This morning I received some interesting statistics in my email inbox. Many of you might have received it as well. I reposted it here.

iPhone consistently covers 2/3 of mobile users

The first thing I noticed was how consistently iPhone usage is measured at around 66% of mobile usage to a given site. This is what I’ve seen in my experience with a number of organizations. I’ve also seen this stat elsewhere. It’s easy to understand why companies with a tight budget pick the iPhone when forced to pick one mobile platform.

Smartphone almost as happy with their browser as computer users

Secondly, I was surprised to find that smartphone users (68%) were almost as satisfied with using their browser on their phone as computer users (70%).  Not surprisingly, feature phone users felt differently (47%).

Coincidentally, Adam Woozeer (@AdamWoozeer) tweeted yesterday that “About 58% of total #IPhone users primarily use the iphone for web.” I’m haven’t been able to verify his data, but it seems to fit with the Chitika data. I might have ignored each of these data points individually, but together they made me take note.

Personally, I use my iPhone browser extensively, but I wouldn’t call it my “primary browser.” I certainly don’t interact with web sites in the same way on my iPhone as I do on my computer. Despite all the power of the iPhone browser, I tend to do everything mobile in task-oriented, bite-sized chunks. For me, this is as true for applications as it is when browsing web sites. In fact, web site loading is often just slow enough that I abandon the site all together rather than wait (I use the original iPhone without 3G).

Smartphone click through rates much lower than computer users

This is almost heresy. The conventional wisdom in mobile advertising is that mobile has much higher click through rates than computers (e.g. mobile ads are more valuable), although the tide may be turning. Chitika found the opposite. Chitika found that smartphone mobile advertising click through rates (0.48%) are much less than online click through rates (0.83%).

The much lower mobile click through rate for mobile makes sense given the impatient, bite-sized behavior mobile consumers display. The stratospherical and often unsubstantiated click through rates quoted by mobile vendors with a vested interest (see link above) may not hold up in less controlled circumstances with larger sample sizes.

Maybe Monetization isn’t all about ecommerce-style advertising…

According to the stats above, smartphone users essentially consider their phone browser as good as a computer browser, yet they are far less responsive to traditional advertising.

Ultimately the lower click through rate suggests that ecommerce-style mobile advertising isn’t the best way to monetize mobile. The mobile context is just different. Mobile requires a different approach than ecommerce.

And from this point there aren’t easy, tested answers to the right way to proceed. It all depends.

Best practices will arise. But for now success relies upon knowing what others have tried and the history of what-works-where and what-doesn’t. Mobile monetization should also include actual commerce, which ironically most mcommerce lacks. Product placement and transactional revenue models also are appearing to work well in certain contexts.

Resources are tight and the stakes are high. This is no time to wander into the wilderness alone.

We would love to be your sherpa. Drop us a line: info@MobileStrategyPartners.com.

“A half-done, hard-to-use solution with limited features certainly says something about you. It’s probably not what you want your customers to hear.”

Mobile Commerce is commerce. Mobile Banking is banking.

Too many organizations overlook this simple truth and instead treat mobile as a simple feature add-on to their web solution. They do so at their peril.

Done right, mobile is not a simple technology decision, but a business expansion. For example, a successful mobile banking rollout certainly includes Technology and Information Security teams, but it also touches Marketing, Retail Banking, Banking Operations, and in some cases, Commercial banking. Rolling out mobile banking is a great excuse to touch your customers through bank statements, courtesy calls, print and mass media advertising, signage in your branches, user education events, etc.

Your customers will see your mobile option as an extension of your brand and a statement about who you are. A half-done, hard-to-use solution with limited features certainly says something about you. It’s probably not what you want your customers to hear.

Look around the internet. There are few if any press releases on the success of mobile sites that simply refactored their web site into a mobile site.

How successful can your mobile commerce site be if you can’t buy anything?

Successful mobile initiatives start with the overall business goals, then they figure out how mobile can help achieve those goals. Technically, this usually involves figuring out how to translate your connection with your customer into the mobile context.

For example, Facebook announced today they have 65 million mobile users. Despite some early usability issues, the application is encouraging more engagement and more users to join, which drives revenue. Facebook focused on the key use cases of status updates and wall posts. These chunks of functionality fit well into the mobile context and made Facebook easier to use because members didn’t have to remember their witty comment until they got back to their computer – they just typed it when the thought about it and moved on.

Similarly, Bank of America has seen tremendous success in their mobile banking application by focusing on getting key functionality to the most users possible. In Bank of America’s case, this meant offering a variety of mobile banking products.

