Nows the Time to Take Advantage of Mobile Marketing, Mobile Apps, and eCommerce

Last week Apple released the new iPhone 5. For current iPhone 4S users, the new iPhone 5 contains pretty much everything on your wish list - larger screen, faster 4G LTE, cool design, etc. But this is another topic for another day. The new iPhone is just another reminder to retailers to aggressively embrace mobile marketing, mobile apps, and eCommerce before it's too late.

Next month, Internet Retailer is hosting a Mobile Marketing & Commerce Forum in San Diego from October 8-10, 2012. I highly recommend any retailer, even if you don't have an online retail business, to attend the event. There will be 45 speakers covering mobile marketing and eCommerce topics.

Here are four more reasons to digest about where mobile marketing and eCommerce is headed, as pointed out in their event brochure.

• Introduced only five years ago, there are now 115 million smartphones in the U.S., more than half of all mobile phones. Add to that the 70 million tablets, and you have the foundation for a massive m-commerce business. And remember this: web stores designed for desktop computers are useless to consumers shopping on web phones.

Everybody's Going Mobile with Smartphones

Today, more and more consumers use their phones as personal, on-the-go computers. That's why it's critical your email campaigns are mobile-phone compatible. Use these simple tips to make sure your emails are easy to read on smartphones such as the Blackberry, iPhone and DROID.

1. Make sure your subject line is appropriate to the content. You'd think it was intuitive. But, avoid incorporating terms that spammers use like Free! and ALL CAPS or worse yet FREE! in all caps.

2. Careful of the images. Remember, not all desktops or phones automatically download those images. Make sure you use appropriate names for your images so your customers can recognize the content.

3. Get to the point. The text that is. Make sure to add text to the email and get to it quickly. Don't be too long-winded and get to the point. Call in the action...what do you want that customer to do?

5 Best Practices for QR Codes

Digitally connect consumers to your brand and drive Web traffic using QR Codes. QR Codes, a.k.a. Quick Response Codes, are popping up everywhere. (You know, those nifty little barcode boxes you can snap with your phone.) These 2-dimenstional matrix barcodes allow marketers to engage consumers through a digital connection with their mobile device. QR codes are readable by smartphones, other camera phones, and web-connected devices such as the iPad. The information encoded may be text, a URL, vcard, calendar event or other data.

Cool and cutting-edge? Think again.

While you might think these crackerjack marketing tools are new, we have to give proper credit to the Japanese who've been using these for many years. Toyota subsidiary Denso-Wave created the QR code in the '90s for use in tracking parts in vehicle manufacturing. With the ability to be decoded at a high speed, QR codes were soon adopted in a much more broad, commercial format across Asia. With the adoption of camera and smartphones in the US, there has been an exponential growth in the interest, and "cool-factor" in QR codes.

What you need to know.

The following list of five best practices will help you avoid making some potentially embarrassing and costly mistakes is using a QR code in Marketing.

• 1. Layout the code properly. Make your QR code easy for your users to scan. Keep proper layout of the QR code in mind. Since QR codes aren't mainstream yet, give subsinct directions to your users about how and why to scan. QR codes are black and white squares. Don't color them or reverse them out. In addition, the white border around the black information square is part of the readable code -- so don't trim.
• 2. Provide valuable content. Give customers a payoff for scanning. A URL with a few paragraphs of information just won't cut it. Provide an incentive, a video tutorial, an interactive quiz or even a chance to enter a contest. You need to make the value of the scan higher than the consumer's data charge from their wireless carrier.
• 3. Make the code concise. The more information that is stored in a code, the harder it is to decode. While QR codes can contain a myriad of information, less is more. QR codes can fail and errors can occur when text or URL strings are too long. Consider using a URL truncation service, or host your own small URL, to create a more efficient code.
• 4. Land on a mobile page. Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Unfortunately, many marketers have already made this mistake. Since your users are leveraging a mobile phone to access your content, make it easy on them! Ensure that if visitors are landing on a URL, it is designed for primary use by a mobile application. For added punch, make the landing page campaign specific.
• 5. Be creative. The world is your oyster. Use a QR code to land on a "Tweet this" or "Like this" for Twitter or Facebook respectively, link to a reading list, generate a PayPal payment, or use a QR code on your promotional items.