It is the most wonderful time of the year. Yes! The holiday season has officially started. For us marketers, it means it is time to roll up our sleeves!

The holiday season is that time of the year that is known for the highest level of app activity. According to Forbes, in 2018, mobile accounted for more than $70 billion – nearly 75% of all digital spend. Thus, it is needless to say, now is the time to focus your efforts on user acquisition and retention.

With consumers interacting and spending more time in-app, mobile is the place to be for both publishers and advertisers.

Here are 5 concise yet comprehensive and useful mobile marketing tips to ensure you are not left behind this holiday season –

Understand Your Users, Segment Them, Engage Them

With all apps mostly fighting for visibility and ultimately engagement, if your mobile marketing campaign is one of the millions on the internet, chances are it will get lost in the crowd.

You need to make sure that you deliver exactly what your users are looking for. To do that, you need to understand your users. The best way to do this is to adopt a psychometric segmentation. This approach helps to segment users in terms of their behavior rather than just their demographics. For example, this helps you to predict which kind of holiday they are interested in and you can focus your efforts accordingly.

Here are some holidays you can consider:

Based on the category of your app and what your users are interested in, you can tweak your mobile marketing campaign according to the holiday(s) you choose to focus on. Leverage on all the data available to you and create mobile marketing campaigns that target and connect to your users more meaningfully.

It is also an excellent point to note your user’s engagement funnel and recognize where mobile plays an important part. It is crucial to have a seamless transition from non-mobile to mobile to reduce users abandoning their journey with you.

Start Early, Very Early 

An advantage of these holidays is that you know precisely when it is, which means praemonitus praemunitus! For those new to this Latin phrase, it means – forewarned is forearmed. According to UberSuggest, people start searching for “Christmas gift ideas” as early as July and continues to surge in September. This is the period when app installs are at their maximum and users are doing their pre-purchase research, especially for brick and mortar retailers. Users are searching on apps, websites, and even “window shopping” to learn more about products, do price and specification comparison.

With mobile being the most common platform for research, compared to desktops, it is imperative to implement your mobile holiday marketing strategy early on in the user purchase funnel timeline. This is an excellent time to harness the power of mobile and utilize push notifications, email marketing, SMS, in-app notifications, geofencing, etc., to assist users in their pre-purchase research phase.

 A Creative Strategy is Imperative 

It is the festive holiday season, so show your users that you know that! The end goal is to be relatable, engage, acquire and retain users. To do this, you must implement a creative strategy. A coherent holiday-themed branding experience is required across the user journey – from holiday creatives to holiday store creatives to in-app holiday content:

The most visible creative during the holidays is the ads. It is the best way to reach out to your target audience and acquire them. This is the time you should spend on paid ad campaigns that deliver installs and post-install events, furthermore. Leveraging platforms such as Minimob for user acquisition and retention will ensure performance results that matter to you.

The next step should be to invest time in creating holiday store creatives. Incorporating festive attributes to your app icon on the app store is said to give up to a 47% conversion lift!

 

Moreover, the app store is also an excellent place to show off your in-app content screenshots, which have been changed for the holiday season. But this does not necessarily mean that you have to improve your full listing. Splitmetrics says that you will get better results by only changing 2 screenshots versus changing all your screenshots.

The usage of videos for previews on the app store is also a good idea. Videos are known for uplifting information retention and engagement with users. In 2017, Vivino had put out a seasonal offer for the holidays and to let their users know, they created the following video. Following this course of action will give you and your app definitive results that lead to user acquisition and retention.

 

Another good thing to note is the holiday colors that are used in creating the holiday-themed creatives. Hues of red, green, black, gold, silver are the right colors to add to your creatives. Of course, it depends on the holiday you are focusing on.

This same strategy can also be extrapolated for not only app-centric creatives, but also mobile email campaigns, push notifications, mobile websites, etc. With a comprehensive creative approach in place, which stretches across your entire mobile marketing campaign, it is ensured that it will boost your KPIs during the holiday season.

A/B Testing Is Your True Friend

Understanding what works for your users is a continuous effort that has to be put in throughout the year. However, when the holiday season is coming up, it is definitely good to be prudent. Any change made in your mobile marketing campaign dedicated to the holiday season should be tested in advance to aid in refining your marketing tactics. It is also essential to understand which aspects of the holiday mobile marketing campaign need to be tested. Usually, it is most efficient to check the ones that are crucial touchpoints to your users. Whether it is a CTA button, a message, app/mobile web layout, content, it should be tested.

The best way to do this is to use A/B testing. Always test two versions of a variable to understand which one works better for your users and keep testing until the best fit is found. For example, it was found that the icon on the right gave 40% more installs during Christmas than the one on the right when A/B tested.

Source: SplitMetrics

 

Loyalty Programs and Re-targeting Are Of Utmost Value 

The holiday season is the time of the year that usually sees a spike in installs or any kind of engagement. However, it is also the time of the year where users never return, leaving to only transact with you once. Thus, it is of value to roll out loyalty and re-targeting programs specifically dedicated to the holiday season users to either retain newly acquired users or to re-target old users.

There are various ways to do this by leveraging the power of mobile. Mobile gives you the ability to connect with users like never before. Push notifications, geofencing, in-app notifications, etc., when integrated into the loyalty program and re-targeting strategy, allow for personalization to truly target all kinds of users at different phases in the user journey.

For example, those newly acquired users can be retained by offering a discount on a second transaction, or old users can be reminded of potential sales they can make this holiday season through push notifications or email campaigns. It is about finding the synergy between the strategy and the ways of communication, that fit the intentions of the users.

We Wish This Holiday Season be Merry For You

With these 5 tips, we hope you will be able to take the value of data, innovation & creativity and time management to convert it into meaningful user engagement and retention. The holiday season is prime for any marketer and you should not be left behind. Now enough talking. It is time to pull out on the Frank Sinatra Christmas playlist and a glass of eggnog and get to make the most of your mobile marketing this holiday season.

We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

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