June 7, 2013
40% of American adults claim to have checked out a product in a brick-and-mortar store before purchasing it elsewhere online ("showroomed"), according to a recent survey from Harris Interactive, although recent data from xAd and Telemetrics suggests that smartphones aren't being used that often for showrooming. Nevertheless, retailers concerned with showrooming who have adopted a permanent price matching policy might be slightly encouraged with the results from the Harris study, which found 57% of showroomers saying they would be much (20%) or somewhat (37%) more likely to purchase in-store as a result. Read more »
June 6, 2013
Email volume increased by 11.6% year-over-year in Q1, following a 5.4% year-over-year increase in Q4, details Experian Marketing Services in its Q1 Email Benchmark Study [download page]. Multi-channel retailers increased their email volume the most rapidly, by 20.2%, as 70% of brands sent more emails compared to the prior year. Travel brands saw the next-highest growth, of 113.6%, although only half of the brands increased mailings. Read more »
June 5, 2013
A study of online shoppers [pdf] by UPS and comScore reveals that the vast majority of those who have liked a retailer on Facebook pay either a little attention to its updates (i.e. briefly skim for information - 52%) or a lot of attention (i.e. by reading the update as if it were from a friend - 34%). That leaves just 14% of respondents either skipping over the updates (8%) or claiming to not notice them at all (6%). While these updates don't seem to be leading to much direct downstream traffic, per the latest Monetate data, social's influence typically occurs earlier rather than later in the purchase journey. Read more »
June 5, 2013
Digital behaviors are increasingly making their presence felt in the grocery shopping world, per data from Acosta's latest "The Why? Behind The Buy" [download page] report. In the Spring 2013 survey, 28% of grocery shoppers indicated they regularly print a coupon from a website before, during or after their grocery shopping trips, up from 24% in the Fall of 2012. More consumers are also signing up to get future emails from a product manufacturer or store (21% vs. 17%), loading coupons onto their shopper cards from a website (19% vs. 14%), and signing up for texts and emails that provide coupons they can print out (17% vs. 13%), among others. Read more »
June 4, 2013
For the second consecutive year, UPS and comScore have teamed up to release the "UPS Pulse of the Online Shopper" [pdf] study. And if there's one takeaway from this year's study, it's that shipping costs plays a huge role in influencing online shoppers' attitudes and behavior. When asked their top drivers of positive recommendations for an online retailer, a leading 68% of respondents cited free shipping, easily the top answer. And when asked their top drivers for negative recommendations, a leading 59% cited shipping costs being too high based on the product price. Not only do shipping costs drive recommendations, both positive and negative, but they're also the leading culprit in shopping cart abandonment. Read more »
June 3, 2013
Compete and GroupM have released a new report that analyzes more than 168,000 purchases of consumer electronics in which the consumer used digital media somewhere along their purchase path. The study, revealing that digital media and advertising heavily influenced almost half of all purchases, identifies 6 types of digital shopper. The researchers argue that purchase journeys are more influenced by behavioral factors than demographics, as each shopper segment sports "remarkably" similar demographics. Read more »
June 3, 2013
E-commerce sites exceeded the threshold of excellence in customer satisfaction last year, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, and new data from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) confirms that online merchants are providing worthy experiences to visitors. Across 16 industry segments examined in the BCG study, online merchants came in second with a "digital satisfaction score" of 11.8, putting them squarely in the bucket of leaders who are best able to satisfy their consumers' expectations. Close behind, media retailers, with a score of 11.1. Read more »
May 30, 2013
78% of smartphone owners and 75% of tablet owners consider the "look and feel" of a company's mobile website when considering whether or not to make a purchase from it, finds Kentico Software in new survey results. These consumers are quick to reward brands for positive mobile experiences, with slightly more than three-quarters of smartphone and tablet owners saying they often return to websites that are visually appealing and function well on their devices. They're also quick to punish those who don't do such a good job: 44% say they would never go back to the site, and 52% would not return often. Read more »
May 28, 2013
3 in 4 American adults report having noticed billboard (static or digital), transit or street-level advertising in the past month, finds Arbitron in its 2013 "Out-of-Home Advertising Report," and that rises to 84% among those who have driven or ridden in a vehicle. Among adults who have viewed a billboard or other out-of-home media in the past month ("OOH media viewers"), many have taken a range of online and offline responses, ranging from watching an advertised TV show to visiting an advertised website. Read more »
May 23, 2013
Compared to email (2.82%) and social media (1.55%), search (31.43%) is easily the primary driver of direct e-commerce traffic, according to [download page] the latest quarterly report from Monetate covering Q1 activity. That's the way it has been for some time now, and probably will be for the foreseeable future, at least when considering that the share of e-commerce traffic coming from both social and email decreased in Q1 compared to a year earlier. But the researchers make a valid point that is bolstered by other recent studies: these findings are based on a last-touch attribution model, which typically undervalues social's role significantly. Read more »
