Category: GMX Mail

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Computer Technology Information

With the holiday week upon us marketers are kicking their programs into high in hopes of achieving maximum inbox placement, clicks and ultimately, conversion.  The economy has made the battle for holiday dollars fierce. Consumers are looking for the best deals and marketers are eager to pack their inboxes with as many relevant offers as they can.

It’s understandable that sending a volley of emails detailing fantastic products, promotions, specials, exclusive savings, buy one get one, two for the price of one, discontinued stock discounts and other offers seems like a really good idea. And in essence it is a good idea when you consider how important it is for you to make sales and impressions ahead of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday super retail events.

However, I would urge caution before letting lose your creative advertising talent without first thoroughly vetting the deliverability of those efforts. You see your competition is doing the exact same thing. In order for you to succeed you have to differentiate yourself from every offer in the inbox, but we’ll get to that in a moment. First you have to actually reach the inbox and let me caution you by saying, not all inboxes are created equally.

As we start the holiday week it appears as though 3 of the 4 major global ISPs, AOL, Gmail & Yahoo! all show deliverability in what we commonly accept as the industry standard range: approximately 80% inbox. As you can see there are fairly broad variations with AOL at times slipping below 80%, while Gmail appears to offer the best deliverability with a peak of over 90% inbox placement.

If we accept that 1 in 5 emails never reaches the intended inbox, and winds up either blocked or in the spam folder then Hotmail appears to be doubling that metric with deliverability averaging just over 66%. This means that almost 2 in every 5 emails lands in the spam folder or doesn’t reach the intended recipient.

By now your lists have been pulled and your segments readied with offers and digital collateral to engage your customers across any and all channels simultaneously.  However, it’s never too late to spend a few minutes and consider tactics and methods for ensuring your messages actually reach your customers.

• Less is more – email is not a volume sport where you deliver every message to every person who ever signed up for an email. Quite the contrary, the less you send, and the more targeted your messages are, the more likely you will build a positive reputation at the receiving ISPs.
• Email only active users – consumers change email address, close accounts and ISPs routinely turn closed or inactive accounts into spam traps or honey pots. If you email every one on your list since the dawn of time you will invariably deliver messages to spam traps that will cause the rest of your wanted mail not to arrive.
• Find your optimal delivery window – track your competition’s emails, see when they send them, most marketers believe that Tuesday and Thursday AM are the best times to deliver email, look for opportunities where your brand can stand out from the crowd because you’re not launching your emails during the thickest marketing pushes. Remember, the first email to reach the inbox is often the message at the bottom of the list.
• Authentication is key – test your domains and IPs, ensure that you have the proper and valid SPF/SenderID, DK & DKIM records for all outbound email traffic. Help the ISPs by differentiating your email traffic from the vast volumes of SPAM lobbed at ISPs on a daily basis.
• Send constant volume – in keeping with the paradigm of less is more, less more often is often better than more at one time. By sending constant manageable volumes you will establish and build a strong reputation, given you’re emailing people who want to receive your messages, rather than that one final push where you launch a major campaign across IPs that irregular amounts of traffic sent across them. Active IPs with positive reputation have more chances of delivering email to the inbox than inactive IPs that suddenly show volume spikes.
• Test your email templates – creativity abounds around the holidays, but keep in mind you have a brand to protect. Make sure whatever special templates you use are single column, include a text part if you’re sending multi-part mime, and that you’ve thoroughly tested the content to ensure deliverability at the major ISPs before going to market with one-off designs.
• Stand out from the crowd – leverage data across channels to make smarter decisions as to where and when your customers are engaging with your brand. If you can track activity and link shares across social networks instead of sending social fans emails, try and communicate with them through social media.

By taking a few basic steps marketers can help ensure that they will stay at the top of their customer’s inboxes rather than at the bottom of their spam folders.  As the week goes on we will be providing you key information to help you see and contextualize your efforts. We’re tracking deliverability and other metrics across mailers and ISPs around the globe. Look for updates as we get closer to Cyber Monday and then a post-mortem analysis the day after.

Cheers!
-Len Shneyder | @lenshneyder
IBM EMM Product Marketing MGr.

Unica

Today IBM announced its intent to acquire DemandTec, Inc., one of the leaders in cloud-based pricing, promotion, and merchandising analytics. This deal, which is of course subject to DemandTec shareholder approval and all of the usual closing conditions, will allow our Smarter Commerce customers to better define and deliver the best prices and product mix based on consumer buying trends.

