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U.K. online retail sales were £49.8 billion in 2009, up 21% from £39.3 billion in 2008, as an estimated 33 million consumers shopped online. One interesting point: Mondays were the busiest online shopping days. The reason is clear according to Retail Decisions’ CEO Carl Clump who notes, “Mondays are the busiest online shopping days due to consumers’ price sensitivity. Shoppers spend their weekends shopping on the high street, finding the items they want to buy. Then they take to the Internet to find the best deal they can for their chosen items.” 30% of online sales in the U.K took place in November and December.Read the full article at Internet Retailer

David Carr of the NYT bemoans, “Television, which was once the brain-dead part of the day, had become one more thing that required time, attention and taste.” But Carr notes that this has changed. “In the dawning era of an always-on database of television, even shows I missed on purpose now find me. The media world today is less the paradox of choice than the inundation by options. My DVR is groaning at 79 percent of capacity, My iTunes library [will] not fit on my new iPad because I have about 75 gigabytes of music, 20,000 songs or so, many of which I have yet to hear. Our ability to produce media has outstripped our ability to consume it.” Carr concludes “We don’t watch TV anymore as much as it seems to watch us, recommending, recording and dishing up all manner of worthy product.”
Read the full article at NY Times

Brian Massey of ClickZ asks online marketers what their New Year’s resolutions are for 2011 and shares his own top 11 in the article from ClickZ. Some of Massey’s tips include: (1) focus on customer conversion by incorporating best practices in your Web site to “that turn visitors into customers”; (2) focus on display advertising and use retargeting as ways to bring “qualified” traffic to your site; (3) utilize “dynamic creative” or “intelligent display” that automates ad assembly in real time to make those display ads even more relevant and (4) utilize and nurture that house e-mail list and think of that database as your own “social network.” Read the full article at ClickZ

The trend is undeniable: retailers sent considerably more email to each subscriber in 2009 than they did during 2008. In one report, retailers tracked by one analyst sent an average of 132 emails to each subscriber (an average of 11 per month or 2.5 per week). During December, which was the busiest month of the year, retailers sent each subscriber 15.4 emails on average. Overall, top online retailers sent 12% more promotional emails in 2009 than they did the year before. The growth trend however could be a cause for alarm. Some worry retail promotional e-mails may be reaching a saturation point and consumers may react negatively unsubscribing or driving open rates downward. According to this article, one way to avoid promotional email fatigue is to “use dynamic content to add personalized content and promotions to your broadcast emails to make them more relevant to individual subscribers.” The article also advises retailers to create loyalty programs (if they don’t have one already) to create a platform for “uber-targeted” messages. Read the full article at MediaPost

An interesting piece in India Online discusses the changes in retail marketing after a turbulent year in 2009 that affected all retailers globally. However, year 2010 is being viewed as “a new beginning” according to Vijay Bobba of i-mint who believes this year – more than at any time in the past – it is important to approach retail marketing differently by identifying the core customer base of the business to reduce customer acquisition costs as well as customer retention costs and at the same time make marketing spends more efficient. According to the article, “This is the entire basis of precision marketing, the new age benefactor for retail marketers.” The article also notes, “[retailers] need to focus nurturing a core customer base that is profitable to the company. Successful retailers [will continue to] generate the majority of their profits from this core base.”Read the full article

The proportion of adult U.S. subscribers owning smartphones jumped to 17% last year from 11% in 2008 and 7% in 2007, according to new data from Forrester Research. The growth rate has held steady from 2008 even as the user base has expanded -- a good sign, because new technologies often initially have gaudy growth numbers before declining rapidly as adoption increases, said Forrester. What about 2010? “This will be the year of the smartphone, now that multiple device OEMs and multiple carriers are offering Android devices, and those ranks will grow (we expect AT & T to join the crowd in the first half of the year) as will the range of Android form factors and prices,” wrote Forrester mobile analyst Charles Golvin in a blog post Monday.Read the full article at MediaPost

Last year, with the economy down, the display portion of the U.S. online advertising industry had a particularly rough time. Total revenues in ‘09 were down 5.2% to $7.5 billion, estimates JPMorgan analyst Imran Khan in a new Internet industry report. But Khan forecasts that U.S. display advertising will rebound 10.5% to $8.3 billion this year, buoyed by a rising economy and actions to reduce the glut of display ad inventory for higher quality sites and content. Khan expects U.S. search advertising to grow an even brisker 13.2% in 2010 to $16.6 billion, after virtually flat growth in ‘09.Read the full article at The Washington Post

Mobile commerce is poised to explode this year, says online marketing and research firm Compete, which has found that 37% of smartphone owners purchased merchandise via their phones in 2009. However, the research shows notable behavior differences across devices. Compete’s director of consumer technologies Danielle Nohe notes, “As marketers better understand how each group actually uses their devices, there’s a huge potential in 2010 for mobile commerce to explode.” However, the report offers a cautionary word of advice: While m-commerce is poised for growth, consumers are likely to abandon purchases on sites that are not optimized for the on-the-go experience, just as online consumers often abandoned poorly design shopping carts in the early days of e-commerce.Read the full article at Internet Retailer

Nearly half of retailers said their online sales are growing at a faster rate than their overall sales, according to a recent poll of 26 U.S. and Canadian retail chains. However, while 44% of retailers surveyed said their web sales are growing faster than their total revenue, 17% said they don’t have a fully operational and transactional e-commerce site. All 17% polled said they are planning on enhancing their site functionality in the near future.Read the full article at Internet Retailer

Retailers spent $4.67 billion this year on interactive marketing efforts, a number that is expected to climb to $8.6 billion within five years as retailers seek to drive web sales, improve their search programs, personalize display ads, and launch mobile marketing programs, says a new Forrester Research Inc. report. 70% of the retailers surveyed as part of Forrester’s "The State of Retailing Online 2009: Marketing" report said they intend to increase or maintain their interactive marketing spend, particularly for search and e-mail marketing. Forrester however concludes that retailers are still spending too much of their marketing budget on acquisition marketing (49%) suggesting that these retailers "can spend more efficiently by remarketing to repeat customers rather than constantly trying to attract fresh ones."Read the full article at Internet Retailer