5 Holiday Mobile Marketing Tips
Black Friday has risen through the ranks to become one of the busiest shopping days for the holidays and beyond, and much of that activity now take place in the digital realm, with mobile taking the lead.
Here’s five key tips to boost your mobile marketing revenues on Black Friday and throughout the entire holiday season.
1- Ideally, you’ve already begun.
Surveys show that 40% of U.S. consumers plan to begin their holiday shopping before November, and a whopping 20% plan to start before October even begins. It’s important to get a head start in capturing those sales.
You’ll need to spend anywhere from two to five times more on ads to stand out from the crowd—and it’s estimated that bid prices can increase by up to 140%. Starting your mobile marketing user acquisition campaigns three months ahead of Christmas should give you enough time to connect with mobile advertising companies and find the right traffic for your app. You can use this period of time to understand your user behavior from the traffic received and optimize your campaigns accordingly nearer to December as costs rise.
2- Be proactive.
Set up post-install events (e.g. add/delete to wish cart; view detail; login/logout; sign up; purchase with coupon; select category) so that you can track the user behaviour. And, request full transparency from your marketing partners so that they can identify ad inventories (sites and app names), device IDs in real-time and every layer of data that is available in order to optimize accordingly. Your campaign budget and KPIs should be set well in advance with weekly subsite level optimization, and campaigns separated by GEOs.
Once the campaign is up and running, review your campaign performance weekly and adjust defined KPIs and budgets accordingly. Granular monitoring and optimization of event data can lead to optimal real-time budget distribution — which can result in relevant budget spend, with maximum ROI.
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3- Focus on conversions.
Over the next several competitive months, mobile marketers should focus on targeting the most relevant audiences with effective advertising campaigns, as well as optimizing traffic towards high product page views and in-app purchases. You can positively optimize ROI of ad campaign spend by converting the largest percentage possible of new users making first-time purchases.
A leading m-commerce brand in Korea ran a campaign that employed a mix of techniques to engage customers, Over a three month period, installs grew by 17 times and purchases by 83 times.
4- Invest in a burst campaign.
A burst campaign—where mobile ad spend is concentrated in a short period of time—can enable your m-commerce app to be ranked at the top on your local app store and beat the competition. Keep this in mind even if you’re already one of the top apps in your country, as your competitors will be upping their game, too, by increasing their efforts between now and December. Try to aim for hitting the top, so both new and old users can easily find you and install your app. Combining this with an effective personalized user acquisition strategy is a great way of concentrating existing efforts, leading to effective results.
5- Be transparent.
If you’re working with a mobile advertising partner or agency, ensure you supply your partner with event data, such as installs, post-install events and retention data. They will leverage the data and use their know-how to improve audience quality over time, keeping mobile marketing traffic both consistent and stable, ideally both during and after the key shopping season.
Markus Malti is managing director of WeQ.
