The rise of mobile in promotions
Mobile phones have changed our lives…
But it’s nothing new, the first mobile phone [The Brick] launched in 1984, costing £2,500 and weighing 2lbs!
In the last year we have received over half a million visitors to our clients’ promotional web sites. The big change has been the rise of mobile – we have seen as high as 80% of entrants to a promotion arrive on a mobile. We have also learnt that the significance of mobile can really depend on the promotion, the brand and the consumer. And, on average, across all the promotions we ran in the last year (up to Sept 2013) 38% of traffic has come from mobiles.
No surprise, really – things have changed – smartphones are now 51% of all phones, and 50% of people use their phone to access the web [Ofcom 2013]
Key themes in mobile promotions
Impulse
We tend to see higher mobile entry levels from products more typically sold in the impulse channel, these tend to be smaller format packs, where we have seen up to 68% of entrants to consumers on these pack enter via their mobile phone – that’s about 3 out of every 5 entrants.
Grocery
There tends to be a larger presence of tablet usage for products that are more typically sold through the grocery channel, in some cases almost 1 in 5 entries have come from a tablet. This is where we see a lower percentage of mobiles and an increase desktop traffic. Mobile can be anything from 15 to 30% of entries, with desktop traffic around two thirds of traffic.
Facebook Apps do not currently work when using Facebook’s mobile application, and in these cases we build a workaround – with quite staggering results.
For a recent client, we saw 77% of their promotion traffic coming via mobile. The promotion was only ever a Facebook promotion, and only marketed via Facebook.
Entrants clicked on a link in their Facebook newsfeed on their phone – and here we used an auto-detect link, which identified the desktop traffic from the mobile traffic. Mobile traffic was diverted to a mobile-specific site, a responsive version of the Facebook promtion App, built specifically for mobile.
Top Tips
• Including a mobile route to a promotion is no longer an option, it is essential.
• Best case, build your promotional site responsively, worst case, build a simpler entry page/route for mobile entrants.
• Mobile traffic to promotions can be significant, but think about your audience and where they buy and where they are most likely to interact before to evaluate the relative value of the spend on a mobile route.
• Mobile promotions can work well using Facebook, they just need to be built correctly.
• Don’t forget traditional promotion best practice to validate entries, drive shares and engagement.
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