Retailers to Drive Mobile Advertising to $12 Billion U.S. by 2015

[prweb] According to new report, Mobile Marketing & Retail Strategies by Juniper Research, the mobile retail market will be worth a whopping $12 billion in the U.S. by 2015. The report states that the current mobile retail marketing is $4.1 billion and is expected to grow by 24% annually over the next five years.

Mobile offers retailers a fantastic way to stay in touch with consumers when they are on the go with opportunities ranging from SMS coupons to mobile ecommerce. Mobile coupons and advertising will comprise of the majority of the revenues generated.

Retailers are currently testing out the various mobile ad platforms with ad-hoc campaigns that fall into two categories: mobile web and SMS marketing. Howard Wilcox, report author and senior analyst from Juniper Research says, "as digital ad spend is increasingly transferred into the mobile space, then mobile advertising will gradually reel in and overhaul coupons."

The future of mobile marketing will be coupons that drive consumers to ecommerce sites to make a purchase. "Everything that can be done on the Internet, can now be done on the cell phone, says Sheri Wells, mobile marketing expert and CEO of SMS Media Group. This represents an exciting opportunity for merchants looking to engage consumers and drive retail sales.

Through SMS marketing, retailers can communicate with their customers on a regular basis offering coupons, promotions and sale announcements. Retailers need to catch up to the existing mobile technologies and opportunities available to them. The majority of online retailers do not have a mobile e-commerce site yet, which represents a huge opportunity for developers. Most retailers also are still not capitalizing on the text messaging trend of building an opt-in mobile subscriber database that they can send offers to.

The opt-in database is an asset that retailers cannot afford to miss out on. SMS coupon broadcasts to a retailers' customer database can generate extremely high response rates ranging from 5% to 25%. When an SMS broadcast is used in parallel with a mobile ecommerce site, recipients can click right on over to make a purchase with their mobile device.

Retailers can easily launch an SMS list for their customers to opt-in to by leveraging existing SMS platforms. One such service is SMS Media Group's SMSdelivery Hosted Platform. It provides an easy-to-use, web-based interface that manages lists, subscribers, broadcasts and reporting of SMS campaigns. The platform also has a mobile web design tool for creating mobile web sites that really brings the entire mobile strategy together using a single service.

Retailers to Drive Mobile Advertising to $12 Billion U.S. by 2015