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Cyber Monday Mobile Sales Have Jumped 260% (Deloitte via PR Daily)
How much shopping will you do from your mobile device this holiday season? Chances are, the answer is quite a bit. Mobile retail sales are expected to soar for the holidays, as more connected consumers shop online for gifts using their phones or tablets. A new Deloitte study expects about 68% of smart phone owners to use their hand-held devices for holiday shopping this year. Cyber Monday sales have jumped 41% overall since 2010, with mobile sales alone skyrocketing nearly 260%, as seen in this infographic:
Apple's iOS Dominated Holiday Shopping (IBM via All Things Digital)
According to IBM, in a report titled The iPad Factor: The Apple iPad generated more traffic than any other tablet or smartphone, reaching nearly 10% of online shopping. This was followed by iPhone at 8.7% and Android at 5.5%. The iPad dominated tablet traffic at 88.3% followed by the Barnes & Noble Nook at 3.1%, Amazon Kindle at 2.4% and the Samsung Galaxy at 1.8%. And, over at eBay and its PayPal unit — which spewed out all kinds of data on mobile transactions that showed volume was between two and three times greater, mostly on Apple devices — the company noted that one of its bestselling items on Black Friday was the iPad 2, selling 250 per hour from 12 a.m. to 8 a.m. PT. So, iPad users are using their devices to buy more iPads. These statistics match other findings that show low commerce and Web usage on Android gadgets.
Click here for the larger Black Friday infographic.
Mobile Phones Make Economies Grow Faster (Quartz)
Studies have shown again and again that mobile phone networks help economies grow. Now there is evidence that improving mobile internet access helps economies too. A recent study examined the effect of faster 3G wireless data connections replacing slower 2G ones. The study by the GSM Association mobile trade group, Deloitte and Cisco, looked at 96 developed and developing markets from 2008 to 2011. When a market experienced a 10% shift from 2G to 3G, GDP per capita growth increased by an average of 0.15 percentage points. A separate look into 14 countries between 2005 to 2010 found that a doubling of mobile data use led to an increase of 0.5 percentage points in per capita growth.
The Biggest Problem In Mobile: Retention (Cristina Cordova)
And we're not talking employees here. We frequently attribute success on mobile to downloads instead of monthly active users. On mobile, the story is far different. Companies and the press often talk about downloads, flips, check-ins or even activity among active users. They avoid discussing monthly active users. Why? By far, the biggest problem facing mobile companies today is retaining the users that download their applications. Every company in mobile wishes they had the retention rate of Instagram, but very few even whisper the words monthly active users to the outside world. An app is only a long-press away from being dismissed to the second, third or fourth page of apps on a user’s device. How mobile companies aim to defeat the retention problem in a world of fickle social users will be their true test.
Why Marketers Need To Get Mobile (Co.CREATE)
Greg Stuart, global CEO of the Mobile Marketing Association, said that when he started in marketing nearly 30 years ago, his manager instructed him to “always go where the consumers are and get there first.” However, in today’s world, such a proposition is more complicated than ever as marketers try to master a wider array of media that is increasingly digital and, of course, more mobile. Marketers need to rethink the value of mobile marketing to put their brands in the hands of consumers. Mobile is not a trend that will disappear or diminish. It is a global movement that requires increased attention and budget allocation to fully realize the value it can offer marketers. None of us can afford to “wait and see” with mobile. Not for our brands, and not for our careers. There is deep divide today in marketing, those that are mobile savvy and those that are likely to retire soon.
Don't Leave Your Mobile Site To The IT Guys (MarketingWeek)
Marketers should ensure the look and feel of their mobile sites isn’t dictated by the IT department. Brand managers should be prepared to pick up the baton for their mobile optimized websites and treat them as an additional and valuable marketing channel, rather than simply a UX issue. With that baton admittedly comes compromise and the need to spend time defining exactly what a brand on mobile should look like. That said, the worst mistake to make is to simply replicate a desktop site with bigger buttons and less content in a bid to save time and money. You wouldn’t ask your CIO to run your Facebook page, so it stands to reason that marketers shouldn’t let another department take ownership of the mobile web.
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