Business-to-Business Key Findings – Sept/Oct 2010
Consumers Shop Online, Buy In Store
Some 78% of Americans use multiple channels – computer, mobile device, catalog, in-store – to research and make purchases. Three in 10 (30%) say they use three or more channels during the process, while 48% use two channels and 22% use only one channel.
Internet users (61%) research products online at least once per week, while only 37% browse in stores each week. However, buyers are more likely to make their purchase in a store (65%) than online (14%).
Preferred Media: TV vs. Internet
Some 42% of Americans say the Internet is the most essential medium in their lives. This is followed by television (37%), radio (14%) and newspapers (5%). The chart below shows the results of whether Americans would prefer to live without Internet or TV, if given the choice.
Americans’ Preference for Eliminating TV or Internet Service by Age, 2010
E-Commerce Via Cell Phones
Total e-commerce spending reached $210 billion in 2009, down 2% from the prior year. Some 56% more people visited retail websites from their cell phones at least monthly; another 48% accessed shopping guides. The number of people visiting online auction sites from their phones grew 33%.
Consumers Who Access Retail Websites from Their Mobile Phone, December 2009 (in millions)
Marketing Advice Sources
Consumers ages 18-34 say they weigh advice from a variety of sources before making a purchase decision. The chart below shows that traditional media are still more influential than online media for this demographic group.
Most Influential Advice Sources, 18-34-Year-Olds, 2009
Small Business Owners Optimistic About Economy
One-half of small business owners (51%) say their companies have already recovered or will have recovered from the recession by the end of 2010. This is in comparison to 54% who said they were “very concerned” about the impact of the down economy on their businesses during 2009.
This optimism is reflected in planned budget increases for staffing in 2010 (18%) versus 2009 (9%). Some 42% are planning to add to their marketing budgets and 30% say they will increase sales initiative budgets. In addition, 46% plan to expand their online presence and 36% want to grow their social media initiatives.
Power of Welcome Messages
Welcome e-mails – automatically sent in response to an online subscription – are opened nearly four times as often as other promotional mailings and have a click rate of 14.4%, compared with the bulk mailing average of 2.7%. Overall, welcome e-mails have a transaction rate of 0.94%, compared with 0.1% for other mailings. Revenues per e-mail were also significantly higher.
Note that bulk welcomes, sent at a fixed interval (e.g., once a week) to all new subscribers, perform much worse than messages sent immediately upon subscription. The chart below shows the power of real-time welcomes, including those sent with an offer.
Revenue per E-mail for Real-Time vs. Bulk Welcome Mailings, April 2010
Branding Via Social Media
Research on social media users who follow brands online indicated that there are various triggers for someone to become a fan of a specific brand. For example, 75% of Facebook users who had “liked” a brand, say it was by invitation from the brand; 59% said the brand had been recommended by a friend; and 49% found the brand through their own personal research.
The reasons that former fans give for unsubscribing from a brand on Facebook was declining interest in the brand (32%), information offered on fan pages was posted too often (27%), information posted was not interesting (22%), information was published by the brand that the subscriber didn’t like (12%), and information was not posted often enough (7%).
Bullets
- Women own an average of 19 pairs of underwear; men own 16 pairs.
- More than four in 10 consumers (41%) are now using in-store or mall kiosks such as Redboxes to rent movies on DVD, compared to the 36% who rent from Blockbuster outlets and other physical stores.
- Behind English, Spanish is the most common language in the U.S. Some 34.5 million Americans speak Spanish at home; Chinese is spoken by 2.5 million.