'Tis the Season to Be Mobile

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Nov 12, 2013, 03:00 ET

LONDON, November 12, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --

Are you a retailer looking for ways to boost your company's Christmas turnover? Robert Tickell, Sales Lead for IBM's MidMarket business in the UK and Ireland, is pleased to lend a helping hand. His colleagues at IBM's Enterprise Marketing Management team have published their third annual UK Online Retail Christmas Readiness Report, an industry benchmark analysis and best practice guide that helps retailers of all sizes to maximise Christmas returns.

If you're a retailer struggling to understand how you're losing customer conversions, which customers are likely to be buying in the future and how to ensure they can buy online in a seamless way across any device, then the report will be indispensible to you. While it may be too late to turn your business around this Christmas, you can prepare for next year; 2014 is set to see continued growth in online, as well as a proliferation of mobile commerce.

The most startling fact in this year's report is the proportional gain in online sales across the festive season last year. On the first Mega Monday last year (26^th November), online retail spending increased 18.9% compared to the same day the year before. That growing trend is no great surprise in itself, but it is worth considering how online access is spreading across smartphones, Tablet PCs and other mobile devices. These are powering an ever-greater share of online sales, with the same Mega Monday seeing Mobile representing 21.5% of online site traffic - up a staggering 79% on the year before.

The IBM team talks to customers every day about how to optimise their e-commerce approach and the same challenges confront merchants across many sectors - lacklustre conversion rates; declining consumer attention; declining average order values... this report explores ways to overcome these issues and more, including the following findings:

Mobile reaches a new peak, while social stays level
Items per order and average order value slump to new lows
Consumer attention continues to decline
Overall conversion and cart conversion lag

It seems the opportunity to reap rewards this Christmas season and into 2014 is large, but the time is now to put in place the processes and technologies that can help your sales and marketing teams unleash their creativity in innovative campaigns that pay dividends over Christmas and into 2014 and beyond.

So if you're delivering an e-commerce experience, Robert encourages you to take heed of his following tips:

Deliver your customers a better mobile experience
Retarget browsers and cart abandoners across all access devices
Accurately measure your multi-channel sales and marketing performance
Optimise your digital marketing campaigns
Progress toward interactive cross-channel marketing

If you'd like further details of IBM's survey, and to understand precisely how IBM's Enterprise Marketing Management team can deliver on all of the above, you can download it here.

Robert Tickell is Sales Lead for IBM's MidMarket business in the UK and Ireland. Follow him on Twitter @rmtickell.

SOURCE IBM