Use Mobile Messaging to Your Advantage This Holiday Season
The holiday season brings a wave of consumers ready to purchase gifts as varied as the recipients of those gifts. This creates a lot of work for retailers, but with the right approach, it pays off with a hefty spike in revenue.
Today's holiday consumers may be self-sufficient when it comes to decision making, but let's face it, gift shopping is a stressful endeavor and help is usually welcome. Consumers are constantly on the prowl for insight into their tween's most recent obsession or creative suggestions for adults. If you provide them with some welcome solutions to their holiday pain points, your brand will be at the forefront of their minds.
Follow some of these techniques to help your mobile app stand out amidst the assortment of competitors:
1. Use in-app messages to interact with current users. In-app messages are a great tool you can leverage to keep users engaged with your app. With the right content, an in-app message can prevent bounce rates, increase the amount of time users spend in your app and ultimately lead to a higher checkout rate.
The best messages are personalized and triggered by a customer's actions. If a message is targeted and gives a customer useful information, they're much more likely to engage and have a positive experience.
Leading up to the holidays, try sending users that tap through several screens an in-app message that offers them gift ideas.
2. Use push notifications to re-engage past users. For users that haven't recently logged into your app, you can re-engage them using push notifications. No one can turn down a good deal, so you could send them a quick note about holiday promotions. This is an easy campaign that's not too intrusive.
As mentioned before, the best messages are personalized and triggered by a customer's actions, so a better campaign would target users based on previous purchases.
Try sending a push notification with competitive holiday promotions, a gift guide or a free gift to users that have previously purchased, but haven't logged into your app within the past month.
3. A/B test to optimize messaging. When you incorporate in-app messages or push notifications, remember to always A/B test sending the message against not sending it. This way you can measure whether those users would have checked out anyways or if there was a cannibalization impact due to users being annoyed with the notification.
To set up the A/B test, decide which users you want to target based on demographics or behavior and divide them into equal groups. Make sure you have a big enough sample size for your A/B test and that it runs long enough to gain statistically significant results. Once the test finishes, compare analytics (e.g., checkout rates and overall revenue) between the groups to see if the message(s) actually influenced behavior. If your messaging wasn't well-received, try a new message or a new target audience.
4. Make sure to look at the big picture post-messaging. When you look at test results at the micro level, such as checkout rates, remember to zoom out and look at other impacts, such as customer retention.
You may send a message that offers a great discount, but has language that doesn't resonate well with your users. This may increase checkout rates for this holiday season, but overall customer retention could drop off afterwards. Make sure you take everything into account and know which metric your company prioritizes.
And with that, happy holidays and happy messaging!
Momchil Kyurkchiev is the CEO of Leanplum, an A/B testing service for iOS and Android apps.