Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - When To Ask Permission To Send Push Notification

If you ask users to opt into push messages during the fourth-to-sixth app session, the opt-in rate is 70%, per Localytics. Why? Because by then you will have established value. Many brands ask too soon and see poor response.

I saw a tweet that said 10 Apps That Every Lazy Person Needs, but I didn’t bother to open it.

Ten billion is the number of price changes Amazon made this past holiday season, according to RetailDive.

The share of parents who know the password to their teen’s email account: 48%; cellphone: 43%, social media account: 35%, per Pew.

My reaction to news that Lenovo is phasing out the Motorola brand: when the Razr was the most popular cellphone, the thought of the brand going away rang untrue.

Apple saw $1.1B spent on apps over the holidays. New Year’s Day was the biggest ever.

Of the 36% of retailers that use mobile devices in stores, 25% use tablets, per the National Retail Federation.

Worldwide time spent in apps grew 334% on phablets YoY from 2014-2015: Flurry.

In 2015, 27% of all activations were on phablets, growing from 4% in 2013.

Gartner says that half of consumers will pay via mobile by 2018.

Mobile purchases will reach 42% of all online orders in 2016, according to Bizrate.

Apptimization is this week’s made-up word. Stop trying so hard. Better yet, try harder.

India has reached one billion mobile users.

The end of apps, eh? Usage grew 58% in 2015, per IBM.

50% of emails sent in the third quarter of 2015 were opened only on smartphones and tablets: Yesmail. That’s up 6% compared with the same period in 2014.

Only 2% of patients in the largest U.S. hospitals are using hospital-provided mobile health apps, per Accenture. The company estimates that failure to meet consumer demand could cost each of these hospitals, on average, more than $100 million in lost annual revenue.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - Why A One-Channel Marketing Strategy Will Fail You

Here are words of caution to those marketers who live in a one-channel world. Consumers aren’t anything like you.

The latest evidence comes from the automotive industry. While smartphones and tablets accounted for 40% of total Web traffic for the car space in October (Dealertrack), a large portion of consumers migrated to a computer to fill out a form. This led to a 32% increase in lead captures.

Meanwhile, 1-800 Contacts has advanced in mobile due to the simplification of the form fill, as well as the ability for a consumer to take a picture of a prescription, according to Google’s mobile lead Jason Spero (@speroman).

Stride Rite has introduced an iPad app that measures a kid’s shoe size. It’s a smart and efficient way to solve a parent’s problem.

Nearly 50% of consumers believe their personal mobile devices are more efficient than store associates in helping them make buying decisions, Motorola reports.

Approximately 456 million Facebook members only access the network via mobile.

U.S. online adults are three times more likely to visit your website than engage with your brand on Facebook, per Forrester.

35% of holiday email click-throughs will happen on mobile, IBM forecasts.

Wal-Mart will match Amazon's prices in stores this holiday season.

The lack of smartphones held back Shazam pre-iPhone, according to a company executive appearing at the M1 Summit. You used to request and get an SMS with the name of a song.

75% of Pandora listening is on mobile, the company says.

The gap increases between mobile leaders and laggards in 2015, Forrester forecasts.

A new Usher song is available via download with info at the bottom of a box of Cheerios.

Folks with incomes lower than $100,000 a year plan to do more in-store shopping, according to Deloitte.

75% of HR managers say mobile HR can build satisfaction, per ADP.

"Father of Mobile" Predicts Three More Revolutions

We stood in line to a get a picture with the gentleman who looks a bit like Kris Kringle. There was no sitting on his knee, but we fawned over the “toy” that he had with him – the world’s first cellphone that the “father of mobile” had invented.

Forty-one years after Martin Cooper changed everything with a device now warmly called “The Brick” – it was actually the relatively humongous Motorola DynaTAC – the 85-year-old came this week to the Mobile Marketing Association’s CEO/CMO Summit in Hilton Head, S.C. to give us a history lesson – and to tell us what is next.

In 1983, “The Brick” had just 20 minutes of battery life and with a weight of 2 ½ pounds, Cooper said that users couldn’t even hold it up for 20 minutes.

Still, “we jump-started a revolution. People are fundamentally, inherently mobile. It seems like no one is where they want to be. Back then, the phone company told us the only way to do it was to tie people to their desks through copper wire. We set people free.”

That freedom and the consumer behavior changes that have come with it had about 200 marketers, publishers and others spending three days hashing out mobile’s role as a channel. Consensus was absent (for instance, the amount of marketing spend used on mobile was all over the board). Come to think of it, we weren’t wise enough to ask Cooper for his opinion on using his invention for brand building, getting closer to the consumer, and to sell more stuff.

Cooper wasn't reticent when asked whether more “revolutions” are coming.

He cited three areas that will change everything over the next 20 years.

“In health care, instead of curing disease, we should be preventing disease,” Cooper told us. “The annual physical exam is essentially worthless because there is no baseline. Soon we’ll be able to have a physical examination every minute and anticipate a disease before it happen.

“In a few years, we’ll be able to sense a few cancer cells in the body and zap them before the cancer spreads. Every disease will be curable.”

Cooper also predicted what he called a revolution in the educational system through 24/7 learning (“when the brain is challenged, it actually grows”). He named Pong and Pac-Man as early stimulants that preceded activity on tablets, games, Kinect’s, smartphones, and many more.

“The next generation will be smarter than we are. Our only satisfaction is that their children will be smarter than they are.”

Finally, he forecast a “collaborative revolution”, pointing to the ruling change in Egypt energized by Twitter.

“People are doing things in groups like never before,” he said. “We’re more efficient by order of magnitude.

“Some day we will all be rich.”

(article first appeared on imediaconnection.com - http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2014/07/15/father-of-mobile-predicts-three-more-revolutions/)