Mobile reach is continuing to rise, with the help of a bumper Christmas for retailers and a growing multichannel audience.
On Boxing Day 2012, the number of consumers using a mobile device to visit brand websites totalled 30.7 per cent, which is up dramatically from the 19.8 per cent it reached on the same day in 2011.
This is according to IBM’s Digital Analytics Benchmark data, which also showed that conversions into sales were high.
The number of people making a purchase on mobile increased to 24.7 per cent, which is up by around nine per cent on the previous year.
This represents the huge potential reach of mobile advertising, and the growing market it can now tap into, compared to previous years.
Year-on-year, a 45 per cent growth in total online sales has also been noted, meaning mobile sales have in fact more than doubled during this period.
Such a shift in the market was predicted, but not necessarily to this extent, giving retailers a welcome surprise following a hectic Christmas trading season.
However, Chris Withers, UK head of smarter commerce at IBM, disagreed and claimed that the figures were to be expected by businesses, following months of planning and numerous marketing strategies to best take advantage of this busy time.
“Retailers started their promotions early this year, but shoppers have still been holding out for the best prices around and after Christmas, and going online is one way of ensuring they get these deals,” he explained.
“The combination of an increase in use of smartphones and tablets, better retail websites, and devices such as the iPad being top of most gift lists this year has created a perfect storm of factors for healthy Boxing Day online trading,” Mr Withers went on to say.
He added that with such positive figures it is essential that retailers pay attention to successful online and mobile marketing strategies and continue to use them to boost engagement and conversion levels.
“Retailers now need to ensure they keep on providing the best customer service possible across all of the places their customers shop,” Mr Withers said of the much-favoured multichannel approach.
Mobile retailing in particular has gone from strength to strength, with new data from Flurry Analytics showing that the iPad has had an especially positive Christmas, generating more traffic than any other mobile device.
Mobile Marketing Magazine reports that it made up 15.8 per cent of online shopping by itself, which was an increase of 109 per cent on 2011 levels.
This compares to the iPhone, with 8.6 per cent of all sales and Android devices totalling 6.2 per cent of the market share.
As can be expected, more iOS and Android devices were activated on Christmas Day than any other day in history, with 17.4 million recorded in all. This is 2.5 times more than December 25th 2011.
Tablets took a narrow majority of 51 per cent, with Amazon’s Kindle doing particularly well, as activations grew by several thousand per cent on Christmas Day.
As well as receiving new devices, download rates averaged at around 20 million per hour throughout the peak of the day.
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