Partner Article

There's an app for that!

Black Friday 2012 has revealed some interesting techniques that US brick and mortar retailers have used, in order to counter Amazon’s tactics of last year, when it picked off in store shoppers through the use of mobile applications, luring them online instead. Deloitte’s annual holiday survey found that half of the consumers in its poll own smartphones and that 68 percent of them planned to use them for their holiday shopping, It’s therefore not a great leap of imagination to see why retailers like Macy’s and Target jumped on the mobile band wagon in time for Black Friday 2012, creating their own mobile applications to both manage the stampedes in their stores, but more crucially, to incentivise shoppers to stay; drip feeding special deals not offered elsewhere, offering redeemable reward points, giving product location information to better manage the flow of their shoppers and even giving parking advice. Smart. And this incentives game is valuable. 12 percent of Walmart’s mobile revenue already comes from when a person is actually in store. Listen up Mary Portas! So the savvy retailers are embracing vehicles like Mobile, FaceBook, Twitter, Cart Recovery and Email Remarketing to fully integrate their digital and in store activities, and so give their consumers the seamless and shopping experience they now expect. So Britain’s High Streets - here’s a platform for growth that was neglected in the Portas Review.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Kathy Heslop .