This week's stats are mobile-heavy. The standout piece of data surely being the astonishing revelation that 24% of us believe losing our phone would be detrimental to our mental health.
Keep a tight hold on that device, and read on. If you're interested in more on mobile, check out our Mobile Commerce Compendium.Online, mobile, and in-store
From the Mobile Commerce Compendium, here's a breakdown of what consumers get up to on their smartphones when accessing the internet in stores.
With big companies such as Starbucks asking for email addresses, for access to in-shop WiFi, this next chart is particularly interesting.
Would you be willing to give a retailer your email address in return for access to free in-store WiFi?
Mobile penetration
Velti’s "Mobile Whitebook 2013: Data, trends and best practice", in partnership with Econsultancy, cites some interesting mobile data.
Over 712m smartphones were shipped globally in 2012 according to IDC – a 45% increase on 2011.
Lower-cost smartphones made by Huawei and ZTC are helping to fuel this trend in emerging markets.
Nielsen reports a 97% mobile phone penetration in the UK, with 64% of these being ‘smartphones’.
In 2012, smartphone penetration in the UK crested 50%. At the end of 2012, penetration levels were close to two-thirds of the population.
Smartphone use is, of course, a global phenomenon. Smartphone penetration in the EU5 has also crossed into the mainstream at 57%, which is higher than the respective penetration rate of the United States (54%). Meanwhile, rates are lower in Germany (51%) and Italy (53%).
Daddy or chips? Alcohol or dog and bone?
A recent survey by the insurer Endsleigh reports that 32% of us would be more willing to go without alcohol for a month than lose our mobile phone, with 24% of respondents believing that losing their phone would be detrimental to their mental health.
Tablet sales
More detail from the Velti Whitebook...The IDC reported a near 14% drop in PC and laptop sales in the first quarter of 2013. By 2017, it’s expected that annual tablet shipments will exceed 350 million, significantly in excess of the 300 million PCs currently shipped annually.
Close to 53 million tablets were sold worldwide in Q4 2012, a 75% increase YoY.
From Q4 2011 to the same period in 2012, Samsung and Asus had the biggest growth but Apple is still in the lead.
Tablets sold globally in Q4 2012:
22.9 million iPads
7.9 million Samsung devices
3.1 million Asus devices
Here's the visualisation of international tablet penetration:
Simultaneous screen use has obviously increased as a result. Second screening breaks down as follows - these figures are for secondary activities when watching television.
Online measurement: use of business performance tools
These stats are taken from Econsultancy's Online Measurement and Strategy Report, carried out in association with web analytics consultancy Lynchpin.
As was the case last year, the most commonly paid for tool is online surveys, with close to two-thirds of companies (64%) paying for this.
The next two in the pecking order are media planning / competitor analysis (48%) and user testing (44%).
Of particular note is the increase in the percentage of companies paying for mobile analytics, more than doubling from 10% to 26% in one year.
Other increases are for company profiling / IP address resolution (from 10% to 20%) and on-site feedback tools (from 23% to 32%).
Agency clients are most likely to pay for media planning / competitor analysis (68%) and social listening / buzz / reputation monitoring (57%).
Has your organisation paid for any of the following types of tools?
(Respondents 2013: 336, Respondents 2012: 252)
Travel: poor customer service via email
Research carried out as part of the Eptica Multichannel Customer Experience Study showed that many travel consumers are suffering from poor online service, with email an unresponsive communication channel.
Travel companies could only answer 30% of customer questions emailed to them, compared to 50% in 2012
In contrast, their websites successfully provided responses to 63% of online enquiries (up from 54% in 2012)
One travel company answered an email accurately in 19 minutes, it took another company 5 days to respond
Scheduled airline websites were able to successfully answer 66% of customer questions, performing slightly better that package operators (60%). In 2012 the difference was larger, at 20%
80% of the travel businesses in the study provided links to Twitter and Facebook and 40% offered their own forums. However none of them linked customer service to social media
Social media drives ROI for FMCG brands
I love a double acronym sub-heading on a Friday.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, four out of five consumers said they would be inclined to more often purchase a brand after being exposed to its social media presence.
83% of consumers exposed to social media would trial a brand’s product.
Heinz (22%), Kettle (17%) and Twinings (19%) all experienced uplift in sentiment after implementing their social media campaigns.
IAB calculates that, for every £1 spent in social media, a potential value of £3.34 could be generated.
The research was conducted on behalf of the IAB’s Social Media Council and carried out by Marketing Sciences, measuring the impact of social media at various stages in the purchase funnel. More than 4,500 quantitative survey responses were collected via the brands’ social media pages over an eight week period, and supplemented with a further 800 research panel interviews.
Alternative payment methods
According to a report from WorldPay, 49 per cent of customers would like to see biometric payment options available such as palm print or iris scanners.
Surprisingly, this figure dwarfs the 30 per cent interested in PIN-based options.
Email subjects worth testing
Check out Perry Malm’s extensive post on this research.
Adestra tested a random sample of 95,000 global, English-language campaigns over the last 12 months (for a total of 2.2bn emails), and have isolated 287 popular 'trigger words'. Specific trigger words have a drastic effect on the response rates of offers.
For example, 'Sale' delivers +23.2% opens, but 'Save' only +3.4%. In terms of click throughs, they give +60.7% and -25.2% respectively.
There are some surprising results. Take, for example, 'Report' (-23.7% opens, -54.8% CTR) and Webinar' (-16.6%, -70.7%.)
Conversely, some content is favoured. 'News' (+34.8%, +47.7%), 'Bulletin' (+15.8%, +12.7%) and 'Video' (+18.5%, +64.8%) work well.
App download charts
Research from Distimo shows:
A free app in iTunes' US top 10 gets around 70,000 downloads daily.
A paid app needs 4,000 downloads to get to the top of the chart.
This varies by around 10 per cent across the week, with Sunday the peak time for app downloads and Tuesday the low.
Getting into the top 10 on Amazon's store takes around 7,000 downloads for a free app, and a 800 for a paid app.