A mobile marketing campaign will only prove as successful as the strategy, effort, and financing behind it.
It’s a lesson many online retailers have learned. And, as a result, new findings from Forrester Research, Inc. indicate that approximately three-quarters of online retailers either presently have or are actively developing a “mobile strategy.”
Incredibly, Forrester’s study, which was produced in partnership with Shop.org, also found that one in five online retailers already has a fully-implemented mobile strategy in place.
“It’s imperative for online retailers to stay on top of what their customers want and these days it’s all mobile all the time,” said Scott Silverman, Executive Director, Shop.org. “Mobile commerce has tremendous potential and will no doubt grow to become a significant part of overall sales volume in years to come. Whether to increase customer satisfaction, grow their brand or drive traffic and sales, online retailers are in this game to stay.”
The survey included input and data from more than one hundred companies. All told, the data gleaned helped contribute to “The State of Retailing Online” research series, the goal of which is to help bestow upon eBusiness “an annual industry benchmark for marketing and business investment and activities.”
Proving that financial backing in mobile emarketing is catching up to the demand for it, the report estimates that a substantial sum of money ($170,000 per online retailer) will be spent on mobile websites in 2010. Of course, that dollar amount will be exponentially larger for mega online retailers.
The report, it should be noted, found that most retailers view social media marketing favorably, but the ROI for driving online sales “remains murky.” Overall, some 80% of retailers contributing to the report revealed their use of social media strategies to experiment, learn, and better understand their customers. 28% explicitly stated that social marketing has “helped grow their business,” although direct sales from social tactics “are not widely measured.”
While your letter does shed a good light of information on the online retailer scenario, we must not leave out the local small businesses. The local marketplaces can achieve a great amount of success by forging their relations with customers within their communities and regions. Educational measures is what will help advertising companies and consultants help these small business managers get into the mobile advertising realm. There is a scorching hot opportunity in the local mobile space.