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Mobile commerce now accounts for 23% of online sales: report

Mobile commerce sales have doubled in the space of a year and now account for almost a quarter of total online sales, according to a new report.

It again highlights the growing importance of m-commerce at a time when many retailers are still struggling to develop effective, user-friendly mobile sites and apps. 

The new data from IMRG and Capgemini shows that sales completed through mobile devices accounted for 23.2% of total ecommerce sales in Q2 2013, up from 11.6% in the same period last year.

A separate survey included in the Econsultancy Mobile Commerce Compendium found that half of smartphone owners (51%) hadn’t made a purchase using their smartphone in the previous six months, which shows that there is still huge potential for m-commerce sales to continue rising as a proportion of total online sales.

66% of Asian businesses plan to increase digital marketing budgets over the next 12 months: report

Two-thirds of Asian businesses (66%) plan to increase their digital marketing budgets over the next 12 months, according to new research from Econsultancy and Campaign Asia-Pacific.

In comparison, just 19% of companies plan to increase their offline budgets in the same time period.

Furthermore, companies surveyed as part of the State of Digital Marketing in Asia 2013 Report are spending an average of 29% of their total marketing budgets on digital, a slight increase from 26% in the 2012 survey.

However, agency respondents included in the report paint a different picture, estimating that their clients spend just less than a quarter (23%) of their total budget on digital.

Coach: almost a first class website

Coach has an ultimately frustrating website.

Don’t get me wrong, the desktop site, designed this year, isn’t presenting too many barriers to customers. It also has some nice touches that should shine in a tweaked redesign. And it has some amazing product images (of amazing products).

But, at the moment, it’s a little buggy and has a homepage lacking in features above the fold.

With a little work, the desktop ecommerce site could make content and products easier to surface, and provide a much more immersive experience.

In this post, I’m looking at the US website. If you’re not in the US, you can hit ‘global sites’ in the footer and take a look at the American view.

For those outside of the US, Coach is big, with revenue of $3.23bn in 2009. It’s big enough that when I Google simply ‘coach’ (and bear in mind I’m in the UK), I get a Google company ‘card’ on the RHS of the SERPS (see below), which I can click to take me to results more relevant to the luxury leather goods store.

So, now that I’m in the store, what does it look like?

Seven interesting social campaigns from Macy’s

Department store Macy’s first embraced social media back in 2010 and has since attracted huge followings on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram.

Social is now central to the brand’s marketing efforts and as a result it has come up with some incredibly innovative campaigns in the past few years.

We’ve already taken a look at how Macy’s stacks up against the competition in a post comparing how the top US retailers use social, and to follow on from that post here’s a roundup of seven of Macy’s most interesting social campaigns.

And for more information on how social can form part of a successful multichannel strategy, come to Econsultancy’s JUMP event on October 9 which forms part of our new week-long Festival of Marketing.

Heart attack and Vine: the best six second accounts

Word up to all the Tom Waits fans that recognise this post’s headline.

I’ve tried to round-up some vines that haven’t been featured here before, and I’ll try to inspire some of you to look again at the tool. Although lots of brands started using Vine back in winter when it launched, many have forgotten about it.

It’s so easy to use, and immediately marks out any Twitter account as willing to share some fun with fans. As Airbnb, and many others, show, it’s also a good medium to use for competitions, as vines are easily sharable and defined by brevity and, hopefully, wit.

Seven brands that have jumped on the Snapchat bandwagon

Despite Snapchat’s reputation as a seedy sexting platform, it recently secured $60 million in funding which values the company at around $800 million.

Though the smartphone app hasn’t published its user numbers, more than 200 million pictures and videos are shared over the platform on a daily basis.

For the uninitiated, Snapchat allows users to send images and videos to their friends, but once viewed the messages are then deleted forever after 10 seconds or fewer.

It’s the ultimate in short-term, throwaway messaging, so it’s no real surprise that it’s been used for illicit purposes, but it is a bit weird that brands have been looking to get involved.

Can you find a CEO on social media? Lyle & Scott hopes so

British fashion brand Lyle & Scott is looking for its next great leader, a new CEO.

To do this, shunning traditional recruitment methods, the company is using social media predominantly, linking to a microsite to attract the right person.

Will we start to see this kind of recruitment process more and more? Those at Lyle & Scott think that to find the right candidate, one has to mix things up a bit, and use a selective medium, symptomatic of the candidate one is looking for.

Let’s take a look…

How Kroger uses Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+

In the latest instalment of our series of posts looking at how major brands use social media I’ve decided to turn the spotlight on Kroger.

The Kroger Company is the second largest retailer in the US behind Walmart, though it owns a number of subsidiary chains as well as its Kroger-branded stores.

But as we shall see, its huge profit margins don’t necessarily translate into success in social.

To compare Kroger’s social strategy to other major international brands, check out our posts looking at Walmart, Tesco, Starbucks, Tiffany & Co. and Nike…

Why the modern marketer must embrace technology

Technology is one of the twelve core elements of the Modern Marketing Manifesto formulated by Marketing Week and Econsultancy. We propose that to be a modern marketer you must be comfortable and adept at procuring and using technology to its best advantage. We believe modern marketers will have increasing ownership of technology. But it isn’t […]

79% of consumers have used reserve-and-collect in the past year

Almost two-thirds of consumers (63%) have bought products online before collecting them in-store at least once in the past 12 months, while 16% use reserve-and-collect at least once a month.

Overall around a fifth (22%) of consumers said they have never used the service, which is actually a very slight increase compared to 2012 when the figure stood at 20%.

Even so, the data highlights the continuing importance of reserve-and-collect services for multichannel retailers as a sales tool. The Multichannel Retail Survey, conducted using the Toluna survey tool, also found that 50% of respondents had abandoned a purchase online due to unsatisfactory delivery options. 

Helping fund a non-profit: the digital donation funnel

When it comes to generating donations we all know that there is more to digital fundraising than simply broadcasting to your supporters.

It’s important to understand who the audience is, whether they likely to convert into volunteers and/or financial supporters and what the best method is of communicating with each stakeholder group to get the best return on resources.

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