We have all gotten used to looking at our phones and seeing several notifications on our home screens. From text messages, to emails, to sports updates, we are able to receive notifications for almost anything. More than ever, local businesses have apps that provide push notifications to consumers to encourage traffic.

— According to BIA/Kelsey’s Consumer Commerce Monitor ™, 35% of consumers who use smartphones when shopping locally regularly use apps to assist with their shopping experience. Most are not just using one shopping app either. On average consumers have 3.5 different apps they regularly use when shopping locally.

Push notifications have contributed substantially to app use in relation to local shopping due in part to the increase in engagement that happens once a consumer joins. According to the “Good Push Index” released by Urban Airship, on average mobile application users who have opted in to push messages have a long term retention rate that is 92% higher than those who have opted out of the messages. Not only is app retention substantially increased, but app engagement is also increased. Opt-in app users open retail apps 12.5 times per month on average compared with only 9.0 opens for those who opted not to receive push messages.

For marketers, the challenge is converting these consumers to buyers. In the local shopping space, according to BIA/Kelsey data, promotion and sales for local shoppers close the loop. Coupon reminders are a popular use of push notifications for retail apps.

According to BIA/Kelsey’s Consumer Commerce Monitor, 43% of local purchases made by smartphone users within the last six months were made through promotions or sales, such as discount deals, “daily deals”, coupons, or similar types of discount offers. Thirty-six percent of respondents to RadiumOne’s survey of women and their use of coupons on their mobile devices felt that push notifications of mobile coupon offers were useful.

Geo-targeting these coupon push notifications is important to drive purchases from local shoppers, especially smartphone users who are using their phones for local shopping in a variety of locations. Most importantly this includes 68% of smartphone users using their phones in the store, according to BIA/Kelsey data. We can also see that smartphone users are often on their phones when they are out and about. With 68% of smartphone users using their smartphones in public and 60% using them in transit, geo-targeting would prove to be highly effective in encouraging nearby consumers to pay more attention to the local businesses around them.

While the future of mobile push notifications is uncertain, BIA/Kelsey’s Mike Boland gives us his prediction in his blog post, BIA/Kelsey Mobile Outlook: 5 Predictions and a Wild Card.

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37.1% of consumers used a smartphone for local online shopping and 19.4% used a tablet, according to BIA/Kelsey’s Consumer Commerce Monitor (CCM) survey. SMBs are well positioned to take advantage, with 32% of SMBs reporting they use some form of mobile advertising to promote their business, up from 28% in 2012 according to BIA/Kelsey’s Local Commerce Monitor (LCM) survey.

In BIA/Kelsey’s annual Local Commerce Monitor (LCM) survey on advertising and marketing of small and medium businesses (SMBs), we asked several questions on the satisfaction of the various advertising and marketing choices made. In our new Consumer Commerce Monitor survey, we asked consumers how they find, engage and transact with local-serving businesses, including where they use their mobile devices. For the consumers who use tablets for local shopping, the majority, 90%, do some from home, 21% do so at work, and 17% do so in-store. One-third of tablet users reported using their devices at least once a day for local shopping, with nearly another third using them a few times a week.

Consumers using smartphones, on the other hand, report being far more likely to use their devices for local shopping while out in the world. Nearly 68% reported using their smartphones for local shopping while in store. Nearly 82% of consumers reported using their smartphones at home for local shopping, while 49% use their devices at work. More than 40% of smartphone users reported using their devices at least once a day for local shopping.

One of mobile’s path to success for the small business can be found in payments. SMBs are ready to close the loop with shoppers who use their mobile phones; 40% of SMBs reported accepting payments at the point of sale with a mobile credit card reader attached to a smartphone or tablet, with an additional 16% planning to add this capability in the next 12 months. This in line with consumers’ adoption of mobile payment with 42% of consumers reported having made a payment using a smartphone credit card swipe in the past six months, with over 7% reporting they do so often.

As their customers are using mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets to shop online, SMBs reported going increasingly mobile. 16% of SMBs surveyed reported that mobile was an extremely high future marketing priority for them, and another 21% reported it was a very high priority.

SMBs are still working on success with mobile, but need guidance on effective marketing opportunities.

