If you’re thinking about launching your first mobile marketing campaign or building your mobile website this year – you’re not being innovative. In fact, you are seriously lagging behind. Mobile use reached unseen levels over the last two months, with over 10% of all sales coming from mobile devices.

And if the 2011 holiday shopping season is any indication, we’ve reached a turning point:

Its undeniable that mobile devices have taken unprecedented root in the lives of millions of Americans and billions across the globe in the past 12 months. We are connected 24/7. We simply can not sleep, work, eat, vacation, shop or even go to the loo without our mobile devices. For the first time in history, the number of smartphones in circulation is close to eclipsing the number of feature phones. Tablets, grew to become so dominant, they are infringing on PC market share.

To recap all that happened in the world of mobile in 2011, we are kicking off a short series “2011: A Mobile Year in Review” featuring mobile industry luminaries, media executives and brand marketers. They will guide us through this year’s key innovations, noteworthy campaigns, effective mobile techniques, smartphone and tablet trends, HTML5 adoption and other hot mobile topics.

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The day has finally come. The relationship between the two of you has seen its up and downs, but you both are ready for the next step. The pit in your stomach is only outweighed by your intense need for one another. You toss all doubts and the butterflies aside, slowly bend down and rest your knee to the floor and fumble around in your pocket for that expensive little detail. There’s nothing more left than to pull out your mobile phone, take a breath and lay it all on the line—“will you buy my product?”

Granted this may be just a slight stretch from reality, but mobile user engagement should be treated with just as much due diligence as popping The Question. Whether you’re a first timer or a seasoned mobile pro, these 5 questions should guide you through the many pitfalls of the constantly evolving mobile landscape and help you design the user experience that delivers pure bliss. (more…)

Once you have your conventional website fully functional, it’s time to turn your attention to your mobile presence. Mobile websites are the point of entry for an explosive number of consumers who go online with smartphones, iPads, and similar devices. To make your site do things like drive purchases and improve loyalty, you need to add features that maximize its appeal on the “small screen.” This series of posts describes approaches to take your mobile website from static and hard-to-read to dynamic and hard-to-leave. The series will explore the following five features:

1. Location Functionality
2. Whiz-Bang UI
3. Touch-Optimised UI
4. Social Networking
5. Offline Storage

To begin the series, lets talk location, location, location! It’s equally as important for brick-and-mortar real estate as it is for the virtual real estate of a mobile website. Mobile visitors are eager to find you, your products, or your services. Reward them by offering content or incentives that are tied to their current location, enable them to visit you and, ideally, make quick, convenient purchases. (more…)

In a previous post from our Mobile Web Advantage series, we explored the various ways that mobile web builds on existing habits. In this post, we will drill down into mobile commerce, which refers to the buying and selling of products and services through a mobile device. Mobile commerce is experiencing such explosive growth that many retailers are rushing to create mobile websites to capitalize on this trend and satisfy their mobile-savvy customers.

Smartphones are rapidly becoming ubiquitous within the mobile population. There are approximately 429.7 million global smartphone subscribers; this number is expected to increase to 1.2 billion by 2015. Furthermore, the global m-commerce market is expected to reach $119 billion by 2015. As this ecosystem expands, customers will begin to expect more and more options for satisfying their shopping needs while on-the-go. Both e-commerce and more traditional brick-and-mortar companies will need to keep up with their consumers by ensuring that their website is usable from a mobile device.

Major brands are beginning to see tremendous growth in the percentage of their business transacted over mobile. For example, in 2010, eBay sold $2 billion worth of merchandize via its mobile channels, tripling its 2009 results. This number is expected to double to $4 billion in 2011. As recently as last month, eBay stated that it expects to process $3 billion in mobile payments via PayPal in 2011, up from $700 million in 2010.

Mobile ticketing, a subset of mobile commerce, is a growing market as well. According to Juniper Research, mobile ticketing transactions are expected to exceed $100 billion worldwide by 2012. Fandango, a leader in the mobile ticketing space, now sees 20% of ticket sales coming through mobile. In fact, 19% of the recent Harry Potter opening weekend revenue of $169 million (that’s $32 million in two days if you’re doing the math) was generated from mobile devices. Fandango’s mobile site, which was developed with the assistance of Trilibis, allows users to search for movies playing in their area in real-time and to buy tickets. In some theaters, users can even hand their phone to the ticket taker for scanning. No standing in line, and no dealing with the clerk or the kiosk.

Mobile commerce is also appealing from the consumer’s perspective. According to a study done by Google, 79% of smartphone Internet users use their smartphone to help with shopping, and 74% have purchased as a result of doing so. In addition, customers actually prefer getting information from their phone while making a purchasing decision. According to Accenture, 73% of mobile shoppers favor using their phone to take care of simple tasks in a store, while only 15% prefer interacting with an employee. That makes sense: it takes time to track down an employee to help you and wait for them to research an answer, while wait time via your phone is limited only by your typing speed.

Not all retailers are taking advantage of their users’ interest in the mobile channel. Also according to Accenture, 51% of mobile users are more likely to purchase from a retailer who has a mobile-specific site, but only 4.8% of retailers actually have one. This clearly indicates that retailers need to get on the ball before their customers lose interest and go somewhere else. So unless you want your company to go the way of Borders, who entered the e-commerce space too late with too little to offer, you’d better not just get on the ball, but start rolling it, too. Because mobile commerce is coming… and at a much faster rate than e-commerce did.

A mobile website will put a spring in your step. Just listen to Andrew Koven, a former president of e-commerce and customer experience at upscale shoe seller Steve Madden (@stevemadden_com).  Koven was positively clicking his heels when he told attendees at the Mobile Shopping Summit in fall 2010 that the company’s mobile presence had generated $500,000 in mobile sales in just six months.  Over that same period, Steve Madden’s share of online traffic coming from mobile devices rose steadily from 4.4 percent to 10.5 percent.

New customers and new sources of revenue are just two of the many benefits of creating a mobile website for your company. This is the first of a series of posts exploring the benefits of mobile websites. Future installments will each examine a key benefit in detail. This introductory overview should serve as a wake-up call: It’s high time you jumped on the mobile website bandwagon. After all, people are now more likely to first experience the Internet through a mobile device than a desktop computer. That’s because more people have cell phone subscriptions (5.2 billion worldwide) than wired broadband Internet connections of the sort used for desktop computers (555 million worldwide) according to mobile marketer mobiThinking (@mobilThinking).

Here are a few more reasons for why your company, brand or service should have presence on the mobile web:

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