Holiday Web sales surged 12% over last year to $73 billion, according to the Adobe Digital Index, which claims to have tracked $7 out of every $10 spent with the top 500 Internet retailers.
Mobile activity fueled the increase, accounting for 16% of all online transactions throughout the season and nearly 25% on Thanksgiving and Black Friday. One third of consumers received geo-located promotional offers on mobile devices. CyberMonday could be rechristened “CyberMoneyDay”; it registered the biggest single-day haul of $2.65 billion.
Adobe released the results of its study at the National Retail Federation show in New York, where Adobe Marketing Cloud announced four new services tied to consumers’ growing relationships with their mobile devices. They are:
- “Contextually relevant emails” whose contents automatically adapt to the time or place a person opens one. The messages and offers delivered are informed by purchase data, interests, and demographic details pulled from Adobe Target and Adobe Campaign. “How often do people open an offer with a two-day window three days after it expires?” asks Kerry Reilly, director of product for Adobe Campaign.
- Greater implementation of Adobe’s Shared Audience feature to create audiences that can be shared across all Marketing Cloud solutions. “How many times have you seen a display ad for something you already purchased?” Reilly asks. “This feature can help avoid this by accessing transactional data before the ad is served.”
- Highly scaled personalization of quality images. “Say you had an ad for a Red Sox jersey with the recipient’s name on the back,” Reilly says. “You could send out millions of emails with these, each individualized from the marketer’s desktop. Previously, you’d need a programmer to do this.”
- “Shoppable rich media experiences” designed to give marketers the power to place “hot spots” on products that take hot-to-trot mobile shoppers directly to the shopping cart.
The Adobe Digital Index found that 55% of mobile users are open to receiving marketing promotions based on their locations.
