How Retailers Can Leverage Mobile Apps During The Holidays

 

The world’s top retailers have already realized the critical role mobile plays in the omnichannel experience. While brick-and-mortar sales still represent the majority of revenue, mobile is essential to marketing, sales, and operations.

 

Retail mobile apps are a key part in this shift, with shopping app downloads growing 170% in 2014 and apps accounting for 42% of all mobile sales generated by the leading 500 merchants in m-commerce.

 

Image by Benson Kua via Flickr

 

Diving deeper, it’s evident that mobile is becoming increasingly important during the Holiday season particularly:

 

• In the 2014 Holiday season, mobile accounted for 22.6% of all online sales (Marketing Land)
• Mobile is forecasted to drive $55 Billion in 2015 Holiday purchases (Apptentive)
• Customer in-app engagement rates doubled from the 2013 to 2014 Holiday shopping season (Marketing Land)

 

While the aggregate data shows that mobile is a key method for boosting Holiday performance, retailers looking to capitalize need to approach it strategically. The following tactics can help retailers leverage mobile apps during the Holidays.

Think Omni-Channel

In an earlier post, we demonstrated how mobile apps are driving omnichannel retailing. These same principles apply – and are perhaps even more critical – during the Holiday season. When shopping activity peaks, customers expect a seamless experience across channels, from desktop to in-app to in-store. Some things retailers can consider adding to capacitate this increased activity during the Holiday season include:

 

• Mobile ordering and in-store pickup
• Mobile gift carding
• Omni-channel shopping carts

 

Ensuring that your mobile app integrates seamlessly with, and enhances, the shopping experience across your other channels can help optimize the path to purchase and drive sales during the Holiday stretch.

Leverage Push Notifications

According to IBM’s Eighth Annual Online Retail Holiday Readiness Report, about half of consumers want to receive real-time promotions while they’re in store – but only 5 percent of retailers have this capacity.

 

These missed opportunities can be captured with the use of contextual, hyper-personalized push notifications. But they have to be implemented correctly. If notifications are sent at the right time and offer the right messaging, they can significantly increase user retention – by up to 55%, according to Urban Airship.

 

 

For example, pushing Holiday sales and promotions to users when they are near your store or in your store allows you to connect with and incentivize customers. Notifications should also be backed up by data to ensure the right users are getting the right messages, at the right time. In fact, customizing delivery times based on user preferences can increase conversions by almost 385%. Furthermore, research from Marketing Land shows that special offers that were combined with time-sensitive call to action messaging more than doubled shopping engagement during the 2014 Holiday season.

Use Data To Align Shopping Experiences

Data from mobile apps can be used to improve customer experiences, boost engagement, and drive sales. For retailers, mobile apps provide very robust sets of data, unparalleled on any other medium.

 

Of the many different metrics retailers can track via mobile apps, things like peak shopping times, demographics, and store traffic flow can help inform marketing decisions, improve push messaging, increase conversions, and even help with operational aspects such as staff allocation.

Integrate Beacons

Beacons have been gaining popularity in retail due to their ability to communicate with user smartphones and provide granular, valuable insights into in-store user behavior, among their many other applications.

 

Using beacons can help retailers blend the digital and physical shopping experience during the Holiday season, enabling in-store push notifications that are tailored to users based on specific interests and behaviors, location within the store, purchase history, and more.

 

Additionally, beacons are a goldmine for analytics, allowing retailers to track things such as footfall, in-store activity patterns, recency and frequency of visits, and many other insights that can help inform decisions for future Holiday seasons.

 

As retailers look for innovative ways to maximize sales during the Holiday season, mobile apps should be on the radar – if not for this year, then for next. With mobile becoming a highly important touch point in the customer journey, retailers looking to compete with the market leaders will need to ensure they adopt a mobile-first mindset.