Have you ever wondered what your SMS referrals are doing after they've clicked?
A whopping 98% of text messages sent are read, putting SMS in a completely different league to other forms or communication in terms of open-rate. But with its simple style and 160-character limit, it can be tricky to track how your campaigns are performing once you’ve pressed send. Including a link in your SMS means you can direct recipients through to richer online content by adding the ability to track who and how many people are clicking through to your website.
Tracking how many clickthroughs you receive on a campaign is awesome if you’re looking for data and statistics on how well the campaigns are performing and who’s interacting – but what about what they do after they’ve clicked on your SMS link? This is where this handy tool from Google really comes into play; adding additional information into your SMS…
Chart of the Day: How the importance of mobile search varies by sector
It's often said that we're now well past the mobile tipping point where mobile accounts for more than half of site visits and searches. Yet this average masks a wide variation across sectors. For example, in B2B search is still dominated by desktop rather than mobile. At Smart Insights we see just 15% of our 500,000+ new organic visits are mobile.
This recently published research from Hitwise from the US and UK shows the difference in the percentage of mobile search by B2C industry sectors.
Mobile search share by industry: United States
Mobile search share by industry: United Kingdom
The main sectors where desktop is still relatively important are banking,…
How to create and implement a successful SMS marketing campaign
There are countless reasons why your business should consider implementing SMS marketing as part of your overall communications strategy.
It’s budget-friendly - you can send messages from around 2p / 2 cents per message
It hits the mark - over 97% of text messages are read within the first four minutes
It gets your customers to act - 19% of people will click a link in a SMS campaign rather than just 4.2% for emails
It produces results - 30% of SMS campaigns receive average response rates of 30%, compared to 4% for emails
But there are rules to follow in order for each of your SMS campaigns to be successful. In this post I will…
Mobile sales are growing rapidly, but many still fail to properly account for them in their analytics.
Most Americans use mobile devices at some stage in the purchasing process, but mobile-influenced sales can be tricky to pin down. Marketers need to quantify mobile’s impact; failing to do so paints an incomplete sales picture and undervalues the ROI your mobile strategy produces.
Mobile is now overtaking desktop in overall usage. Data assembled for the KPCB mobile technology trends survey shows that people spend 51 percent of their time on mobile and only 42 percent on desktop. Even more use mobile to research purchases or look for discounts.
An ideal method to help pinpoint a mobile ad campaign’s effectiveness is mobile app attribution, which tracks app installs, in-app purchases, completions, and other mobile-related behaviors. The majority of marketers have a more difficult attribution challenge than tracking digital downloads. If you sell…
Charts of the Day - New Research shows how mobile dominates digital minutes, but multiplatform use is huge as well
You will know that in most consumer marketing sectors, in most countries, we're well past the mobile tipping point where mobile web usage is more important than desktop measured by number of site visits.
Another way of looking at the importance of mobile is looking at the mobile share of digital minutes. This is measured by the large, international panel providers like comScore and in their latest report on Mobile’s Hierarchy of Needs they have a report that shows the importance of mobile in all countries.
So it's no longer a case of asking whether mobile marketing important, we know it is! It's now a question of using the statistics to understand how consumers behave when using different types of mobile devices,…
Chart of the Day: Smartphones aren't killing TV
Those of us accustomed to reading marketing reports are used to the idea that mobile is killing TV, and that TV is an ageing dinosaur destined to limp along for a while till it's finally declared dead.
But the data reveals a more interesting picture. Time spent on mobile devices is growing fast, but it's not having a negative impact on TV viewing. TV viewing is shifting very slightly to video on demand and away from live TV, but TV viewing as a whole has held up solidly over the past 3 years.
Time spent on smartphones has more than doubled, but this seems to complement rather than compete with TV viewing. The lesson is simple - rapid mobile growth is happening, but it doesn't mean old mediums are dying.
Source: Nielsen Total Audience Report for the 4th quarter…
Chart of the Day: The amount of time people spend using messaging apps in Europe, Latin America & Asia has grown by up to 10 times that of the USA
In a recent report by ComScore measuring the percentage of time the average user spends using messenger apps versus all other mobile activity found that people outside the USA, UK and Canada spend significantly more of their time on mobile using these apps. The messenger apps included in the report were the 5 key apps globally, Facebook messenger (with over a billion installs on Android - who doesn't have this on their phones), WhatsApp (and this one), Line, WeChat & QQ messenger.
These 5 apps share 1.4% of all mobile minutes in the USA and 2.3% in the UK, but when you compare that against 15.8% in Mexico and 14.9% in Indonesia the difference is staggering.
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How to adapt to the shift to mobile commerce
For a long time, the rise of mobile marketing has been the darling of tech predictions. Since Mary Meeker, an analyst at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, said in 2008 that "Mobile [will] overtake fixed Internet access by 2014", the world has been waiting for that prediction to hold true. It did, at least by some sources, precisely that same year she said it would.
According to a study by Comcast, in 2014 mobile usage represented 60% of the total time spent online, while desktop-based consumption made up the remaining 40%.
Since the majority of your website visitors come from mobile devices, you need to adapt your digital marketing strategy to take advantage of the…
Chart of the Day: Mobile ad spend continues to skyrocket, but customer perceptions of mobile ads are still in the doldrums
Armani don't do infomercials. Rolex doesn't do direct mail. Ralph Lauren don't do coupons. Why do they ignore these often successful marketing tactics? Because if you put your ad for Rolex watches on a crappy leaflet and shove it through someone's door it degrades the brand. It detracts from it's luxury, it's exclusivity.
The lesson is that it's not just the content of the ad that matters. The medium it's delivered in matters.
This should make marketers wary about rushing head long into mobile ads when customers are reporting so many issues with them.
There's no doubting that such a rush is occurring. Spending on mobile ads doubled in just two years - and will reach an impressive 143 billion this year according to Statista.
And…
Now mobile is the norm, marketers need to re-think how they approach a broad range of tactics
By the end of last year there were 2 billion mobile users worldwide. This amounts to 400% growth in just a decade and the figure is bound to have increased since this date. 80% of internet users access it via their mobile phones and this should be a huge warning signal to all businesses that their marketing, sales and communications strategies must all have a 'mobile-first' focus.
All business owners have had it drummed into them that their website must be responsive, it’s what customers expect, and whilst this is true , it can’t stop there. Your entire strategy needs to be based on the assumption that users could be viewing your online communications, emails, social posts and more from practically any device, and more than likely a smartphone or tablet. How is…