Similarly, USAA recently announced success with its mobile remote deposit feature. USAA announced that users deposited over $1.5 million in the first days after the service launched. Mobile deposits are important to USAA because the bank doesn’t operate a large retail branch network and their customers are spread around the world. Mobile deposits bring more deposits into the bank and encourage customers to choose their USAA account as their primary account rather than an account from another bank or credit union.

The mobile image you project is increasingly the image your customers see. Make a good impression.

Mobile Banking Requires a Long-Term Strategy. Canada is ready.

The call for strategic mobile banking is increasing and two recent articles are absolute must-reads.

First, Mobile Financial nicely sums up the challenges of mobile banking. Mobile Banking is not a simple add-on to an existing product. Mobile provides new ways to connect with your customer, strengthen loyalty, and deliver better services at a lower cost.

Mobile poses significant risks and technical challenges. Making a prudent decision on mobile banking requires three key “legs of a stool” a) deep collaboration between the business executives who know the long term goals for the organization, and b) the technology team who knows the intricacies of the current environment, and c) deep mobile expertise, which is often missing from most organizations.

Success requires all three legs of the stool and moving forward without all three almost certainly will result in failure (although some banks have set the bar extremely low so they can claim success, regardless). Mobile banking efforts now should be a base to build upon in the future. Doing it wrong now and having to start over puts you behind your competitors who did it right.

Secondly, Jose Colucci writes a manifesto (or offers a 12 step program) on why Canadian banks should offer mobile banking now. The Canadian market is ready. Canada is the land of the RIM and increasingly the iPhone. Canada has the technology, the infrastructure, the resources, and the demand for mobile banking to completely explode (in a good way) and be an example of success for the developed world.

I predict that when the first bank makes a bold move, the entire industry will follow. Canadian mobile banking will happen in a breathtaking, large rush.

In fact, in doing some Search Engine Optimization last week, I discovered one of the most searched terms related to mobile banking in Canada is “TD Mobile Banking.” Like most other Canadian banks, TD has a mobile web site that is keeping the proverbial light on for mobile. But like most WAP interfaces,  the TD site has some usability challenges which are almost certainly preventing widespread adoption.

And the point is that despite the usability challenges and lack of promotion, there is considerable demand for the product.

Canadian customers like Jose are clamoring for mobile banking.

C’mon CIBC, BMO, Desjardins, Laurentian, National, TD, and RBC. Let’s have it!

HSN iPhone mobile commerce application featuring shake2shop

Mobile Commerce is starting be, well… commerce. Home Shopping Network (HSN) announced their new iPhone application that among other things let’s you buy stuff.

So far much of the hype around mobile commerce and mobile advertising has brought back painful memories of the Dot-com days before the bust. Back then it seemed everyone built their business model on ad revenue and the glory of first mover advantage. Today’s conversations on mobile ad revenue and “stickier”, more loyal customers seems to be the same deja vu all over again.

Now we have another great example of a company using their ecommerce expertise to find another way to connect with their consumers and convert eyeballs into revenue. Hallelujah.

Modern consumers use their phone when they’re bored. Look around. Almost everywhere you’ll find someone staring at their phone: in the breakroom, at the DMV, waiting for a plane, sitting on a bus, even standing in line at the checkout. There are lots of places without computers and that are not your retail store. All these other places are opportunities to connect with your customer and create new sales.

“This is another valuable tool for us to reach both existing and new customers with the compelling lifestyle content we offer via HSN TV as well as the broad array of quality products available at hsn.com,” says Brian Bradley, executive vice president/general manager of online and advanced services at HSN. HSN points out that this is possibly the first case of a Live Video “Third Screen”, referring to simultaneous live video on television, computers and now mobile phones.

However, the focus on booking sales in the mobile channel is arguably far more important to the overall mobile commerce industry.

Ecommerce companies are struggling with how best to adapt the web shopping cart metaphor to mobile commerce. Doing business on mobile phones adds additional difficulty because of the fragmentation of technologies (like SMS, browsers & applications) and devices (iPhone, Android, etc.). The successes and failures of the HSN application and others like it will be useful to the industry as a whole.

Industry best practices are still in the incubation stage. Organizations going it alone generally must figure out all the details using trial and error and often with very little objective data or mobile experience as a guide.

This challenge is why more organizations will seek help from outside experts like my firm Mobile Strategy Partners. At least for now, Mobile Commerce is more complicated than ecommerce was in the 1990s. As a veteran of ecommerce and now mobile commerce, I have seen the organizational struggles and the expensive mistakes that could have been prevented.

Mobile Commerce is evolving faster than ecommerce did. More and more organizations are looking for help in getting the product mix right earlier and get to ROI faster.

They’re doing it because if they don’t, their competitors will.