Showing Support Closely Follows Discounts
As mentioned above, data from “Facebook X-Factors” shows that the highest percentage of consumers (40%) are motivated to like a brand on Facebook by discounts and promotions. Almost the same percentage (39%) is motivated by showing support for the brand. |
Based on a report from The Luxury Institute, affluent and ultra-affluent mobile users are more likely to make purchases from their mobile devices. One in five respondents with incomes of at least $150,000 said they did so at least rarely, and among users with net worth of at least $5 million m-commerce was even more popular.
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Indeed, the percentage of consumers who purchase from mobile phones has grown from 10% in 2009 to 13% in 2010. Pricing and product research via mobile devices has also grown significantly during the same time frame. |
Social networking, meanwhile, is becoming an increasingly important traffic acquisition channel for online retail, accounting for more than 3% of all visits to the top 500 online retail sites. |
For the upcoming 2010 holiday season, email marketing volumes are expected to increase 15-20% compared to the same time period in 2009. |
Multichannel retailers registered the largest increase at 42% from 2008 to 2009 holiday seasons. Experian’s research reveals that email offer-types can make a key difference in campaign success. Email campaigns with offers such as free shipping, discounts and reward points had lower open and click-through rates, but higher transaction rates and revenue per email. Offers including a free gift had the highest transaction rates, while offers for points in affinity programs had the highest revenue per email. Read more at www.mediapost.com |
This represents a 17-percentage-point increase in penetration over 2000. An even higher percentage would have made such purchases had they more spending money and access to a credit card.
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“Several payment alternatives like debit cards and student accounts not only enable teens to buy on the web but also let parents set spending limits and monitor payment activity,” said Jeffrey Grau, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report “Marketing Online to Teens: Girls Shop with a Social Twist.” “Yet rather than offer these options, many retailers seem content to drive online teenagers to their physical stores.”
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| A flurry of paid-search reports released Tuesday may have marketers’ heads spinning, but each provides insights into specific parts of the process. |
SearchIgnite released the Q2 2010 U.S. Search Market Report Tuesday. Year-over-year paid-search spend increased 14% in the U.S., following an 11% YoY increase, sequentially. |
Similar to Efficient Frontier’s report, SearchIgnite found retailers spent more — about 7% — compared with the prior year. Microsoft’s search engine Bing gained market share by 26% from the year-ago quarter, but declined 9.6% sequentially. Overall, Bing dropped slightly to 6.2% share of search spend in the U.S., while Google and Yahoo reached 78.4% and 15.4%, respectively. |
Google increased the average number of paid-search ads shown per search session by 15%, followed by Yahoo at 22% and Bing at 11%. More premium ads in sponsored listings and down the right rail don’t necessarily suggest good news, however. Increasing ad coverage can diminish returns, and result in a poor experience for consumers, according to the report. |
Relying on Google for metrics, the report suggests that consumers can withstand between 5.5 and 6.0 ads per search query. Yahoo now serves up 6.85, making it unlikely the increase in ads will lead to additional revenue. Bing serves up about 3.85 ads per keyword, so it’s “extremely” likely that this will reflect in better-than-expected revenues for the search engine. Similarly, Google went from 4.97 to 5.72, so they could report healthy increases as well. |
| Google now monetizes nearly 8% more of their keyword searches. Stokes says keywords searched with no ads decreased from 43.6% in Q1 to 39.7% in June, making the inventory easier to monetize. |
In the Americas, paid-search spending by tech companies increased 12% during the second quarter, while the Asia/Pacific region rose 33%, sequentially. Combined, spending in Europe, the Middle East and Africa grew 25%. Google’s China strategy and move to serve content from Hong Kong has influenced performance. During the second quarter, Google’s share in the region dropped from 69% to 61%, while Baidu’s share of paid-search spending rose to 22% from 12%, sequentially. Read more at www.mediapost.com |
In a survey of shoppers in four states, nearly four in 10 told cross-channel commerce solutions provider CrossView they preferred to receive promotional messages from retailers by email. It was the most popular communications channel, with direct mail drawing about a quarter of respondents and text messaging coming in third with 18%. Just 9% of shoppers were interested in promotional messages on social media.
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Email marketers searching for subject lines that will grab their recipients’ attention should look to highly relevant, time-based messages for the best results, according to data from Experian Cheetahmail.
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The email marketing services company conducted a study of more than 40,000 messages in March 2010 and discovered that, overall, almost half of transactions and about three-quarters of opens and clicks happen within a day of receiving a marketing email. So good results will often come fast.
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One of the fastest ways to get email recipients to open and click on messages is to send notices of abandoned carts. As Sara Ezrin, senior director of strategic services at Cheetahmail, explained to eMarketer, recipients of such messages are already thinking about the items in their cart, and that they are in the market for those products will spur them toward quick response.
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Companies in retail, travel and auto industries dug into budgets during the second quarter in 2010 to spend 24% more on paid-search ads overall, compared with the prior year, and 9.7% sequentially, according to the Efficient Frontier Q2 2010 Executive Summary released Tuesday. |
CHART OF THE DAY: Craigslist’s Traffic Crashes Into eBay |
Citi analyst Mark Mahaney put out a massive report on Internet stocks today, and this chart showing eBay’s tanking traffic jumped out at us. Mahaney says, “these long-term very negative traffic trends point to the possibility of sustained eBay U.S. Marketplace underperformance going forward.” |
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