Behavior/Insight
Luxury Brand Apps Shopper Behavior
Sixty-three percent of affluent smartphone shoppers have made purchases via their smartphones
Wealthy Americans have been at the forefront of smartphone app use and mcommerce. And that trend is likely to continue, according to a Q1 2012 study by the Luxury Institute and Plastic Mobile of US consumers with an annual income of at least $150,000.
According to the report, 60% of these wealthy Americans owned a smartphone, of which more than 80% had downloaded an app.
3 Types of Purchase Paths
Concept Overview:
While marketers would like to think that all shoppers fall into the same model of purchasing decision, the truth is there are many variations. These are the three most common. The trick for brands is to understand (usually though click-stream analysis) which type of path each shopper is on and cater the experience based on that. This is increasingly important in multi channel marketing as we see the majority of consumers say they are overwhelmed with the amount of content they must process before making a purchasing decision.
The Challenges of Cross-Channel Data Integration
Source: eMarketer, Feb 21, 2012
Marketers fail to deliver real-time customer-targeted brand experiences
Increased consumer demand for more personalized and relevant brand experiences has made customer segmentation and targeting an imperative for companies.
According to a November 2011 survey from Acxiom andDIGIDAY, though the majority of US advertisers and agencies were able to identify and segment their customer base, few were capable of doing so in a way that delivers a personalized experience in real time and across multiple channels.
More than half (58%) of advertisers and 39% of agencies said they were able to track and segment their best customers. However, agencies were more than twice as likely (12%) to be able to incorporate both online and offline data into the segmentation process, compared to just 5% of advertisers capable of this more advanced approach.
By segmenting customers, brands can create the more personalized, relevant experience that consumers now demand—especially from retailers. April 2011 data from the e-tailing group and MyBuys showed 50% of US cross-channel shoppers expect to be offered promotions or merchandise that reflect their past online shopping behavior and purchases. More importantly, 46% of shoppers reportedly would buy more from retailers that personalized the shopping experience across channels.
To accomplish the goal of delivering a truly personalized experience in real time, brands must be able to track activity throughout the customer lifecycle and act on this data immediately across channels. But Acxiom and DIGIDAY found advertisers and agencies have yet to make this work—though many are well on their way.
Less than a third of agencies and 37% of advertisers said they had neither the capability to deliver real-time, personalized customer experiences nor to do so across channels, though nearly half of advertisers and 28% of agencies had the ability to at least perform one of these two tasks.
In December 2011, the Winterberry Group and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) found many marketers hoped to do better in the coming year. Most marketers worldwide planned to focus more closely on customer behavior analysis, and offer optimization and cross-channel touchpoint optimization—tactics required to meet the goal delivering real-time experiences to customers across channels.
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Check out today’s other articles, “Super Bowl Viewers Had Smartphones Firmly in Hand” and “Social Network Users in Brazil, China More Likely to Engage with Brands Online .”
Are QR codes replacing SMS?
Our two cents:
The short answer is no, despite the fact that some brands are seeing QR codes outperform the typical SMS call to action. The simple fact is that QR code adoption is still relatively low, ~14% in the U.S. Therefore, you’re starting with a smaller pool of people to begin with. We see SMS as still being the best all-around mobile tactic for creating customer loyalty, as many customers use it to sign up for coupons, alerts, etc. This is especially important for brands that target mainstream demographics, e.g., Moms 25-44 with an HHI of $75k or less. It’s common for this demographic to under-index on QR codes, but overindex on SMS and MMS. So at the end of the day, it really comes down to figuring out who your customer and defining their mobile behavior, instead of blindly following tech trends.
Report: Consumer Media Usage Across TV, Online, Mobile and Social
Nielsen, January 6, 2012
Almost one in three U.S. TV households – 35.9 million – owns four or more televisions, according to a new report on media usage from Nielsen. Across the ever-changing U.S. media landscape, TV maintains its stronghold as the most popular device, with 290 million Americans and 114.7 households owning at least one. In contrast, 211 million Americans are online and 116 million (ages 13+) access the mobile Web.
For more insights on usage and trends across TV, mobile, online, and social media download Nielsen’sState of the Media: Consumer Usage Report.
People don’t understand QR codes, not even college kids
Our two cents:
The central theme in this article is that the QR code process is still overly complicated and non-intuitive. After all, if you really think about it, someone probably showed YOU how to use one. But the most important point from Amy Gaharan at contentious is that until mobile phones and the objects they are meant to engage with become more aware of each other, i.e., smarter, then it will always seem like a hassle.
Behavior and insight on this holiday season’s mobile shopper
Our two cents:
It’s certainly no surprise to learn of the compound growth rate of research and purchases for mobile shoppers. While some retailers made early bets in mobile that have in some cases yielded 20% increase in online sales, most are still trying to define an overall mobile strategy. So when the IBM says things like “Retailers are going to have to do a really good job in targeting their messages and promotions for mobile users” we can’t help but shed some light on what exactly that means for most retailers. Below are a few key points to “getting it right” for any retailer:
- Remember that mobile shoppers are surgical shoppers. And just as importnat, remember that shopping on a retailer’s mobile site means visual shopping, especially for ESL shoppers. Therefore, keeping copy to a minimum and getting multiple (and easily downloadable) images on the site is key. With the average mobile device shopper spending about 4 minutes on a site, it becomes imperative for retailers to quickly serve up ONLY the most relevant content. Furthermore, mobile shoppers also tend to do less browsing and look at fewer products when they shop, making it more imperative for retailers to personalize messages and content. Simply put, shoppers go to websites to get ideas, but they go to mobile sites to get what they want.
- Use social networks to drive engagement and sales online. Social networks are an important factor in retail. According to IBM Coremetrics data, 9.2% of consumers in October that came to a retailer’s web site from a social media site made a purchase, compared to 5.5% who visited the store site directly. Retailers should not walk away from this fact thinking that adding a social networking step to the shopper journey is the right way to go. “Liking” or “following” a brand on a social network is a non-linear action for shoppers and not part of the traditional sales funnel. Therefore, retailers would be ill-advised to treat it like any other media channel.
- Invest in mobile search. This is one of the few silver bullets retailers have in mobile and not nearly enough of them use it. The simple fact is that everyone uses mobile search and with google now running a mobile-specific algorithm, retailers must respond with mobile-specific SEO and SEM strategies.
