Mobile Shopping to Leap This Holiday Season

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Mobile should play a more important role in holiday shopping this year, a roundup of research findings attests.

InsightExpress’ Q3 2011 Digital Consumer Portrait found that 32 percent of consumers plan to use their mobile devices to help research products by comparison shopping, while 27 percent will use them to read reviews while in the store.

This month, 15 percent of people in the U.S. logging onto a retailer’s website are expected to do so through a mobile device, according to data from IBM Coremetrics Benchmark. Mobile devices will help boost November shopping by as much as 15 percent over November 2010, IBM said.

In October, close to 11 percent of people used a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site, up from 4.2 percent in October 2010. Mobile sales reached a high of 9.6 percent in October 2011, up from 3.4 percent the previous year, according to Coremetrics.

In fact, in the retail sector, 77 percent of all mobile traffic now comes from tablets, according to digital marketing company Efficient Frontier.

"The most disruption you'll see is from smartphones," said Mack McKelvey, senior vice president, Millennial Media. "While it's a huge challenge for advertisers to think about this, It also represents a huge opportunity. Consumers are saying they will use smartphones to search for better prices. So, before you even get the consumer to the store, you have to think about what you're going to do."

McKelvey says marketers should advertise now to get their brands in front of consumers, and then think about specific ads and promotions as we get closer to the holiday. The key, she says, is to reach consumers higher up in the purchase funnel.

She says, "It's going to be very hard to impact low-funnel activity in the store via mobile if they haven't done the high-funnel activity leading up to it."