Adobe, the world's leading provider of digital marketing services, said Thursday that Korean enterprises operating online businesses need a better marketing strategy to tap into the nation's well-established mobile infrastructure.
Citing market research data on Korean enterprises' websites, Adobe said many recorded low conversion rates despite very high smartphone penetration rates and active use of mobile devices to access the Internet.
The data showed that 34.8 percent of visitors to Korean websites use smartphones for access, whereas only 19.2 percent of American users do the same. On the contrary, the conversion rate, which refers to the ratio of purchases on visits to a website, stood at only 1.6 percent, compared to Japan's 3.3 percent and India's 3.5 percent.
"This data implies that many Korean websites are failing to achieve profits despite the local customers' high visit rates and stick rates through mobile," Adobe Asia Pacific communication director Julie Cleeland Nicholls said during a press conference in Seoul, Thursday.
Adobe pointed out many Korean marketers tend to remain with traditional methods of marketing and thus fail to boost conversion rates through digital marketing.
Korean companies need to follow the leading business in an industry or a region to learn the differences, optimize mobile experiences and come out of their comfort zone in launching digitalized marketing activities, it said.
"Marketing activities became increasingly about numbers and data nowadays," Adobe Digital Marketing Business Unit Vice President John Mellor said. "In digital marketing, consistency and continuity are the most important. Marketers need to provide a seamless user experience in establishing mobile marketing strategies. Adobe's Marketing Cloud platform can help them make better decisions on this."
The company said its relationship with International Business Machines (IBM) is more a partnership than competitors in the marketing services sector.
"Adobe and IBM consider the partnership very seriously. We may compete with IBM in the software sector but at the same time are working to build up a strong partnership in the marketing services sector," Mellor said.
Adobe has been recognized as the world's largest vender of designer software such as Photoshop and the Illustrator series. But since it launched cloud-based digital marketing platform services, it rapidly became the biggest provider in the sector.
Adobe Korea Representative Director Eric Choi said, "We believe we do not have competitors in the digital marketing service sector in Korea. Adobe is the only provider of truly integrated platform services. Our subscription-base business model needs a ceaseless renewal, which makes our services remain up-to-date and more competitive than those of other providers."