction with a new Facebook location-sharing feature.

Juniper Research produced a new study forecasting the rapidly increasing usage of mobile devices for tickets for all kinds of travel and entertainment plus sports events will be one of the main factors driving the growth of mobile commerce. Mobile ticketing transactions are forecast to exceed $100bn (based on gross transaction value) as soon as 2012: this is more than double the market in 2010.

The Mobile Commerce Sectors

The report provides the one stop solution for all players within the mobile commerce ecosystem. It pulls together each of the detailed reports within the mobile commerce stream: Mobile Payments for Digital and Physical goods, NFC Mobile Payments, Mobile Money Transfer & Remittances, Mobile Ticketing, Mobile Coupons and Mobile Banking.

Mobile Commerce Growth

This new report demonstrates the spectacular growth that we forecast across all the segments of mobile commerce. For each sector this report provides six year forecasts for transaction values in eight key regions of the world, as well as an analysis of a number of drivers and constraints, considering a number of business models issues as well as a discussion on operator churn and ARPU revealing that four of the segments (Ticketing, Money Transfers, Physical Goods and NFC) will more than double in transaction value over the next two years, whilst Digital Goods, Banking and Coupons will still post very healthy growth of 30% to 50% over the two years.

Importance of User Experience

Although growth looks strong, one of the vital recommendations included within the report is that commerce providers need to keep users top of mind when developing their applications. If the initial user experience is poor for mobile payment methods – either based on cost, security, reliability or ease of use – then customers will reject them. This up to the minute report provides the most recent evaluation at the mobile commerce market, including a look at current applications and services in each of these sectors, with content from the above reports refreshed and updated in the second quarter 2010.