Art and Science of Interactive Marketing

Interesting: 58% of mar­keters believe that ‘a per­fect attri­bu­tion model is impos­si­ble.’

Adobe sur­veyed more than 700 dig­i­tal pro­fes­sion­als across Europe and North Amer­ica, in asso­ci­a­tion with Econ­sul­tancy, to learn more about how they are tack­ling mar­ket­ing attri­bu­tion. Down­load the report.

Really interesting implications for thinking about consumer consumption:

http://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/multiscreenworld_final.pdf

Interesting report from Pew Internet Research:
Some 85% of American adults own a cell phone, and these mobile devices now play a central role in many aspects of their owners’ lives according to a new survey. For many cell owners, their phone is an essential utility that they check frequently, keep close at all times, and would have trouble functioning without:

• 67% of cell owners find themselves checking their phone for messages, alerts, or calls — even when they don’t notice their phone ringing or vibrating. Some 18% of cell owners say that they do this “frequently.”
• 44% of cell owners have slept with their phone next to their bed because they wanted to make sure they didn’t miss any calls, text messages, or other updates during the night.
• 29% of cell owners describe their cell phone as “something they can’t imagine living without.”

Read the report

91% of retailers say they have a mobile strategy in place, according to a new study from Shop.org and Forrester. Retailers also report that consumers using tablets tend to spend and convert more than consumers using other mobile devices and computers. Read more at http://www.internetretailer.com/2012/05/23/retailers-get-mobile-friendly

Interesting infographic from mBlox and snippet from Sam Laird on Mashable:

Young people between the ages of 18 and 24 are even more connected to their mobile devices than you might think.

Nine in 10 young adults spend between one and five hours on their mobile devices daily. Nearly one in 10, meanwhile, are on their gadgets between five and ten hours each day. Just under a third would actually like for brands to send them promotions via smarthphone and tablet, but more than half say that it’s “extremely important” to be able to opt out of such come-ons.

This is all according to a study by mobile interaction and payment agency mBlox, which commissioned a December study of more than 4,000 young mobile users in the United States and United Kingdom. According to mBlox’s chief marketing officer Michele Turner, the research provides important insight as advertising and marketing to people on the go continues to proliferate.

“With 2012 largely being seen as the advent of mobile commerce, this research helps validate the huge revenue potentials for brands and an appetite by consumers for mobile marketing,” Turner said in a statement.

In just one illustration of mobile’s importance to advertisers and marketers, Google reported that mobile devices accounted for 41% of searches for Super Bowl TV ads during the game earlier this month.

But brands need to be careful about how they target those mobile users and how much knowledge they reveal about them. While 30% of survey respondents said they want offers to be located nearby, two-thirds said they don’t want brands knowing their whereabouts. More than half worry about their credit card information being stolen, and nearly half fret the risk of signing up for fake websites.

I love the idea of thinking past multi-channel to the idea of omni-channel. Today’s consumers want to interact with brands in a consistent manner that is channel transparent, yet optimized for that particular interaction. The diagram below from the NRF Mobile Blueprint, shows this progression.

I am with David Dorf’s comment on his blog when he said, “I’m looking forward to the day in which I can use my phone to scan QR-codes in a catalog to create a shopping cart of items. Then do some further research on the retailer’s Web site and be told about related items that might interest me. Be able to easily solicit opinions and reviews from social sites, and finally enter the store to pickup my items, knowing that any applicable coupons have been applied. In this scenario, I the consumer are dealing with a single brand that is aware of me and my needs throughout the entire transaction. Nirvana.”

Intriguing synopsis from Forrester about a concept they call Agile Commerce. The idea of touchpoints has been around for a while but their visualization provides a nice take on how companies can understand customers in terms of channels needed to accomplish tasks.

Here it is:

Multichannel commerce no longer makes sense. As consumers are increasingly connected through a wide array of Internet-connected devices, the traditional multichannel commerce experience is becoming obsolete.

Customers no longer interact with companies from a “channel” perspective; instead, they interact through touchpoints. These touchpoints include channels such as stores, branches, call centers, and websites, but also emerging interactions such as apps, social media, mobile sites, SMS messages, and interactive advertising — across a wide range of devices such as smartphones, tablets, Internet TVs, cars, and even appliances.

As a result, it is time for organizations to leave their channel-oriented ways behind and enter the era of agile commerce —optimizing their people, processes, and technology to serve today’s empowered, ever-connected customers across this rapidly evolving set of customer touchpoints. This is agile commerce.

Agile commerce is not just an incremental change; it’s a metamorphosis to a new form of operations and technology orientation. While the pieces and capabilities of an agile commerce operation may look similar to those focused for years on multichannel commerce, it’s how they come together and how the organization responds to the customer that represents the significant change. With the advent of agile commerce, organizations need to reconfigure resources and capabilities to stay ahead of the rate of change as consumer technology adoption and behaviors change. The customer is now at the center, and delivering relevant content, commerce, and service is the key to delivering on the new reality.

Looking forward to leading programs on email and search marketing upcoming on March 9 and 16 … see more at the UWSBDC site.

Hosting an event for UWEBC member companies on 11/11:

Monitoring Social Media and News and Email & Social Media Integration with Gobuzz.com, Lands’ End, and Finn Digital presenting.

Email Critique and Review Clinic: companies participate in a live review and critique session.