With such heavy emphasis on all things mobile, it can be overwhelming for independent retailers and emerging brands to determine the best course of action for their business. But going mobile possesses countless irrefutable benefits that your business would be foolish to turn away from.
In the U.K. alone, smartphone penetration is estimated at around 51%, with 59% of smartphone owners accessing the internet daily from their devices. For younger generations, it looks as if desktop devices will be skipped altogether in favour of a mobile or tablet.
Undoubtedly all of this can be more than a little daunting for traditional retailers, primarily because it’s such a huge change of pace to shift to multi-channel marketing while still offering customers the same smooth, consistent and integrated brand message. However, there is no doubt in most retailers’ minds that mobile must be embraced if they wish to remain appealing to the consumer.
There are 3 dominant ways that mobile commerce excels when it comes to giving retailers an advantage in capturing audience attention:
Push Notifications
Push notifications are pop-ups in the style of text messages that can be received by anyone who downloads an app. Once the app is downloaded, the user can be notified of new messages or events, which will appear in the mobile’s status bar.
Push notifications offer an appealing new marketing channel for fashion retailers as they are a quick and easy way to appeal to people’s short attention spans. Furthermore, statistics suggest that email open rates are experiencing a steady decline, while more and more consumers are accepting push notifications once they download an app.
Geo-Fencing
This involves your phone determining precisely where you are at a given moment so that your phone’s apps can send you information about location-specific deals and offers. Luxury brands have no doubt capitalised on this to connect the online world with the offline world.
Personalisation
Personalisation involves retailers leveraging on customers once they have downloaded an app. A link is made with the customers’ social media accounts, which keeps track of which products they browse through, shows them the products their friends have liked and offers them special discounts.
For the luxury market, mobile will without doubt continue to play a very crucial role. While the age-group of mobile shoppers averages 25-34, a study conducted by the Luxury Institute discovered that 67% of wealthy smartphone users regularly shop via mobile device.
As consumers continue to demand 24-hour access across a range of devices and channels, now has never been a more crucial time for fashion retailers to make the shift to mobile.
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