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While The Weather Company VP Denise Chudy and Wanderful Media CEO Ben Smith work in different verticals (weather and retail), they shared a common mobile message at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local conference: that the experiences are inherently local, with users expecting that local experience to also serve up personalization and hyper-relevance. To deliver on this value proposition, data (and lots of it) is mandatory.

For TWC, that entails zip-code level data across 40,000 zip codes that creates greater location targeting accuracy. This also highlights primary retail areas for advertisers to isolate and enables TWC to “model hyperlocal behavior (sales/activity data) to weather patterns.”

The net effect is an understanding of the market-specific weather triggers that incent someone to engage in an activity or make a purchase. For instance, Chicagoans are more inclined to shop for tires when there is an increase in snow and wind. Sounds obvious, but TWC can model out the specific percentage lift in purchase intent.

The next step in TWC’s local migration is supplementing its mid-market sales team with local market-level sales partners (the Hartford Courant is an early example).

Smith’s vision for migrating retail print circulars to digital and creating a smarter shopping experience starts with a deeper understanding of “casual discovery shopping” (historically the print FSI model), then creating platform-specific experiences to match. iPad is a powerful play for Wanderful, with tablet users spending up to 15 times more time per session than PC users. “We want you to start in the stream of content and don’t stop streaming.” The more time on site, the more data Wanderful can collect, which leads to a more robust and personalized content experience.

In mobile, the experience is fundamentally different in order to leverage the platform’s distinct capabilities and use cases. It’s more about atomized content delivered when, where and how the user prefers as they’re making a buying decision. To help accomplish this, Wanderful is building out “point apps to solve a specific problem under a common brand.”

The post At Leading in Local: ILM 2013: Mobile’s “Inherently Local” Qualities appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Allmenus.com, the online ordering portal with 255,000 restaurant menus around the country and 3,500 online ordering relationships, will focus on specific local markets via a new partnership program that gives a portion of revenues to newspapers or other local promotional partners.

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette is live, and other newspapers and local media companies are anticipated as partners in coming months. Allmenus.com is the second brand from parent company Dotmenu.com. The original brand was Campusfood.com, which brings online ordering to college students.

Allmenus’ media partnerships involve co-branding and promotional advertising, potentially including display, direct, e-mail and social media. They also involve contextual integrated content. While they notably don’t involve the papers in sales, the papers receive a minority share of local market revenues. Revenues are derived from online food ordering, advertising and monthly maintenance fees.

Allmenus Chief Revenue Officer Tony Wills, a former exec with Quigo, Newsday and R.H. Donnelley, says the company determined that local markets had to be launched one at a time to be truly successful — even though it has good distribution via Google and Yahoo Local. Newspapers still have the online brand and promotional power to best drive local awareness and sales, he says, despite their drop-offs in penetration and usage. Newspapers also appreciate Allmenus as a “content” service since it strives to have the most comprehensive set of menus in each market — something it handles with local feet on the street, and fly-in teams.

Under terms of the partnerships, Allmenus widgets for online ordering will be featured in specific contextual parts of newspaper sites, including sports, local, weather and business. While it would seem to make sense to have newspapers also handle local sales, Wills says that it wouldn’t really work because newspaper sales staffs are paid on commissions.

A primary reason it wouldn’t work is that Allmenus takes no money upfront. Instead, it charges a transaction fee that is a little over 10 percent.  It takes 11.5 percent, or $5.75, out of a $50 order, for instance. “If there is no revenue, there is no sale,” says Wills.

In any case, newspapers may have trouble committing the resources in today’s environment. “Newspapers are under siege,” says Wills. “They can’t commit the resources. They need it to be turn-key.”

There is a role for newspaper sales reps, however — to build awareness for the Allmenus service. “It makes the print sale” for restaurants more valuable because of added awareness and usage, says Wills. Indeed, online ordering is a big piece of the restaurant landscape. Pizza Hut is getting 30 percent of its sales online. Moreover, online boosts the amount of sales — online orders are 10 percent higher than in-person orders because it is so easy to check off additional or more expensive items. Ultimately, however, it is a different ballgame than brand and awareness advertising.

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