Marketing across channels

With all the debate and speculation regarding Groupon and its planned IPO, I thought it would be a great time to check back in with our previous analysis of traffic to Groupon and its nearest competitor Living Social.

Cell phone ownership among American adults is 91% and 98% among young adults. Verizon and AT&T will almost certainly continue to dominate the market, especially given the fact that cell phone subscribers are increasingly staying with their provider for an extended period of time.

The popularity of flash sale websites with limited time & inventory offerings have grown exponentially over the two years. Online shoppers’ love for the thrill of snagging designer clothing, home décor, travel and even wine have caused visits to the category to increase 368% in July 2011 as compared to the same month two years ago and 109% one year ago. So far in 2011, Nordstrom acquired HauteLook, Amazon entered the fray with MyHabit and recently Saks Fifth Avenue announced the launch of a dedicated flash sale website after offering sale events per week on Saks’ main website. In July 2011, Zulily.com, a website offering sales targeted for women and babies/kids, captured the highest market share of visits at 16%, followed by Ideeli and LivingSocial Escapes. Amazon’s MyHabit ranked 11th, out of the 87 websites in the custom category after only 2 months in operation. Several of the major players over the past six months, the total visits to Ideeli increased 42%, Gilt.com up 14% and Nordstrom’s Hautelook up 8% for July 2011 as compared to February 2011. Total visits for MyHabit jumped 128% for July 2011 as compared to May 2011 when the website launched. The audience for Flash Sales continues to be attractive, and willing to shop – over-indexing against the online population for household incomes over $100k and creditworthy VantageScores of A and B.

The most effective way to segment a back-to-school audience is to include basic data elements with a segmentation methodology that recognizes the lifestyle and behavioral differences among households containing school-aged children. Experian’s Mosaic lifestyle segmentation solution can provide key insights into this lucrative audience.

In many ways it's wrong to refer to Brazil, Russia, India and China as "developing" markets — by some measures they can be considered just as developed as the "developed" markets.

According to Experian Simmons, users of printed coupons — those obtained from newspapers, magazines, mail, etc.—outnumber users of digital coupons by a margin of almost 3-to-1. Fully 68% of all U.S. adults said their household uses print coupons, a number that has remained relatively unchanged during the past five years.

All four Cinderella teams hail from markets with above average interest in college basketball. How do the Richmond, Tallahassee, Milwaukee, and Indianapolis consumer markets compare to one another?

According to Experian Simmons, just over 5% of all U.S. adults and nearly a quarter of adult NCAA men's tournament viewers (24%) qualify as likely online game streamers. How do you know which ones they are?

While WOM sites like Yelp.com continue to grow, their participants continue to be a very distinct subset of U.S. Internet users.