The sheer amount of pumpkin spice flavored offerings in the recent marketplace tells us that the holiday season is right around the corner (or it could just be an impatient marketplace offering pumpkin spice as early as July?). Last holiday season, consumers flocked in droves to their smartphones to complete their Black Friday shopping, to the tune of $1.2B spent[1]. How prepared is your organization’s holiday mobile strategy to handle this season?
Engage- Don’t Annoy
Mobile engagement strategy will have started long before this point of the year, but capturing your share of the holiday mobile crowd is vital. Strive to create engagement that is both appropriate and timely. If you’re offering a steep deal on something the customer has searched for within the last twelve months in your app but did not buy, send them a notification once they launch your app! Use the data captured from your prior CRM campaigns to send relevant emails at the right time of day. We are all consumers and should always apply logic about when and what works to capture our spending. If a campaign seems annoying from your consumer logic perspective, it will certainly annoy your consumers.
Conversely, avoid sending repeated push notifications about deals, relevant to the customer or not. Not only will the customer likely not purchase from you, your app may not even make it another day in their mobile real estate.
End-to-End
Prior to the holiday volume, it’s pertinent to think of the end-to-end experience. Ensure that your experience has remained consumer friendly and has responded to changes in the mobile app marketplace. Customers want to be able to quickly find the items they are looking for, and pay for them securely and quickly. Ensuring that apps are not asking for irrelevant information and that they have enabled the most relevant forms of easy, secure payment[2] will be integral to the success of your holiday shopping season.
On the backend, stress testing all components of mobile platforms to ensure mobile platforms can handle the exponential volume levels of the holiday season is crucial. Again, app abandonment can happen for any number of reasons, and error messages surrounding a search, purchase completion or app launch are all prime candidates for consumers to leave an app and never look back.
