Three Marketing Tactics
to Tap Into the Emerging
Apple Demographic
Charles Nicholls
Apple customers are emerging as an important new
demographic, accounting for a massive 89% of mobile
commerce sales.
When Orbitz admitted that it ranks products differently for
Mac users, citing 20-30% higher average order values, much
comment was made about the difference between Mac and
PC customers.
But that is only half the story. When you factor in mobile
devices, the new Apple demographic begins to have
significant implications for marketers.
Apple mobile customers dominate mobile commerce,
especially on tablets. Analysis of 21 million mobile ecommerce
transactions by SeeWhy in February and March (2013)
found that Apple customers are fundamentally different from
Android customers: 89% of mobile ecommerce sales were on
iOS, with 70% of total mobile sales coming from iPad alone.
Remember that there are significantly more Android devices
than iOS devices, so if Android customers were the same
as Apple ones, those figures shouldn’t be so: In essence,
Android should drive more mobile sales.
Digging into this in more detail by looking at Web traffic
sources, it becomes clear that Android usage is higher than
iOS over cellular, but iOS usage is much higher over Wi-Fi,
suggesting that Android users have less access to WiFi—or
aren’t using it.
In fact, Android device usage patterns suggest they are used
more as utilitarian devices, helping to achieve tasks when
out of the home, such as finding stores and accessing the
web using cellular. Those patterns are what we normally
associate with smartphones—many fewer purchases with a
much smaller average order value than tablets.
Tablets are used in a fundamentally different way from
smartphones. Used primarily at home, on the couch and
in bed, tablets are a recreational device with dramatically
higher average order values than desktops or smartphones,
generating three times more revenue for e-commerce
merchants than phones.
Are Apple customers really different?
Apple was first to market with the iPad and has a larger
market share. Could that account for the difference, or are
Apple customers really different?
In a survey (SeeWhy, April 2013) of 1,500 US consumers, we
found clear differences in the demographics of Apple phone
owners. They tend to be younger, better educated, living in
urban areas, and are more affluent than Android users: 60%
of Apple phone users earn over $75,000 per year, compared
with 44% of Android phone owners.
As for market share, 10.3% of US online consumers own
an iPad, whereas 8.9% own an Android tablet. That means
there are a lot of Android tablets out there not being used
for shopping.