4 Ways Mobile Can Create a Great Holiday Retail Strategy

Are you ready for Halloween? Thanksgiving? Christmas? New Years? Post New Years? As any seasoned product and marketing manager knows, running campaigns that align to consumer trends and seasonality is the way to be relevant at a time of year when users have a lot else going on. Here are 4 tips that will help you better leverage your mobile app to create a great holiday mobile retail strategy for your retail or ecommerce app.

1. Holiday Specific Messaging, Promotions, and/or Design

For Mother’s Day last year, ProFlowers ran several campaigns to incorporate specific messaging around love and giving for the holiday. The changes they made created a 17% lift in sales as compared to a control group for the same period of time (A/B tested).

While a lot of product and marketing managers may think that impact can only come from large promotions on the scale of Coke Zero’s Sweater Generator, many people don’t realize that small tweaks can also create a big change.

Simple messaging such as the one below can sometimes make a big difference.

2. Mobile Impacts In-store Purchases

…even if the purchase doesn’t happen in the app itself. According to a study by Deloitte this year, 50% of brick and mortar purchases will be influenced by online and mobile experiences.

“Deloitte’s retail and distribution practice expects total holiday sales to climb to between $981 and $986 billion, representing a 4 to 4.5 percent increase in November through January holiday sales (excluding motor vehicles and gasoline) over last season. This growth rate is a moderate improvement over last year’s 2.8 percent gain. Additionally, Deloitte forecasts a 13.5 to 14 percent increase in non-store sales in the online and mail order channels during the 2014 holiday season.”

“[Deloitte’s] research indicates that 84 percent of shoppers use digital tools before and during their trip to a store. Additionally, those shoppers convert, or make a purchase, at a 40 percent higher rate than those who do not use such devices during their shopping journey.”

Your holiday strategy has to match what your consumers are actually doing with your app. If the major use case is as a companion to the in-store experience, optimize your app for those engagement metrics before the shopping season starts. Here are 4 tips from a UX pro on how improve your app for in-store purchase.

3. The Holiday Shopping List

Blue Chip Marketing found that 80% of items in a shopping cart are from a shopping list.

How is your app getting into the consumer’s mind during the pre-shopping phase? If your e-commerce/retail app has a shopping list capability, is it the user experience optimized? If it doesn’t have a shopping list or save for later option, should you build one as users prepare their holiday gift lists?

Here is how Nordstrom and Amazon have implemented the wish list.

4. Shoppers Are Influenced by Mobile Advertising

For many retailers, the main decision maker during the holiday season is the mom. According to a study by instant.ly:

“62% of moms say that their purchases have been influenced by mobile advertising. 58% are “totally comfortable” with mobile ads. If you look at the kinds of calls to action these ads have triggered, the data is really interesting. 58% felt mobile ads introduced them to something new or introduced a new brand. 42% recalled that mobile ads helped them save money and 18% felt that mobile advertising specifically influenced a purchase.”

Make sure that your advertising spend is distributed wisely across your different channels and mobile ads are part of that plan.