Being Agile During the Holidays with Dynamic Variables

The holiday season isn’t just for retailers and retail apps. Many apps will see a bump in downloads and user activity because consumers are activating new smart phones. A study by Fiksu shows that apps that update during the holidays see
more sessions per user and 4x increase in users per app than apps that don’t.

Being an app that takes advantage of the holidays is actually fairly easy also. You don’t have to set up complex marketing campaigns. It’s sometimes simple activities like message changes, holiday imagery, and special promotions can make a big difference. Apptimize is a great resource for running holiday campaigns because you can leverage an A/B test to roll out changes to your app after an App/Play Store release. More specifically the Visual Apptimizer and Dynamic Variables can help you prepare for the holiday launch.

Messaging and Imagery

Once you have the Apptimize SDK installed in your app, you can change any copy or messaging without having to submit your app into the App or Play Stores using the Visual Apptimizer. In general, this is a great tool for A/B without having to wait for each release cycle. During the holidays, this is even more useful because it enables app owners to be flexible and nibble after store submission freezes.

One app created the following A/B test for Mother’s Day last year:

The mother specific messaging was turned on leading up to the holiday and then immediately turned off after. To prove that the ROI gained from the message change wasn’t just to due to the increased traffic, a A/B test was run so that some users saw the original message during Mother’s Day and some saw the mom specific copy. The mom specific copy had a statistically significant increase impact on the conversion rate on this page as well as overall revenue.

Promotions

With Dynamic Variables, app owners can change more complex parts of the app after it has been submitted to the App/Play Store. The developer simply has set a variable using a code snippet (details in our documentation here) and the variable (which can be a string, int, or double) can be changed on the fly without having to resubmit the app.

This is especially useful for running holiday promotions. During the holidays, it’s particularly important to be agile and take advantage of the high traffic volumes. Amazon increases the rate at which they test prices during the holidays, simply because there is so much opportunity for optimization during the frenzy.

Let’s say you want to run a holiday promotion. You want to display a few offers on the homepage screen of your app during the months of November and December. But which promotion(s) do you display? This isn’t something that you can test before the holidays start because the customer activity is different. You have to test on the fly. With Dynamic Variables, you can set up each promotion slot to be a “variable” and then insert different offers in real-time to test which one(s) perform the best. After you know which offers are more effective, you can push them out to more and more of your users.

You need to be able to act quickly, but you still can be strategic and data-driven when being nimble. A/B testing with Dynamic Variables and the Visual Apptimizer can help. If you have any questions or want to set up a specific experiment, please reach out to us at contact@apptimize.com with questions.