The thinking behind the acquisition is simple: to help our clients succeed in a world of highly empowered customers. This means that we aim to be the key partner to help our customers be both relevant and consistent in their engagements with their own customers across all channels—while still competing against all other companies who are trying to do the exact same thing.

Furthermore, rapidly shifting customer and business trends require companies to be highly responsive to changes in demand. By extension, setting and executing the right pricing strategy and the ability to automatically adjust it based on online and offline data is a key competitive advantage for businesses. That’s where DemandTec comes in. DemandTec delivers science and agility to help organizations optimize their price, promotion, and product mix within the broad context of enterprise commerce: retail, B2C, and consumer goods.

Our proposed acquisition of DemandTec will extend IBM’s Smarter Commerce solutions by enabling companies to use cloud computing services to gain broader insights about customer merchandising and pricing preferences to better market, sell and deliver the right product at the right time, at the right place, and at the right price. DemandTec will enrich our market-leading Smarter Commerce portfolio, which includes Websphere Commerce and solutions acquired from other technology visionaries, including Sterling Commerce, Unica and Coremetrics. DemandTec will also expand IBM’s SaaS strategy by adding new, subscription-based offerings to our SaaS solutions portfolio and will deepen our suite of offerings targeted at merchandising, sales, and marketing professionals.

Of course until the deal closes, we’ll continue to operate as two separate businesses. In the meantime, my team and I will look forward to welcoming DemandTec’s employees, clients, and partners to IBM.

Unica

A couple of weeks ago when I wrote about online shopping trends and predictions for this holiday season, I focused largely on the rise of the mobile shopper. Today in honor of Black Friday, I’d like to focus instead on social shopping.

Social shopping, as I’m sure most of you know, refers to those people who turn to their social networks for advice or research when they’re considering a purchase. Seems like a pretty intuitive concept. But the fact is that I’ve spoken to far too many retailers who have either discounted the notion that social shopping will ever make significant contributions to their bottom lines or who throw up their hands in frustration and say something along the lines of “I just don’t understand how to use it to drive revenue.”

These are the kinds of perspectives that drive retailers out of business. Here’s why. IBM data shows that people who arrive at a retailer’s site from Facebook are nearly twice as likely to buy something than other people. Put another way, social media’s ability to influence consumer behavior far outstrips that of other channels.

The reason lies in the very nature of social media. Social media is built on the premise that one person’s opinion is not only as valid as anyone else’s, but that it’s authentic and therefore trustworthy. People tend to trust someone (even a perfect stranger) who has taken the time to post an opinion on a Facebook page much more than they trust an ad. More to the point, IBM data shows that people are willing to act on the opinions of strangers. It turns out that even on the Internet, it’s the human relationship that matters.

What we’re talking about is the evolution of the Internet from a click-based experience to a people-based experience. Rather than clicking through pages and pages of Google search results, people are turning to their social networks for advice. Consumers have the ability to exert influence over brands in ways that weren’t possible before the rise of social media. What’s more, they know it. IBM’s Yuchun Lee has often said that social media is like “truth serum” for businesses. Use that to your advantage.

The implications for retailers (or any business) are clear: you must identify, nurture and promote brand advocates, ratings and reviews, and social conversations. These are the people whose opinions will influence your sales across a network of people everywhere. Social shopping matters for one achingly simple reason: in the age of the empowered consumer, you are marketing and selling your goods and services to people who have a multitude of ways to broadcast their opinions to thousands upon thousands of other people (and potential customers).

If you don’t care about social shoppers, you’re in the wrong business.

Unica

Thanksgiving has always fascinated me. It’s the one day a year that every American family is eating basically the same meal (with a few variations, of course) and watching football and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The entire country stops and collectively does the same thing.

Now we can add one more national activity to Thanksgiving Day: shopping. Who would have thought that Americans would actually want to shop on a national holiday? Actually, my team and I don’t just think that people want to shop: we know it. We use IBM digital analytics to track—in real time—what’s happening in online retail across the U.S. every day of the year. We know that this year, for example, online retailers will bring in record Thanksgiving Day sales.

Americans want to shop on Thanksgiving, but the way they shop has changed dramatically. If you’ve heard me speak at the IBM Marketing Innovations Summit, you’ll know that I’ve long said that the traditional, funnel-based approach to marketing is broken. Consumers are smarter and more sophisticated about the many ways they can use technology to redefine the shopping experience on their terms. Want to save a buck? Look for promo codes online (you might also be able to redeem them in store).  Worried about in-store inventory levels for that game your son absolutely has to have? Hop online to see if your local store has it in stock or skip the worry altogether and just buy it online.

