All of today’s talk about mobile retailing has been fascinating. But it’s also making my brain hurt.
And just when I thought I had started to grasp the potential of mobile retailing – how retailers can use SMS to drive sales, what companies are mobile retailing role models, and how to get started (or, not get started) in all of this, one speaker’s insights fell on me like a load of bricks.
During a session on six trends in mobile marketing and commerce, Best Buy’s Tracy Benson was sharing some amazing stats which illustrate the power of mobile retailing. More than 100 million people are accessing Facebook on a mobile device. Over 700,000 people have downloaded Best Buy’s iPhone app in three months. In 2013, half of all cell phones in the U.S. will be smartphones. Makes you want to go out and invest all your pennies in the iPhone, doesn’t it?
And then she said this: “I’m sitting here telling you, think beyond mobile.”
From the Kindle and the eReader to the PS3 or the iPad, “Internet-enabled devices are very real and at the forefront,” she said. Meaning: Mobile retail is the here and the now, but there are many other touchpoints for the internet in the very near future.
When trying to determine whether to invest in the channel, don’t think about whether you have enough “mobile” customers to justify the expense, Benson says. Think: “Does my customer use the internet, and where are the places I need to make the internet accessible to my customer?”
Maybe it’s mobile. Maybe it’s not.
And here I thought I had this all figured out.
2 Comments
Its like a kindle has caught on fire because mobile marketing is a huge from the mobile technology in where people can scan bar codes to in-store mobile coupons. However I believe iPAD is going to be even bigger because its opening a new channel that lets users combine videos, news magazines and publishing all into one device, where you can make a purchase, share it with friends and still be looking at your interactive magazine. I discuss both in more detail on my blog Ellen.
“Maybe it’s mobile. Maybe it’s not.”
Maybe it’s hybrid, marketing platforms that can mix external Internet marketing with traditional internal marketing material, delivered across Internet and mobile devices using standard browser. This unified delivery strategy with browser based approach means big savings (development, support and deployment), provides consistency and delivers cross platform support. Not to mention the mountain of custom analytics that this approach supplies for use in real-time updates geoIP, time and market based campaigns, etc. Best yet, these hybrid marketing platforms exist today, SAAS based, no development costs, ready to go. So, maybe it’s hybrid, maybe it’s now.
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[...] basic topics of designing and deploying effective mobile sites, using SMS to increase sales, and what the future holds for this digital trend, but that was hardly the end of the mobile discussion. At the main event, speakers detailed where [...]
[...] basic topics of designing and deploying effective mobile sites, using SMS to increase sales, and what the future holds for this digital trend, but that was hardly the end of the mobile discussion. At the main event, speakers detailed where [...]