Mobile is undeniably hot, but the jury is still out for many marketers on whether it can drive sales in a big way.
Omaha Steaks uses mobile as a direct response channel. The company has tested mobile ads, QR codes, apps, in-app ads, SMS and a mobile website as a means of pushing deals out to consumers. The results: less than 5 percent of sales come via mobile.
“Because we are direct response, we are always pushing out offers,” Steve Morse, the company’s manager of search and social marketing, said at the Mobile Marketing Forum in New York yesterday. “We’ve learned that in SMS, people don’t want offers continuously. On the other hand, on the mobile Web redemption for our offers have grown by leaps and bounds. That is why we are continuously improving our mobile Web experience.”
The Omaha Steaks mobile website is all about direct response. It has a deal of the day section, where consumers can browse time-sensitive deals for their favorite steak dishes. Consumers can browse the site and purchase there as well. They could either enter their credit card information, or they can use Paypal to check out, making it a quick checkout process.
“We are traditionally a catalog marketer and mobile is our way of trying to pull in the millennials, since that is the way they are accustomed to shopping,” Morse said.
The company also uses Groupon and has found that it is able to acquire new customers via the platform. In fact, on average, 60 percent of the transactions that are a direct result of Groupon, are new users, or, people who have never purchased from Omaha Steaks before. But Groupon isn’t the strongest of the mobile tactics that Omaha Steaks uses. Morse said that mobile search is the best performing in terms of driving redemption of offers.
“Our highest redemption rates are from mobile search,” Morse said. “But when it comes to branding, in-app ads are probably the best for driving awareness. We are also seeing that our average order value is higher on mobile than online.”
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