This was the first seminar I attended, 9am Tuesday morning, presented by Liane Dietrich of LinkShare. The attendance wasn’t huge because of a printer problem at the registration desk (I’m glad I registered the previous night), so here’s a summary from a finance affiliate’s point of view for anyone who missed it:

According to Information Shopper, 92% of people have more confidence in online information than salespeople. I’ve met a lot of salespeople – is it bad to say this doesn’t really surprise me?! As soon as someone hits me with a hard sell, I immediately switch off. To find out whether a product was really worth buying, I would go online to find out.

Apparently I’m not the only one. According to Liane’s presentation, here are the percentages of people who research a particular type of product before buying:

Cars, computers – 80-85%

Vacuum cleaners, tools – 55-70%

Books, films – around 40-50%

Apparently mobile internet users will catch desktop users within 5 years. So there is no doubt that mobile is a huge growth market. Interestingly, 55% of mobile purchases are made from home. People are beginning to prefer the immediate connectivity of their mobile over sluggish desktop and laptop load times. As long as wifi or 3G makes the process easy and quick, people are beginning to purchase more and more on their smartphone. And they like doing it – 93% of people making a mobile purchase had ‘a good experience’.

As far as the finance sector is concerned, major innovation is underway. I have a UK banking app which allows me to check my balances and see mini-statements. In America they are ahead of this. Liane presented the new Chase bank iPhone application, which incredibly allows you to take a photo of a cheque, upload it to the app and hey presto! the money is deposited into your account.

People are spending on their mobiles. By 2015 £75 billion will be spent on goods and services via smartphones. According to Forrester research, 2.8% of sales are currently made via mobiles. Expect this to increase year on year.

The example of Japan was interesting too. Over half the Japanese have a smartphone, and in 2010 38% of affiliate revenue in Japan was accounted for by mobile. This trend is likely to spread fast.

Looking at the highest mobile growth rate sectors, I was surprised to see fashion at the top. The list was:

Fashion, Cosmetics, Tickets and Entertainment, Catalogue, TV Shopping.

Another noteworthy fact is that sales via PCs and laptops peak at the weekend in Japan – this is not the case with mobile purchases, which remains relatively constant throughout the week.

Liane concluded by answering the question ‘Is the industry ready for mobile affiliate marketing’. She acknowledged problems with M-commerce such as the varying behaviour of the various mobile browsers, and some buggy platforms. I think the general answer was yes though, and that if you’re an affiliate who is not thinking about going mobile soon, you should be – otherwise you may well be left behind…

What are your thoughts on the future of mobile affiliate marketing?

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 14th, 2010 at 7:27 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.