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The countdown to the holidays has begun! As most marketers know, now is the time to put a winning holiday ad campaign strategy in place.
The season is known for the highest level of app store activity — but also when acquiring loyal users costs much more than it normally would. With mobile accounting for over $70 billion1 (almost 75% all digital spend), now is a critical time to focus on user engagement and retention.
Here are 6 key tips to ensure you don’t leave money on the table this holiday season:
According to Prosper Insights and Analytics, 89% of consumers say they research products online before buying in person.2 And holiday shoppers are no different, starting their pre-purchase research in October or much earlier.
This is the time when maximum app installations take place, especially for brick and mortar retailers. Consumers are increasingly exploring both retailer and third-party apps and websites, sometimes even supplementing it with “window shopping” to learn more about products and compare prices and specifications.
Image: 2017 Holiday Planning Playbook, NRF2
It’s essential to assist these consumers in their research through timely notifications. Send relevant offers and recommendations for products they’ve shown interest in or are most likely to buy. The impact of mobile push notifications is growing every year, with the 2017 holiday season witnessing an all-time high opt-in rate for notifications at 56% — 2.7% higher than the 2016 season.
Every brand is trying to make the most of the holiday season. If your mobile marketing campaign is one of thousands swarming the internet, chances are it will get lost in the crowd.
To stand out, brands need to understand their target audience’s interests and values. Psychographic segmentation is great way to learn about your consumer’s behavior and interests.
Psychographic segmentation focuses on what your users are most interested in — not their demographics. For example, you can determine the product category your app users are most interested in based on viewing or purchase history, and use these insights to create targeted mobile marketing campaigns that connect more meaningfully with your core user segment.
Brian Schmidt, Director of CRM, Growth & Retention at Fender, discusses the importance of segmentation when it comes to their holiday campaigns. Fender sells a vast array of products, from high-end, signature instruments to lifestyle merchandise. Because the decision making process around each type of purchase is so different, Fender creates segments based on everything from app usage and purchase history to instrument type and even product registration information (because of the number of third party retailers who sell Fender products).
Mobile Retention & Engagement Strategies for the Holiday Season Matter
Gain insights from an in-depth discussion on Best Practises in Mobile Retention for the upcoming 2018 Holiday season.
Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day, and Chinese Singles Day (considered the largest online shopping event in the world) are some of the biggest annual online shopping occasions.
In fact, Cyber Monday shoppers are looking for great deals beyond Cyber Week. What was considered a week of online shopping deals is now morphing into a whole month of discounts and promotions. Last year, Amazon launched their best holiday retail campaigns 50 days in advance.
With that season quickly approaching, it’s important to have your marketing messages and creative assets in place 6-8 weeks prior to the holiday season frenzy.
A/B test campaigns to refine your messaging and identify the marketing tactics that are resonating with your target audience. Determine which version of an app layout, CTA button, campaign content, messaging, and even emojis are performing best with your users.
While in-app purchases are essential for all businesses, they become even more critical as more brick and mortar businesses become mobile. A great way to convince users to transact in-app is by allowing them to save their payment and shipping details. This shortens their path to purchase and improves the user experience.
Image: Mobile Shopping – Retail Shopping on the rise, Adobe
Another important channel marketers can no longer choose to ignore is push notifications. 45% of mobile app users opt-in to receive push notifications, making it one of the most widely used mobile marketing channels.
Push notifications are essential for activating new users, improving engagement, and driving in-app purchases. With personalized notifications triggered by user activity, you can boost CTRs by 3X and improve conversion rates.
Push notifications enabled with webhooks allow you to integrate your campaigns with CRM systems, so you can immediately follow up with users who abandoned their cart and prompt them to complete a transaction.
Once your target audience is identified and segmented, the key is to keep the interest alive.
According to Schmidt, Fender is looking to expand their use of micro-influencers. Fender’s apps focus on utility, with the biggest being their guitar training app, which is why they see a spike in app downloads around the holidays. This is when most of users celebrate “unboxing day,” wanting to tune their new guitars immediately and start learning how to play.
Image: Fender Play
Influencers are closely connected to a niche audience and often have greater influence than other digital marketing mediums.
An important tip here is to shortlist influencers not just on the basis of their followers, but their engagement rate.
When you’re identifying the right influencers, an ideal engagement rate is upwards of 1.5% if the number followers exceeds a million. And if you’re considering influencers with followers in the range of 10-20,000, the engagement rate needs to be over 4%.
Here’s how Fender used one of the world’s leading bassists, Flea of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, to introduce the Fender Signature Flea Bass:
Don’t give up on churned users. You can win them back by with personalized campaigns that show the new value your app can provide. A great way to identify the right users to target is through CleverTap’s live user segmentation engine, which gives you real-time insights into app uninstalls.
No matter how good your win-back campaigns are, some users simply won’t reinstall no matter what you do. In these cases, cut your losses to drive down cost of user re-acquisition and focus on acquiring new users instead.
According to Schmidt, a great win-back strategy needs to consider the lifetime value of the customer and the net revenue you’re getting from the target audience. To put it simply, you can’t spend $100 re-engaging a customer who’s only going to spend $5 on your app.
The holiday season is full of users ready to spend big bucks, providing you with an opportunity to grab their attention and win them over into your most valuable users.
At the heart of any successful holiday season campaign, especially for mobile, is appropriate use of data. Data provides marketers with the latest trends, consumer research, spending patterns, and campaign performance.
In our recent Holiday 2018 Mobile Engagement and Retention Virtual Panel, Brian Schmidt, Director of CRM, Growth & Retention for Fender discusses in-depth best practices for mobile retention for the upcoming 2018 holiday season:
Mobile Retention & Engagement Strategies for the Holiday Season Matter
Gain insights from an in-depth discussion on Best Practises in Mobile Retention for the upcoming 2018 Holiday season.
