Consumers Will Spend $13.4 Billion on Mobile Shopping in 2013

Over the past couple of months, it seems the majority of buzz and conversation in our industry has been related to mobile. From our Inspired Marketing Predictions for 2013 to redefining strategy, everything is related to the idea of mobile becoming increasingly important to the strategy of every marketer... especially retail. I debated calling this blog post "The Power of Now," because frankly... we are dealing with the idea of now.

Give me my product now.

Let me browse products now.

I want pricing on your product (and all your competitors) now.

Not long ago, social changed the way people discussed their lives and products. Mobile is now THE disruptive technology and it is only growing. eMarketer released a report called the Retail Mobile Commerce Forecast: Shoppers Turn to Smartphones First. The study was interesting for a multitude of reasons, but let's dive into just one for now: $13.44 billion will be spent on products using mobile phones in 2013. That number is up from $9.86 billion in 2012.

I guess the overall question is HOW to take advantages of the increase in mobility among consumers. How do we position and plan for a completely mobile environment that is bound to happen in the next five years?

Here are some quick tips to help you think through your mobile strategy.

1. Remember Email Open Rates: Marketers solely adopting mobile will recognize their mobile email open rate (some marketers are seeing mobile opens over 30%; others, over 50%!) and refine templates and practices for conversion on the handset or tablet. Seeing its return on investment, marketers will decide on how best to incorporate SMS and push messaging into a lifecycle marketing program, or whether to stick with transactional use cases only for those channels.

2. Think Push Notifications for Apps: Push establishes direct-to-consumer communications with the future potential to steal advertising budgets from other channels as brands find higher response rates and a much lower cost—for example, sending Rich Push videos versus having your TV ads skipped over on DVRs. And there’s already growing evidence that push messaging is a primary reason that consumers keep some apps on their smartphones.

3. Recalculate ROI: More advanced marketers will integrate advertising, email marketing, SMS/text marketing, and push messages into the ways they promote their apps and mobile websites. In calculating the ROI for a mobile website or app, marketers will abandon disparate marketing programs and go with fully integrated cross-channel programs that result in higher ROI.

Want to see some real-life mobile success stories? Check out our Mobile Customer Success Showcase.