Mobile Shopping: Email marketing works, social media doesn’t

Custora have published a new research report about Mobile Shopping in the US, finding that Social Media advertising isn’t working for mobile shopping – but email marketing is.

Less than 1% of mobile sales came from social media networks (including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest). Email marketing, on the other hand, drove 27% of sales on mobile phones.

Customers responding to email marketing and shoppers going directly to e-commerce sites (including app traffic) accounted for the highest share of purchases on phones. Email marketing generated 26.7% of sales on mobile phones, compared to only 20.9% on desktop, and 23.1% on tablet.

[Tweet “#socmed accounted for only 0.6% of sales on #mobile and 0.2% on tablets”]

The Custora report is based on data from over 100 retailers and 70 million consumers, and looks at big happenings in mobile shopping today, and their implications for marketers.

Other highlghts from the report include:

• US mobile e-commerce is a $40 billion market, poised to hit $50 billion in 2014. That’s up from only $2 billion in 2010.
• iPad still accounts for the biggest share of tablet e-commerce orders, though the share of orders made from Samsung tablets increased from 1.9% in 2012 to 15.3% in Q1 2014.
• Amazon Kindle Fire is quickly becoming a shopping device of choice, taking share from Apple iPad. This bodes well to the newly announced Amazon Fire Phone.

The full 12-page report has more findings on mobile marketing channel performance, the value of mobile vs desktop customers, and interviews with marketing leaders at e-commerce retailers in mobile shopping – Karmaloop, Nomorerack and thredUp.

You can download the report at custora.com/mobilereport