The point is that consumers today have a technology arsenal that they can use to research online and then channel hop at will. That’s a game changer. It places tremendous pressure on businesses to offer a consistent, engaging, brand-relevant multi-channel experience.  At the same time, it turns the concept of brand loyalty on its head. People are now only as loyal as their last experience was satisfying. I call this “experiential loyalty,” and it forces businesses to center themselves on their customers and what these customers consider important. What you think is important doesn’t matter: act on what your customers tell you is important.

I don’t mean to underplay how difficult it can be to consistently deliver marketing so relevant that your customers consider it a service. Marketing in the age of the empowered consumer can be challenging.  As my colleague, Annalivia Ford, has so eloquently said, no one wants to be the guy who annoys a customer into abandoning a brand they used to love.

IBM is on a mission to fix marketing for the benefit of the consumer. We call our approach Smarter Commerce and we believe this market represents a billion opportunity. My former Unica team has been combined with Coremetrics to deliver the broadest range of enterprise marketing management solutions available anywhere.

We’re up to the challenge of redefining marketing. Are you?

Unica

I recently got an email asking me if I thought ISPs tighten the rules during the holidays to be more strict on senders. It’s a question I got quite often when I was at AOL, also.

So…do they??

In my opinion the answer is no, they don’t! There are a many reasons for this thought, but it all boils down to the fact that the holidays are a nightmare for ISP staff, and the last thing I can imagine them doing is making their workload higher on purpose. Consider that:

• Malware infections jump during this season which means that help-center tickets increase dramatically as does inbound mail volume due to more computers being added to bot-nets.
• Marketing mail volumes go up in response to the retail frenzy which means that mail volume increases exponentially.
• All the additional strain on the inbound relays and spam-processing servers means things break more, which means that admins get no time to sleep because queueing mail causes more problems than it solves…
• Queueing mail has a domino effect that causes problems for other ISPs, and also means delays in mail reaching end users, which means another increase in help-center tickets.
• Along with all this, people get new technological toys over Christmas and want to get them online…
• … all of which means that help-centers are flooded.
• Help-center overload means tickets are not resolved in a timely fashion, which means that…ISP customers get angry, which is at minumum bad PR – folks complain on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, to their friends on the phone – and at worst means losing a customer (and possibly his friends!).
• Changing how the spam systems work means that production code changes get stress tested real-time, which over the holidays with lots of staff on vacation is unlikely to have a good outcome.
• ISP admins are people too. They want to have a nice holiday, eat a lot and drink more, and to relax and spend time with their loved ones just like everyone else. A relaxed holiday is a pipe-dream for most admins anyway, and making live changes to existing systems makes it even more unlikely to happen!

This is one big ugly stressball for ISP staff, who are thin on the ground and over-worked to begin with. I cannot imagine a scenario in which significant changes would be made to production anti-spam systems except in the case of dire emergency.

The perception that ISPs are deliberately throttling email or tightening things down over the holidays is entirely due to changes in the inbound mail stream – differences created by marketers who change their own behavior during the holidays. Anti-spam and reputation systems react to sudden spikes in volume, invalid users, and spam complaints, which are caused by the sender’s decisions to send to older segments, send more frequently, send across channels, send to purchased or rented lists. These are all things that many marketers typically do over the holidays. This spiky behavior is seen as outside the norm and treated accordingly – and rightly so! There is nothing unusual about this at all.

So…as I said in my previous post, the best thing marketers can do during the holidays is to follow best practices, to not make significant changes to their email programs that would result in additional poorly targeted mail being sent out, to treat their clients with the same respect they wish to get from companies they buy from themselves, and to be patient with the ISPs, who are doing the very best they can with ever-more-limited resources.

“Do unto others as you would wish they do unto you” is a very applicable idea, as well as “less is more”. Respect the email eco-system, keep the big picture in mind and it will pay off!

Unica

As clocks roll back and the days grow shorter, we’re going to pause and review last quarter’s (Q3) deliverability across email, mobile and social messaging to get our bearings as we head into this holiday season. It’s more important than ever to mine data, extrapolate trends and make strategic decisions based on good tactical analysis as many marketers prepare for their most crucial marketing pushes of the year.

Deliverability Holds Strong in Q3

On average, 1 in 5 emails wind up in either the spam folder or is blocked outright. This has been a long held statistic to describe average deliverability across industries—this continues to be the case Q3 of 2011.

