How mobile marketing is going to save m-commerce

According to a study out this month by Affiliate Window, which studies on a monthly basis its traffic figures, retail sales through mobile have slowed their rate of growth for the first month since, well, selling stuff through mobile started to get on analysts radar. Does this mean that the m-retail bubble has burst? Not really. What it shows is, I think, two forces at work.

First up, I think the general parlous state of the economy, the fear surrounding all our financial futures from our chums in the Eurozone and a slight drop off in hype around m-commerce are all playing a part. But perhaps more interestingly, it seems that what consumers are doing with ‘mobile’ is shifting their shopping habits from the mobile phone to tablets.

If you drill down into Affiliate Window’s figures you find that the iPad has increased its share of sales week on week. In week 20 it accounted for 53% of mobile sales, by week 23 this had grown a massive 11% to 64% of all mobile sales. The rise in sales through the iPad has seen the share of sales through both the iPhone and Android devices decrease significantly over this period. The iPhone dropped from 29.61% in week 20 to 22.90% in week 23. During the same period Android dropped from 13.2% to 9.7%

And despite the drop in the share of sales through mobile handsets, the actual volume of sales through each device increased (apart from Blackbery – sorry kids).

But, while this shake up – if you can call a drop in growth from 7.85% from 7.32% in a month a shake up rather than a blip – may worry some, Affiliate Window finds that conversion rates on mobile of any stripe is growing, hitting more than three per cent for the first time since February.

So mobile shoppers are slightly more likely to actually follow through and buy than they were. And this is, in itself, encouraging for the sector and its raft of technology and service providers. Those that do shop on these devices are buyers.

And the figures don’t take into account how many end up doing research on mobile then buying through another channel, such as in-store or online and vice versa.

One thing that all this does point to is that retailers need to continue to take mobile more seriously and to look at how mobile can be used as a marketing tool. A separate study out this week by Velti, which asked 3000 consumers about being marketed to via mobile, finds that 45% are happy for it to happen, but are likely to only let three companies do it to them. This figure rises to 55% (but still wanting a maximum of three brands to contact them through mobile) when you look at trusted brands.

And top of the list of trusted brands are retailers (25.6%), financial services firms (16.9%) and travel companies (16.5%) who are all well positioned to be a ‘trusted’ brand and exploit the mobile opportunity.

This study shows that early adopters of mobile marketing are likely to be the ones that get the cake and that retailers are ideally positioned to be amongst these companies privileged enough to talk direct to consumers via mobile.

These two studies show that retailers need to do more to engage consumers to shop through mobile and their trusted brand status lends them to it exquisitely well.