Mobile Marketing

Retailers often treat millennials like some sort of marketing Holy Grail, but there may be some simple ways to boost revenues from this emerging consumer generation.

According to a new study from online marketing platform provider Cue Commerce, “Consumer Moments of Truth,” the 80-plus-million shoppers who are part of the millennial generation can be categorized into the following five broad shopping personas.

Marc’s, a 58-store deep-discounter of grocery, health and beauty products and other items, is providing targeted recommendations with help from national partners.   The Cleveland-based retailer is teaming up with Allrecipes to introduce in-store beacon-triggered experiences that provide shoppers with personalized meal recommendations through the Allrecipes Dinner Spinner app. In-store notifications are triggered on shoppers’ smartphones by a Verifone beacon system running on the Footmarks SmartConnect proximity platform.

Twitter, which has been piloting an embedded buy button in tweets since September 2014, is reportedly pulling the plug on the idea.  

The launch of “buy buttons” in the past year on major social networks like Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter received a lot of attention, but so far they are not catching on with customers.
 
According to Digiday, research firms including Forrester and GlobalWebIndex are finding low consumer usage rates for social buy buttons. Reasons include limited functionality and visibility of the buttons.

When it comes to marketing, retailers should adopt a truly “omnichannel” approach.

According to a new consumer survey from digital marketing firm Fluent, “The Omnichannel Advantage,” consumers who are reached through a greater number of channels make in-store and online purchases from their favorite retailers more frequently.

Purchases from mobile devices continue to rise and upping ad spend is driving results for retailers.

According to data from Rakuten Marketing., purchases from smartphones that originated from a display ad on a computer increased by 52% between the third and fourth quarter of 2015. During that time tablet purchases that resulted from a display ad on a computer grew by 125%.

Online consumers appear to be remembering Mom this year.

According to new data from the Adobe Digital Index, online sales in the important Mother’s Day gift categories of flowers/gifts and jewelry are both trending 2%-3% higher than they were in 2015.

It may seem a little premature given that school is still in session, but the first back-to-school study has been released.

About 62% of households plan to reduce back-to- school spending compared to 2015, according to a survey by Bizrate Insights, a division of Connexity. Average spend will be $606, or $1,086 for households with college-age children.