However, the average is not reflective of all industries and verticals out there. Across different retail sectors we’ve seen deliverability as high as 95% on average and as low as 75%. Travel and hospitality remain strong with an average 92% deliverability, while Publishing has languished at 73%. It’s important to recognize how the industry as a whole is performing in order to set realistic goals for the coming quarters.

Weekly Deliverability

As has been the case for a long time, Tuesdays and Thursdays are still the strongest days for marketers to deliver their emails. Email marketing appears to follow the workweek in lock step. On average, since Q1 2011, we’ve seen deliverability improve on an average of 2-5% for Monday-Thursday. In Q1 deliverability to the inbox on Mondays averaged 78.6% while in Q3 it’s risen to just over 83%. This is good news for marketers and probably gives many of them justification to not make any changes moving into the holiday season.

It’s hard to justify experimentation during crucial periods of the year. However, opportunity does exist outside of the traditionally coveted days of Tuesdays and Thursdays for intrepid marketers. Weekends show much higher deliverability and the added bonus of less competition. If we think about this logically then we can assume that patterns of engagement that relied on consumers being present either at work or at home in front of their PCs no longer paint an accurate picture. Because of this, weekends are fertile ground for ongoing campaigns.

If you don’t take my word on it, just see how many of your competitors are experimenting with weekend driven campaigns. Test small portions of your house file and see if they respond to offers on weekends only vs. those that receive them during the week. This will help you determine of weekend campaigning is right for your brand and consumer demographics.

Human Behavior Drives Mobile & Social

Reliably, human beings are creatures of habit. Their habits in regard to mobile engagement have remained relatively similar over the last three quarters. Mornings show less mobile engagement but it grows rapidly as we approach the noon hour, after which it remains high but tapering off as we move into the evening.

Consumers are no longer tied to a desk; smart phones have enabled them to stay connected everywhere. To take advantage of your consumer’s mobility and their new patterns of cross-channel engagement, it’s important to track and understand who is using what kind of device and where.

Use this keen information to selectively deliver optimized messages during strong hours of mobile engagement, 11:00 AM – 2:00 PM. By doing so you give your emails the best chance to grab the consumer’s attention and be at the top of their inbox.

Design Across Devices & Platforms

Marketing collateral design remains an important factor in today’s digital messaging. Based on our findings the full message view is beginning to hedge out the preview pane among consumers reading email across platforms, channels and devices. This may in part be due to smart phones and tablets which don’t employ a preview pane due to size constraints. Robust design in today’s world is one that can cross channels, devices and platforms, marketers have employed simple elastic formats to achieve the most uniform designs. When planning cross channel designs keep in mind a few basic rules:

• Use a single column design that renders across mobile, desktop and web email clients seamlessly.
• If the call to action is hard to read or press on your phone, then it’s just as hard on your customer’s handset. Keep it clear and straightforward and you’re likely see a higher conversion rate.
• Let your text breathe—use a 10 pixel border and keep content from the edges of your layout, as it can be difficult to read when text comes up to the very edges of a mobile screen.
• Don’t forget your ALT Tags. Although marketers enjoy the default image ON feature of devices such as the iPhone and iPad, you have to take measures to protect your brand in web email clients and desktop email clients where images may be off by default.
• Your landing pages are just as important as your emails; optimizing them is part of the overall cross-channel optimization design strategy. If you convinced someone to click a link in your email, imagine their surprise when the page isn’t optimized for their mobile device.
• Not all browsers are built the same; test your email across browsers and versions of those browsers. Given the fact that Microsoft is only now retiring Internet Explorer 6 (10 years later), there’s a wild mix of browser versions out there each with their own nuances. What works in one browser may not work very well in another. Compound that with how different and varied the rendering engines of webmail clients are and you have a cornucopia of design permutations for which to code and anticipate. If you’re uncertain what should be your lowest common denominator, then might I suggest you look no further than the World Wide Web Consortium’s HTML standard and test your code against their code validators for code compliance.

Users are increasingly cross channel in their media consumption habits and how they engage with brands. Marketers have to think similarly in order to anticipate and deliver high quality content to engage and sustain lasting conversations.

Social Continues to Grow

Social media and the growing social marketplace continue to make their mark on today’s marketing world. We examined a few dimensions related to the social marketplace to understand how email influences and drives content across channels and helps enforce a brand’s presence from one digital messaging stream to another. Mobile devices continue to feed the social media marketplace growing significantly, almost 50% (from 11.25%) in Q1 of 2011.

