The latest Gartner report predicts that tablets will overtake PC sales by 2015. Now, this is unlikely to come as a shock to… well anyone really. The standard barometer to determine which mobile technologies are dominating the market is just observing what’s in the hands of the everyday commuter on the tube – and there are a fair few number of people using tablet devices as a tool to avoid socialising on London transport.

But today’s marketer relies on cold hard facts. So here it is: research from Adobe predicts that the shipments of tablets are expected to grow to 383.3 million units in 2017, compared to 72.7 million in 2011. That’s an increase of 427%. So why is this good news for marketers? Not only are consumers using tablets to access the internet, but more specifically, they are using it to buy goods and services. Nielsen research shows that 87% of smartphone and tablet owners use these devices to shop. And this is being reflected in our own numbers – over 64% of visits to the Gumtree platform come from mobile and tablet devices. Additionally, customers are using their tablets to do the initial research on what they want to buy.

So in tablet users, we typically have an audience who are casually browsing and buying, most frequently from home in the late evening, often whilst watching TV. This all spells not only a good opportunity for marketers but a lucrative one as we see higher conversation rates and average order value on tablets.

Another benefit of the tablet as a platform for engagement is that it allows a business to positively adapt their email marketing to specific audiences. Email marketing is experiencing a renaissance, which is largely driven by mobile and tablet adoption anyway. So with the tablets as your platform, you have the opportunity to test content variations that reflect the window shopping and impulse buying that we commonly see in tablet buying behaviours.

Tablets very quickly become a marketer’s best friend when it comes to display advertising. Studies have shown that leader boards and ads perform better as users are fixated 23% longer on a tablet than on a desktop PC. The reality of the situation is that consumers are more engaged with content on screen when they can interact more with the device – be that scrolling, zooming, pinching, clicking etc. This provides a huge opportunity for display advertising to drive a quick response mechanism to TV advertising as customers adopt a more cross platform/multiscreen approach to research, buying and selling.

The best thing about tablets, which might be the most obvious, is that it combines the best media features of both PCs and smartphones, giving customers (and the opportunities for marketers) the best of both worlds. As with other retail and classified brands, we are also seeing more customers move across devices in the buying and selling experience, so it is becoming more important than ever to be able to identify users across devices to avoid online advertising wastage. But this is just the beginning – as we see further development on HTML5, the online experience will become richer, prompting consumers and marketers to further take advantage of the opportunities provided by mobile technologies such as the tablet.

 

By Hannah Wilson, Head of Marketing at Gumtree. 

PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.

comments powered by Disqus