With Autumn upon us, for many marketers the festive marketing season has already kicked into gear. With many consumers – especially Millenials – using mobile devices more and more, mobile marketing should play a greater role this holiday shopping season than it has before.
Mobile optimisation
It’s crucial to optimise marketing promotions like email campaigns for mobile devices. Optimising the mobile experience means ensuring your mobile website loads quickly. Users expect lightning-fast load times, and their patience is shorter now than in past years. If you don’t deliver, customers will move on to another site that loads more quickly to avoid delays.
Personalisation
Today’s consumers expect a personalised experience, so make sure you always include local store information in email campaigns that are designed to attract recipients to brick-and-mortar locations. The best strategy for mobile customers is to use GPS information to locate the nearest store. For emails that are opened on a desktop, use the IP address and past purchase data to identify the customer’s local store. Email campaigns should be tied to browsing behaviour, therefore personalisation, particularly taking advantage of data points specific to mobile devices, is an effective way to engage your audience.
Real-time
Another aspect of optimising the mobile experience is the importance of quickly grabbing your mobile audiences’ attention and also making it easy to complete a purchase. The bad news is that you have only a few seconds to capture the customer’s attention. However the good news is that if you optimise the visual presentation by placing calls to action strategically, you can improve your chance of making a sale exponentially.
Double check
One way to accomplish this is ensuring your email is easily scannable on mobile devices with a clear call-to-action. It’s also a good idea to check how the emails look across a variety of smartphones and tablets. An email that renders beautifully on an iPad might not display as well on an Android smartphone, or vice-versa.
Look back
While planning is a core part of a successful mobile marketing strategy, nothing can take the place of real-world experience. Take a look at how your company performed last Christmas and apply lessons learned to this year’s marketing strategy. Look at what worked in 2014, identifying buyer behaviour and response rates to specific promotions for insights that can drive sales this Christmas. Also evaluate campaigns that weren’t as effective as you’d hoped last year and pinpoint the source of the shortfalls.
Omnichannel
It’s important to target ‘showroomers’ who are checking out products in brick-and-mortar stores and ‘webroomers’ who are doing product research online, but might make a purchase from a different vendor. By using omnichannel techniques, such as beacons to broadcast mobile content in the store, price transparency, offering free shipping on and offline and targeting each group via in-store specials and online promotions, you can pick up sales from both ‘showroomers’ and ‘webroomers’.
Start early
By starting early and using a longer campaign timeframe, marketers are able to include many types of shoppers through different promotions such as wish lists, sneak peeks and consumer-generated content to drive sales. Some people will always wrap up their Christmas shopping before Halloween, while others will always complete their festive shopping at the last minute. You don’t want to leave any potential revenue on the table, so serve both groups by launching your Christmas mobile marketing strategy as early as you can. … The quicker you get started, the sooner you can start bringing in those sales.
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