Compelling content is the foundation of social media. The two major social networks, Facebook & Twitter, attract fairly different levels of engagement and content. Tweeting appears to be more mechanical than posting to Facebook. The relative speed of tweets and audience makeup differs from the social networks of most users that can include family members and close friends. Posting to Facebook reaches a more personal audience than twitter and users seem to limit what they post to Facebook a bit more than what gets tweeted to the greater world audience. This means two things for marketers:

• Ensure your content has clear mechanisms allowing users to share it through their social networks
• Create engaging content that is likely to be shared among more trusted circles such as Facebook

Conclusion

Although the coming holidays may seem bleak with the current economic outlook, the potential for reaching today’s consumers and the avenues that marketers can take to do it are numerous. Smartphones have enabled consumers to take their inboxes on the road and creative marketers can take advantage of Location Based Services to truly deliver the right message at the right time to the right person.

Continue to build engagement among your customer base by ensuring you know and take advantage of their messaging habits. Correlate data across channels to find meaningful insights that will help you plan for future success. Hold back from blanket messaging everyone across every channel in your house file because the danger of message fatigue is real and can do irreparable harm to your overall marketing. Set realistic goals but allow room for experimentation that is tempered with good research and data rich decisions. The danger in today’s market place is to believe that yesterday’s approaches will yield tomorrow’s success, they may for a brief period of time, but if one thing is certain the world is changing faster and faster every day.

Cheers!
-Len Shneyder
IBM Product Marketing Mgr.

Unica

It’s that time of year again, when people are going to open their wallets and spend money on Christmas presents and retailers crank up their email engines in the hopes of grabbing their piece of the pie.

In the face of a struggling economy and general hard times, it is hard to avoid the temptation to indulge in various mailing tactics that are not best practices, like dusting off older segments of mailing lists, significantly increasing mail volume, sending mail across channels where permission was not explicitly given, buying mailing lists, etc.

Some may argue that there is no harm engaging in squirrely practices in the interest of making the sale now and then cleaning up the results later – immediate gratification always feels good and makes the financial quarter’s bottom line look great – but… there are costs which may not be immediately obvious. One of them is annoying customers into abandoning a brand they used to love.

A couple of years ago I wrote a post about a major retailer that I’d bought from many times, over the course of 6 years or so. I was accustomed to getting an email a day with their special offer du jour, but in the weeks before Christmas they started sending me 2 a day, and then one day hit me with 3 in the space of a few hours. The third email was not only the tipping point for me in volume, but was also somewhat misleading. I unsubscribed in a fit of deep annoyance and never went back.

Consider that over the years I had spent considerable money at this retailer and was quite prepared to continue doing so: they offered a good product at great prices along with good customer service, which is a hard combination to beat. In their attempt to get a larger share of the Christmas pie, though, they lost my future business and also that of my friends to whom I had been enthusiastically referring the site. Was the possible immediate short-term gain worth the loss of steady future business and referrals? Probably not.

Now is not the time to get creative with bad mailing practices: the amount of marketing mail people get this season is unarguably larger than normal which is already predisposed to being aggravating: irritating folks into making your marketing disappear – possibly for ever -  is never a good idea. Buying mailing lists is never a good idea. Sending to stale old segments is never a good idea. All it takes is a couple of clicks from your recipients to make bad things happen to your good lists. Don’t be that guy!

Now is the time to make sure your lists are cleaned up, as low on invalid users as you can make them, and as fresh as possible.  It is time to make sure your bounce handling is able to keep up with your volume. It is time to increase engagement and ROI by sending compelling email offers that people want, to people who asked to get them. Relevance, engagement, clean lists are the mantra!

May your email flow cleanly and profitably this Christmas season!

(“Make The Pie Higher” is a poem composed of random Bushisms)

Unica

It’s my great pleasure to announce that IBM has been named to the “Leaders” quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Integrated Marketing Management, Kimberly Collins, Adam Sarner, October 26, 2011. This recognition comes on the heels of our also being named a leader in  The Forrester Wave™: Web Analytics Q4 2011 (where we also received the highest scores of any vendor for both current offering and strategy).These positions are in addition to being named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Marketing Resource Management, Kimberly Collins, February 1, 2011. Only IBM can claim such broad and strong market recognition for its Enterprise Marketing Management offerings.

