Mobile

• Digital

  Data Gives Insight Into Avoiding Shopping Cart Abandonment

  Ecommerce shopping cart abandonment rates have jumped by nearly 20 percentage points — from the low-to-mid 50s to the low 70s — during the last two years. While a closer look reveals the facts probably aren’t as bad as the numbers indicate, they do represent a call for marketers to take a closer look at their checkout structure.

• Data & Analytics

  Want Travel Business? Look to Your Smartphone Presence

  A couple of recent reports have put some numbers behind the notion that we lean on our mobile phones for much more than just talk these days. Specifically, if you’re involved with the travel industry and want to reach a customer base that’s lighting out for the territory this summer, you might want to start making serious plans to mobilize your campaigns. As it turns out, smartphones aren’t just the last things we touch before takeoff or the first things we reach for when we’re wheels down.

• Acquisition

  2012 March Madness Was Very Mobile: Study

  Mobile devices did a lot more than warm a bench in this year’s NCAA tournament. A new study finds that 79% of U.S. fans used mobile to get some kind of roundball content– rising to 91% reach among 18 to 24 year olds.

• Engagement

  Hertz Coupon Value Increases with Facebook Shares

  Hertz is enabling consumers to increase the value of special offers by sharing those promotions with their social networks.

• Digital

  ExxonMobil, Shopkick Test Check-in Rewards at Gas Station C-Stores

  ExxonMobil is testing a deal with shopping rewards app Shopkick to give gas customers an incentive to pay inside– and perhaps to pick up a few things before they do.

• Data & Analytics

  Hearst Tests Personalized Onserts Featuring QR Codes

  Harper’s Bazaar is testing onserts that address subscribers by name and feature QR codes that click through to an advertiser web site.

• Digital

  Using Web Data to Improve Your Retail Storefront

  For brick and mortar retailers, ecommerce data can provide many relevant and timely indicators of popularity, such as new or increasingly popular search terms, or engagement metrics like dwell time on particular products or categories.

• Digital

  Synonym-Aided Search Boosts Guess’s Website Performance

  Shoppers have thousands of ways to ask for products they want. But if a marketer’s website can’t recognize those requests, the opportunity to make a sale vanishes. Guess Inc. is using a new website platform that recognizes a wide variety of synonyms entered into search engines to direct prospects to relevant offerings.
  The fashion marketer’s organic search efforts have paid off, attracting customers more likely to want specific products–and pay premium prices for them–rather than pulling in bargain hunters.

• Mobile

  Citi Targets Tablet Banking App to Kindle Fire

  Marketers not willing to write off the Android tablet audience are faced with a problem: Which Android device to create those apps for? In March Citibank answered that question by placing its first official Android bet on the Kindle Fire, the tablet launched last September by Amazon.

• Mobile

  Hot Dog Sellers Relish Vienna Beef’s Custom SMS Offering

  Marketing through mobile can be very effective, but small, independent mom-and-pop operators don’t always have the budget–or the know-how–to design and implement campaigns on their own.