The peak season for e-commerce is unquestionably the holidays. During these three weeks, online sales surge; in 2021, they topped even the previous year’s record with another 11% YoY gain.
The difficult issue is that many online retailers begin their holiday season promotions as early as mid-October, and by the time the actual holidays get closer, their marketing creativity resources may be running low. Is it your situation, and you’re looking for more ways to boost your conversions and sales? Or perhaps you haven’t yet had a chance to adapt your normal routine to the Christmas season.
This mobile app marketing guide contains some helpful advice based on Unomok’s years of experience working with e-commerce clients and the most recent market insights.
When Should Your Holiday Mobile App Marketing Campaign Begin?
The ideal moment to arrive is when the majority of high-value clients start their holiday shopping. When is it, exactly?
This year, 68% of buyers would shop for presents and offers before Thanksgiving, according to Deloitte. As they will spend 23% more than those who make their purchases later, these early shoppers will constitute the most lucrative target audience for you.
If you can start a pre-holiday campaign in the coming days, you may get the most attention and guarantee your place on the shopping lists of the busiest customers.
- Make a decision regarding the strategic focus of your holiday marketing campaign.
Choose your general approach first. Will it be more profitable to concentrate on customer acquisition or, alternatively, customer engagement and re-engagement? Particularly in light of the short deadlines you face for the launch of your Christmas campaign.
If you decide to concentrate on attracting new clients, watch out for these traps:
Acquisition costs, which are high year-round, are particularly costly around the holidays;
You’ll be under time constraints to draw in, hold the attention of, and convert a new audience;
Mobile operating systems’ restrictions on customer data privacy make acquisition less efficient. Therefore, those additional advertising costs may not always result in high conversion rates.
However, as the Baymard Institute notes: “Choosing to engage your existing consumer base may be a wise strategic choice.
Recurring clients have a 9 times higher conversion rate;
Retained customers spend 25% more on holiday shopping.
According to our expertise, we advise you to place your bet on the engagement strategy because it may significantly increase your e-commerce sales and produce the biggest return on investment.
- Peek on Your Competitors to Make Informed Decisions
It might turn out that some of your holiday marketing strategies are already being tested by your rivals. Whether so, you may even monitor their effectiveness by using competitive intelligence tools to find out if your competitors have changed their SEO strategies, ad settings, traffic generation methods, or messaging. Have any of these holiday adjustments proven successful so far, based on competition analysis tools?
This stage will assist you in identifying more lucrative prospects while putting the less lucrative ones on hold.
- Make Certain Your Customers Are Using the Most Recent Version of Your E-Commerce App
Consider a consumer who has already arrived at the checkout screen and has selected a lengthy list of items. There, a mistake happens, and the cart is empty of all the products.
The transaction has not been finished. The consumer will then likely pick the same goods a second time and abandon some of them, which will be a terrible experience. Or, even worse, they might delete your app if they find the purchasing experience to be intolerable.
Your team has already corrected the bug, despite the fact that you are aware it existed in an earlier version of your programme. Why is it that a customer’s device doesn’t have this most recent version installed?
Fortunately, you may take proactive measures to safeguard your company against such an unpleasant (and entirely normal) danger.
Send a Silent Push to users’ smartphones that contains Custom Data to start the update of your app. This type of notification gently activates whatever was installed in the background and provides the necessary data to your users’ applications. A Silent Push assists you by: helping you: not requiring your users’ attention; making no alert or sound; and
Track the amount of programme uninstalls;
Get rid of the bad users. All invalid or non-existent push tokens will be deleted from our database each time a Silent Push is delivered;
Activate your app’s holiday deals section;
release a new design theme with a Christmas theme;
To draw more attention to your mobile commerce, update your app icon.
- Customer segmentation is crucial for increasing conversion rates.
Truth be told, it does.
Recent internal study from Unomok shows that when an app uses behavioural segmentation in its marketing communications, compared to broadcast campaigns with similar messages and CTAs, its conversion-to-purchase rates increase by a factor of a hundred. The figures are astounding, yet this is what Unomok clients actually do by being serious about segmentation.
In a perfect world, we advise you to gather all the information you can from your offline and online customer data sources. You’ll even be able to identify between clients who are absolutely new to your e-commerce company and those who are regulars of your physical store (if you have one). Isn’t it incredible?
Here is how you can accomplish it with Unomok Customer Journey Builder: you want to segment out all of the users who have triggered the “App Install” event and divide your subsequent communication flow in accordance with those who you have labelled as “Purchased Offline.”
- Create individualised messages for every customer segment, including each individual customer.
Although it is a more complex phase, it is not as difficult as it might seem. By developing consumer segments, you’ve already completed half of the work. Now you want to make pertinent offers to those groups.
For example, the customers who have put something in their favourites should receive in-app messages or push notifications with a reference to such products. Additionally, push notifications and in-app ads advertising the products you suggest to customers who haven’t chosen any favourites should be sent to them.
- Your Messaging Should Be Synchronized Across All Channels
You don’t want to make the embarrassing error of announcing “deals for everyone” on one channel and “an extra discount for loyalty programme members alone” on another. Marketing automation may protect you from this danger and raise the likelihood that your target audience will hear and respond to your message.
What should you do?
Simply trust an omnichannel communications system like Unomok Customer Journey Builder with your mobile app marketing. You can use its single-channel substitutes, which allow you to deliver push notifications, in-app messages, and emails independently, but in this case, you’ll need to pay close attention to how you orchestrate your campaign.
- Update Your Icon to Spread the Holiday Spirit to All Users of Your E-Commerce App
Your app icon will catch the attention of both your present customers and newly installed users, regardless of the strategy you select for your holiday marketing. Consider changing its appearance in time for the upcoming holiday or shopping event.
Such a short revamp will unavoidably garner notice for your app and can increase both the number of new instals and regular user engagement. You can also incorporate it into your holiday app’s gamification; for instance, you can break up the app’s user journey into several milestones. Update the app icon once the user reaches one.
Additional Suggestions for Your Holiday Mobile App Marketing Plan
These are just a few suggestions that you should give a go during this busy shopping season. Hopefully, more customers will read your marketing communications, take a look at your offers, and then convert. The busy holiday season may be the ideal time for you to compile solid information about the behaviour of your customers. After the holidays are over, you can examine it and use the results to your current efforts.
Learn how Unomok can help your e-commerce business at every level, from audience segmentation,