2012 - year of the smartphone!
The instant communication offered by pocket sized, portable devices will open up new marketing and creative channels for retailers this year. With emerging technology standards in barcode tagging (QR and Microsoft TAG) and product image recognition (Google Googles), it's now more important than ever to make sure your content is optimised for a mobile viewing experience.
Mobile platforms such as IOS, Android and WM7 all offer their own unique challenges to web developers, and the Sparkstone team are proven professionals in this fast growing sector.
Sparkstone looks after the analytics accounts for most of our clients, and over the past 12 months we've seen a massive increase in mobile traffic across retail verticals including B2C and trade markets.
For most of 2011 there was a growing trend of new website visitors arriving via mobile devices, with many returning for a repeat visit on their desktop of laptop devices. 2012 looks set to be the year when these repeat visits will increasingly be made on the user's mobile device as mobile data plans become cheaper and 3G networks become faster as well as more wide spread.
We're also experts at providing more 'traditional' solutions such as email marketing and SMS messaging, both of which have an established presence even on older mobile phones.
Optimising for the smaller screen...
It's vitally important that you consider the mobile user experience when planning your digital strategy. Where the 'Buy Now' button goes and what font size to use are all important factors when screen size is limited to just a few hundred pixels and a mouse hover is non-existent because the device has a touch screen. Sparkstone's development and creative teams are constantly refining the user experience (UX) of our mobile solutions to make them faster, more intuitive and ultimately producing greater conversions.
It's already an established fact that average order values for purchases made on smartphones are higher than those made on desktop devices.
Whether this is purely down to demographics it's difficult to say. What we are sure of however, is that by optimising your mobile pressence Sparkstone can take your business further and help you to win more loyal customers from your competitors who are slower to react to the demands of mobile.
