Mobile Marketing

October is National Pizza Month, and two pizza chains are using mobile and social technology to heat up their loyalty programs as the weather cools.

The Los Angeles-based, 200-plus-unit California Pizza Kitchen will leverage a Paytronix-powered mobile rewards program.

Leveraging geofencing to identify members of its Pizza Dough loyalty program when they are near stores, California Pizza Kitchen will send push/pull mobile messages with a special October promotion offering 25% savings.

Retailers who do not offer an option for online or mobile shopping may find their customers opting out. A new survey of U.S. and Canadian consumers from MasterCard, “The Psyche of Shopping,” shows that consumers have purposely chosen not to buy something when a retailer did not have an online payment option (68%), a mobile payment option (19%), or an in-app payment option (14%).

Consumers may make merry during the upcoming holiday season, but mobile devices may be less a part of the action than retailers like.

According to a new survey from marketing automation platform provider Bronto Software, only 19% of holiday shoppers plan to purchase from a tablet, and 22% from a smartphone.

Consumers will use mobile devices to search for the best deal: 65% will look for promotions and coupons, 63% will check prices on that store's website and 61% will search for lower prices at another store or site.

Social media has evolved into a powerful marketing tool for retailers. But so far, social commerce is not yet a major transactional channel.

Twitter is the latest social platform to attempt to take advantage of social media’s immediacy to offer direct purchase functionality aimed at impulse shoppers.

Proponents of the motto “image is everything” will be pleased with a new partnership eBay Enterprise is launching. The online retail platform is teaming up with visual commerce platform Curalate to give publishers the ability to drive traffic and revenue from images sourced from Instagram.

The partnership offers Curalate Like2Buy, which allows users to directly click to purchases from Instagram images, to more than 100,000 publishers in the eBay Enterprise Affiliate Network.

Lane Bryant is teaming up with the American Cancer Society on an omnichannel campaign to raise money for breast cancer research.

Since 2012, Lane Bryant customers and associates have contributed $1.4 million dollars to the American Cancer Society's Making Strides Against Breast Cancer campaign. The brand says it aims to increase the 2015 contribution by 21% for a total contribution of $2 million dollars in 4 years.

Woody Allen famously said 80% of success is showing up, and that saying may well apply to mobile retailing. According to a new study from Google, “Micro-moments: Your Guide to Winning the Shift to Mobile,” 51% of smartphone users have discovered a new company or product when conducting research.

In addition, showing up in mobile search ad results can increase unaided brand awareness 46%. And one in three smartphone users have purchased from a company or brand other than the one they intended because of information provided in the moment they needed it.

Consumers are taking an increasingly varied path to purchase for tech accessories. According to the Second Annual Accessories at Retail study from the Consumer Electronic Association (CEA), almost two-thirds of U.S. consumers (62%) and more than three-quarters of millennials (77%) now go online via computer or mobile device to learn about tech accessories before making a purchase decision.

However, fewer U.S. consumers are making their final purchases online using a computer (30%) or mobile (7%).