Home improvement and mobile are as matched as a hammer and nail, and other takeaways from the just concluded Mobile Marketing Forum in New York:
On the heels of a presentation by Lowe’s at the last Mobile Marketing Association get-together in San Francisco in January, Home Depot detailed its own measureable progress in engaging shoppers and selling more stuff through mobile devices.
Among the learnings:
- Home Depot’s mobile-optimized site and apps provide access to the 400,000 different product types available online – as compared to the 35,000 in physical stores.
- About a third of Home Depot’s traffic last year came through mobile.
- Home Depot’s app has been downloaded 3.5 million times, with traffic up 60 percent because people responded to opt-in push messages.
- Home Depot recently ran a test on Twitter and saw mobile engagement outpace desktop by 40 percent.
“The biggest challenge today for marketers is to make it exciting for consumers,” said Trish Mueller, senior vice president and chief marketing officer of Home Depot. “We’re passionate about customer service and mobile provides such an amazing way to connect with the customer.”
In January, Sean Bartlett, director of mobile strategy and platforms at Lowe’s, told us how mobile innovation has entered the 65-year-old retailer’s 1,700 plus stores with 42,000 iPhones in the hands of associates, and Wi-Fi in store to give shoppers what they desire – easy and free access to product reviews and social networks.
So, if you want to build a case for mobile, watch the home improvement efforts. …
Rules and regulations, arguably the driest of mobile topics, were discussed in committee meetings, the larger sessions, and in hallway conversations when campaigns run and contemplated were being discussed.
And with good reason. Coinciding with the MMA Forum was news of a lawsuit where a Web user sued Facebook for allegedly sending her an SMS message suggesting that she send “friend” requests to other users.
Illinois resident Darya Ivankina alleges in her potential class-action lawsuit, filed this week in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Illinois, that the social-networking service violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act by sending her cell phone an unwanted ad.
That law prohibits companies from using an automated dialing service to send SMS messages to people without first obtaining their consent. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act provides for damages of up to $1,500 per text message.
Facebook didn't have an immediate response.
While technological advances like Google Glass made for interesting conversation in New York, some of the most successful campaigns featured use of permission-based databases that brought value to the mobile user and the brand. …
We again heard that mobile searches create large opportunities. According to Google’s Tim Reis, 73 percent of mobile searches trigger additional action and conversions. …
International mobile guru Tomi Ahonen reported that the average smartphone user looks at the device every five minutes – or 200 times a day. Further, he said that if one was counting full-length 160 character messages, a teenager sending 100 SMS per day would type the full text of “War & Peace” in under 7 months.
That’s a large amount of consumer interaction in any book.
(first appeared on imediaconnection.com - http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2013/05/13/takeaways-for-marketers-from-mobile-marketing-forum/)
