Mobile Shopping Is Growing Quickly
According to a new study by ABI Research, in 2015, shoppers around the world are expected to spend about $119 billion on goods and services purchased via mobile phones. That number represents about 8% of the total e-commerce market.
Mobile Coupon Marketing
Mobile marketing is the next big thing as far as the majority of contemporary marketing experts are concerned. Even unlike the Internet, nothing has been as powerful as the mobile phone, spreading far and wide across the globe into the hands of most of the world’s population.
Even in impoverished, 3rd world countries such as Kenya, as many as 1 in 3 adults own a mobile phone, and with over 950 million handsets sold last year worldwide, it’s no wonder mobile marketing is on the rise.
Marketing through mobile coupons is a particularly effective way of reaching your audience. People are used to email marketing, and as such are less responsive to it – particularly given the volumes of email we receive. It’s often a difficult task for a marketer to break through the noise and get their message heard above all others, let alone to induce a response from the prospect (even where the prospect has opted-in to receive the emails in the first place).
Mobile Marketing is Moving into the Mainstream
According to an interesting report in emarketer.com, the years ahead will see mobile marketing continue its shift toward the marketing mainstream.
USA is Catching Up in the SMS Marketing Race
Mobile marketing is marketing directly to consumers through SMS messaging, leveraging the growing number of mobile phone owners and users. Mobile (or text) marketing is predicted to be the next major global technology phenomenon, and to a certain extent it is already used across Europe and Asia by businesses of all sizes to deliver targeted marketing messages on a wholesale scale.
Mobile marketing business consultants and service providers already have access to the framework for dealing with SMS text marketing, yet still the US market remains behind much of the rest of the world in mobile SMS marketing.
The US is surprisingly far behind when it comes to utilizing available mobile technologies. While the Internet is very much the domain of US business, in mobile communications the US seems to lag some way behind the rest of the world. There are 36 countries in the world that have over 100% per-capita usage of mobile phones, including many otherwise poor and indebted nations. The US, for whatever reason, isn’t one of these countries.
Using Mobile Coupons to Enhance Current Advertising
Using a mobile coupon strategy as part of a wider concerted marketing effort can be a great way to build customer loyalty and drive sales from prospective customers. Mobile coupons are a highly effective way of driving a response from targeted prospects, and are a still a relatively untapped area of marketing. Technology has only very recently reached the extent to where it is capable of delivering messages to prospects at an efficient and cost-effective rate.
A mobile coupon is simply a discount or voucher sent by text message to a consumer’s cell phone or hand-held device. All the individual needs to do is text a particular ‘keyword’ to a specific 6-digit code and they will instantly receive your customized reply. This saves them the trouble of searching for and printing out your coupon, since they can simply show the text message at time of checkout. This is a big deal to some, considering today’s ‘going green’ times. This also ensures that they can always attain your most current offer instead of bringing in an expired print coupon.
