Designer apparel brand Tory Burch now sees 44% of its site traffic stemming from smartphones and tablets with more than 28% of sales attributed to mobile devices.
During a keynote presentation this morning at the National Retail Federation’s Shop.org summit, Miki Berardelli, Tory Burch’s CMO, told an audience in the mid-thousands here in Chicago that the brand has hit an 80% return rate for its mobile app users. The next step from a mobile perspective is to tackle responsive design and deliver more targeted and personalized emails to customers on mobile.
Echoing Tory Burch’s strong mobile sentiments was a shared finding from Forrester Research and Shop.org that estimates 40% of emails are now opened on mobile devices. (Specifically, 28% occur on smartphones and 16% on tablets.)
In a survey of 10,004 consumers, 40% say the first thing they do when they wake up and when they go to sleep is check their email. As a result, in the marketing organization, email marketers are the most “sought after” interactive marketing professional in addition to those “writing analytical rules,” according to Sucharita Mulpuru, VP and principal analyst at Forrester.
According to The 2013 Social and Mobile Commerce Report released during the show today, comScore and management consultancy The Partnering Group found that 35% of smartphone owners used their device to locate a store, 24% used it to search for coupons and deals and 19% looked up product availability.
Mobile commerce numbers are up across the board. In the third quarter of 2013, mobile commerce sales transactions totaled $4.7 billion, which is about 8.6% of the total ecommerce pie.
Mobile, according to Tory Burch’s SVP of Global Retail Matt Marcotte is “more than technology,” he said. “It’s [part of our] entire philosophy and it changes how we work.” The brand developed Client Book – a mobile folio for consumers to create wish lists of products that leverages CRM data input by in-store associates. Tory Burch can subsequently serve personalized prompts to those Client Book members when a product they’ve expressed intent to purchase becomes available or to recommend related products.
“We used to talk about the fact that there were much lower conversion rates on mobile phones than on website and for some retailers, that’s still true, but it’s not uncommon now to run into retailers where that mobile conversion rate is the fastest-growing metric they have,” commented Jason Goldberg, VP of multichannel commerce and content at Razorfish, a Shop.org board member. “Now, we’re consuming digital [content] while standing in-store making a purchase. I now have to deliver different digital experiences to that device for every phase in the funnel. Context is much more important.”
The digital Shop.org division of the NRF consists of 630 members overall – 330 of which are retail companies, Goldberg said. “We’re seeing a lot more senior executives come here to accelerate the growth of their digital channels. Where it used to be a VP of ecommerce, maybe now you see a VP of ecommerce and the COO.” The NRF yesterday announced the development of a formal CMO Council to serve as a platform for the retail marketer and advertiser. The council will collaborate with NRF’s Shop.org and CIO Council to develop track-specific research and events.
