Last year, Reevoo delivered over nine billion word-of-mouth impressions across our customers around the world. Increasingly more and more of those impressions have been delivered to mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones.
We are all aware of cross-channel commerce (or, as some call it, omnichannel shopping), and the implications this new customer journey has for brands. Consumers use several channels to shop and obtain information before purchasing, therefore, the whole experience needs to be seamless and the information provided relevant at the time and appropriate for the channel used.
New technologies and new shopping habits mean car buyers are now driving their own purchase process – and, from what we heard at this year’s AM Digital Dealer conference, the impact on automotive businesses is huge.
The industry-specific conference highlighted the importance of having a well-rounded online strategy to help with the car buyer purchase journey, to ensure that the final purchase is one of your models or from one of your dealerships.
Whether businesses are ready for it or not, m-commerce looks set to hit the mainstream in 2012.
As part of the research for our new ebook, we dug into the latest research on consumer usage of mobiles as research and/or shopping tools. We were expecting to see usage increasing – but we were surprised by just how fast m-commerce is growing.
Here are some of the highlights, based on trends for the last six months:
For businesses and consumers, customer service is more important than ever. But, while you’d be hard put to find a business that disagrees, many businesses struggle to make a firm connection between the effort they put into service and its impact on their bottom line.
Nearly half of consumers use both online and offline channels for their pre-purchase research†. So it's no surprise that forward-thinking businesses like Tesco are focusing on better ways to make their online and offline channels work together to maximise overall conversion rate.
The M-Commerce Pecha Kucha held by Ecommerce UK last week was a fantastic event – but more than this, it was a sign of the times.
The event was packed with marketers and ecommerce professionals all keen to hear about the latest m-commerce developments and best practices hammered out by their peers.
No one was waiting to be convinced that they need to start planning to consider adding mobile to their marketing or selling strategy - next year, or the year after. The savvy crowd already knew that m-commerce is happening now.
Will social commerce (or mobile commerce, or hyper-local commerce integration, or Facebook shops...) will become the new norm for all consumers? By getting caught up by black-and-white questions like this, we risk missing the true complexity of multi-channel shopping.
Multichannel does not mean that all consumers will use all the channels available to them. By neglecting consumer preferences, we risk missing the opportunity to make our interactions with consumers as engaging as possible - and seriously risk alienating consumers.
Facebook’s announcements last week at F8 herald a new era of possibilities for extending social throughout the web – and the future is particularly exciting for social commerce.
Multichannel integration doesn't have to be about offering brand new tools and experiences to your customers. In fact, it's usually better to think about how multichannel can combine the best of existing channels into a seamless experience for customers. This is an area in which Jessops, the UK's leading photography specialist retailer, and Pago, a new Californian start-up, are excelling.
Jessops tend to take a thoughtful approach to recent developments in technology and consumer habits, crafting responses that really work for the brand and its customers.