Tag: location-based marketing

In recent EPiServer research, the department store retailer managed to score 75 percent.

John Lewis, a large British department store, has scored extremely well in the latest EPiServer Mobile Commerce 2014 report, when it comes to the smartphone and tablet based shopping experience.

The company was only just slightly ahead of some of its biggest competition, such as Amazon UK and Argos.

The EPiServer report provided the results of an annual study that took the leading 20 retailers in the United Kingdom into consideration. This report has now reached its third year and has shown that while some retailers are excelling in mobile commerce, others are facing a considerable struggle in providing the type of seamless, friction free m-shopping experience that is now expected by consumers.

Mobile commerce is becoming considerably more sophisticated and is evolving quickly.

The average score that was recorded by the research was 47 percent effectiveness for m-commerce. Comparatively, last year the average score had been 55 percent. This suggests that as the technology and expectations become more complex, retailers are having a hard time being able to keep up.

The study took into account Android and iOS dedicated apps for both smartphones and tablets, as well as mobile sites. It took a number of different factors into consideration, including location based and geolocation tools, multi-channel experiences (such as the “click and collect” option that allows a consumer to make a purchase over a smartphone and then simply pick it up in the store), in addition to direct contact with customer service options, social sharing features, and personalized content.

At the very top of this mobile commerce experience list, was John Lewis, which managed to score 75 percent, just squeaking ahead of its competition. It was granted this score after it had achieved a consistently solid mobile strategy throughout its website, Android and iOS app experiences. The official statement from EPiServer said that “Apps deliver smooth experiences that reflect the main site and John Lewis branding with great user experience features, for example ‘double tap to zoom’ on product images, an in-store crossover feature in the form of a barcode scanner and a location-enabled store finder.”

Pandora Media Inc. experiences location based marketing flub.

Pandora, the online radio company, gives mobile advertisers the ability to target their users through the zip code the consumer enters upon signing up but, what has recently been discovered, is that the trouble with this mobile marketing technique is if the advertiser’s customers do not manually change their zip code data in the event that they move, they will continue to receive adds that would only be relevant to their previous place of address.

Many mobile ads that use latitude and longitude for targeting a user’s location are inaccurate.

According to a recent Thinknear survey of 53 million ad impressions, only 34% of mobile ads that use geolocation technology for the purpose of targeting mobile users in a specific location are accurate within 328 feet (100 meters). Meanwhile, 27% are inaccurate by over 32808 feet (10,000 meters).

Thinknear General Manager Eli Portnoy said that mobile users on the go create problems for these apps. Although an application developer may believe to have the proper longitude and latitude coordinates that are equal to a one meter (3.2 ft) by one meter location on a map, in reality, these coordinates could be way off by hundreds of meters. Therefore, if an app publisher utilized the zip code that was entered in during sign up as a central point, the user could, in fact, be traveling in a completely different zip code.

Portnoy commented that “The industry is moving very, very quickly, and location is very hard.” He added, “A lot of publishers are not location experts, and they are trying to get location, and they don’t understand how.”

To boost its mobile marketing technique, Pandora has started to check IP addresses.

According to Pandora, the majority of its advertisers are interested in running large-scale campaigns that are nationwide. They have no interest in trying to reach mobile users who are located on a specific city block. For this reason, the internet radio company does not try for a target that would be narrower than zip code.

To enhance its more targeted advertisements, Pandora is now checking from where the IP address of a mobile device is coming and will notify a user to change their zip code if this is required. Pandora’s director of product management, Jack Krawczyk, said that the company’s surveys have revealed that its mobile marketing location accuracy scores are in the high 90s on a percentage scale due to the fact that people do not move that often.