If your business would have had a mobile-marketing campaign during the holiday season, your sales may have increased by as much as eighteen percent.
That is the opinion of Razorfish Vice President of Mobile Paul Gelb. “I think the biggest takeaway from 2011 holiday marketing was the emergence of an enormous mobile-marketing gap amongst retailers,” he told Mobile Commerce Daily. “Retailers that are not ready are ceding high ground to their competitors and may have trouble leveling the playing field in the future.”
And Gelb is not alone. Hipcricket CMO Jeff Hasen observed that:
- More advertisers are incorporating mobile into their marketing mixes
- A Budweiser television commercial encouraged customers to scan a code with their mobile devices to win a Super Bowl trip
- Citi and LevelUp garned significant publicity by giving $10 mobile credits for pizza to the people in New York City’s Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
In addition, IOS and Android users downloaded 1.2 billion mobile applications between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, and traffic from mobile devices comprised 18.3 percent of online traffic on Christmas Day.
Since retailers earn roughly forty percent of their annual revenues over the holiday season, the importance of mobile marketing between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day cannot be ignored. Just imagine a stressed-out father running through the mall on Christmas Eve and checking his iPhone for which stores have last-minute coupons because he still needs a few presents. After all, people use mobile search when they need information “on the go” and do not have time to go to their homes or offices to use their computers.
Still, the increasing importance of mobile marketing extends beyond the last five weeks of the year. In general trends:
- 60 percent of tablet owners have booked travel on their mobile devices
- Banking customers who use a mobile applications engage with their banks three times per week while those who use traditional Internet banking access their information twice over the same period of time
- Mobile coupons are expected to reach redemption rates of 8 percent by 2016 (while the redemption rate of traditional coupons has decreased since 1999)
In a prior post, we noted that companies have fewer than two years to “get” mobile marketing. Unfortunately for their profits, it seems that many have not gotten the message. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, only 7.2 percent of mall retailers used QR codes in their mobile-marketing strategies.
As the 2011 holiday season proved, mobile marketing can be a present for your company – but only if you unwrap it quickly.