We at IBM place a premium on ensuring that our solutions do what we claim they’ll do, and therefore, an investment in IBM Enterprise Marketing Management offerings is a very good bet. We think that our consistent and strong performance in third-party evaluations reflects that commitment. We’re investing in integrated marketing management solutions for the long haul. Indeed, IBM’s considered decision to acquire Unica and Coremetrics and to then combine the two into a single group focused on marketing management is a multi-year play, and one that will combine our many strengths—multi-channel campaign management, integrated email, and digital analytics to name but a few—into one, fully integrated offering.

And while we’re proud of the recognition for our Integrated Marketing Resource Management Solutions, we’re actually focused on an even bigger prize: delivering the broadest range of enterprise marketing management solutions available anywhere.

About the Magic Quadrant

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Unica

ARMONK, N.Y. – 04 Nov 2011: During this year’s November holiday season an unprecedented 15 percent of people in the U.S. logging onto a retailer’s Web site are expected to do so through a mobile device, according to cloud analytics-based findings by IBM (NYSE: IBM).

(Photo:  http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20111104/NY00549-a )

(Photo:  http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20111104/NY00549-b )

Based on data from the IBM Coremetrics Benchmark, all online holiday shopping in November is also expected to grow as much as 15 percent versus November 2010, with the growing influence of mobile devices such as iPads and Android phones being among the key factors.

The IBM Coremetrics Benchmark analysis gathers data directly from the web sites of more than 500 leading U.S. retailers. Using sophisticated analytics technology, the benchmark measures real-time sales data and online marketing results to uncover shopping trends across a wide-variety of channels including social media, mobile devices and other online sources where consumers interact with their brands.

This latest installment serves as the commencement of IBM’s fourth-annual Benchmark Campaign and reveals the following 2011 online retail predictions for the November holiday season:

• Online Shopping Growth: Total online sales in November will experience impressive growth of 12-15 percent over the same period in 2010.
• Mobile Traffic and Sales: Record numbers of consumers will shift their shopping from the PC to their mobile device this holiday season. In October nearly 11 percent of people used a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site, up from 4.2 percent in October 2010. Additionally, mobile sales continue to increase, reaching a high of 9.6 percent in October 2011, up from 3.4 percent in October 2010.
• iPhone & Android: For the first time, Android users will demonstrate similar levels of mobile shopping as iPhone users. These October 2011 numbers show iPhone accounting for 4.0 percent of mobile traffic and Android 3.5 percent.
• The iPad Factor: Shoppers using an iPad will lead to more retail purchases more often per visit than other mobile devices. This trend is based on October 2011 figures where iPad conversion rates reached 6.8 percent as compared to the overall mobile device conversion rate of 3.6 percent.
• Surgical Shopping Goes Mobile: Mobile shoppers will display a laser focus on buying this season that surpasses that of other online shoppers with a 44.2 percent bounce rate on mobile devices versus online shopping rates of 37.3 percent.
• The Social Influence: While the industry will see modest increases in direct social buying, the influence of these sites and services will eclipse that of other channels.  According to October conversion rates, 9.2 percent of consumers that visited a retail site from a social media site made a purchase. This compares to 5.5 percent of all direct online shopping last year. Also in 2010, the vast majority of social shopping will continue to come from Facebook, which in October accounted for 77 percent of all traffic from social networks.

“This November holiday season will mark the true advent of the post-PC era with consumers demonstrating a heightened interest in adding mobile devices to their holiday shopping arsenal,” said John Squire, Director, Product Management, Enterprise Marketing Management Group, IBM Industry Solutions. “In response, savvy retailers must invest in delivering hyper-personalized, smarter commerce shopping experiences that are capable of building loyalty through multiple channels with exceptionally relevant promotions, free shipping and more.”

About IBM Smarter Commerce

The growth of mobile, social and online commerce are key trends within Smarter Commerce, an evolving market defined by rapid shifts in digital buying patterns and the adaptations businesses are making to capitalize on them.

More information on Smarter Commerce can be found at www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/smarter_commerce/overview/

Source

These early holiday season findings are based on data from IBM Coremetrics Benchmark, the only analytics-based, peer-level benchmarking solution that measures online marketing results, including real-time sales data. All of the data is aggregated and anonymous.

Coremetrics Benchmark uses IBM’s cloud-based digital analytics platform to rapidly collect and analyze intelligence on how consumers are responding to the products and services being offered to them, enabling clients to make accurate decisions on marketing expenditures. As a result, marketing teams can gain deeper insight about their consumers and present personalized recommendations, promotions and other sales incentives across the wide variety of channels—including social networks and mobile devices—where consumers interact with their brands.

Contact(s) information

Doug Fraim
IBM Media Relations
617-501-6376
dfraim@us.ibm.com

Unica