Holiday Mobile Sales Grew 3x in 2013 ‑ Are You Ready For This Year?

Now is the time to be working feverishly to maximize the mobile experience for your customers. Buying needs to be a frictionless experience, without hassles and glitches. Checkout should be seamless and easy. Web must be mobile friendly, with pages, images and decks responsively scaled to fit the smaller mobile screens.

Optimizing mobile will allow you to capture incremental revenue during this holiday season. All revenue counts, so don’t risk losing out to your competitors when a mobile makeover is well within your grasp. Outside of mobile, there are a host of other strategies to be testing to ensure that you’re maximizing revenue opportunities. Get the full playbook!

Test Responsive Design

As experts in mobile engagement, we coach our clients on considering both the quantitative and the qualitative results of implementing responsive across email and onsite. The primary shift that we look to drive is in encouraging clients to view mobile as part of the total customer lifetime experience rather than just another channel in their mix. Multiple device types (smartphones, tablets, mobile gaming, ereaders, etc) now in the hands of an ever-growing number of consumers, so it is imperative that customer experience be optimized for these devices even if conversion rates lag adoption rates.

According to Forrester, just 3% of the top online retailers are actively employing responsive design. That means that most retailers are missing out on an opportunity to optimize the mobile experience, increasing conversion and ease of use for their customers. With the holiday season fast approaching, implementing responsive design for the entire mobile browsing experience is not advised. But by testing responsive with email and elements of your site (checkout experience, product pages), you’ll be able to determine if your specific users convert higher via responsive design in the long-term, thereby making a case for implementing responsive design across your digital ecosystem.

When testing responsive design you can potentially see a short-term dip in conversion and revenue generated via email. Stand strong! Over the long-term, customers who receive the test template will often show a higher customer lifetime value and increased purchase frequency. By implementing tests now for responsive email design you’ll have the proof points needed to support a move on to testing other elements of responsive design following this holiday season so that you’re accessing incremental revenue growth throughout 2015.

Deep Link Into Your App

If you’re an ecommerce marketer armed with an app, the holiday season is the time to ensure that you’re maximizing its full potential. While research shows that the vast many apps are downloaded and then soon deleted, retailers with the right install base have the ability to produce 30% higher purchase conversion rates from their app than from typical mobile websites. On top of the revenue that can be generated, apps also produce valuable data that will add to your ability to further optimize the mobile experience and 1:1 communications.

Deep linking is the most effective method for increasing app engagement, especially during the holiday season when the volume of noise customers are faced with is dialed up. The most intuitive tactics to use include push notifications, SMS and even email. This holiday season, we recommend focusing on your push notification strategy as all signs point to the retail market adopting this tactic as their mobile go-to. Try using Rich Push Notifications to get your users to specific pages/screen within your app based on their previous behaviors.

Our rules to engagement for push notifications

1) Focus on relevant content
Push notifications must be relevant to the individual user. Leading up to the holiday season begin testing push notifications for announcing flash sales, reminding users about abandoned carts and deploying VIP discounts with users who have recently downloaded the app.

2) Personalize send time
Just like with email, you need to consider the time of day that your users are most active on their mobile phones in order to right-time your send. A quality omnichannel technology partner will enable you to leverage data from your email program in order to set a unique personalized send time for each and every in your mobile push notification testing cohort.

3) Don’t be too “pushy”
It is crucial that you use the data that you have on each individual customer to determine the frequency in which they will tolerate push notifications. For highly engaged customers, start testing an increased frequency of push notifications now. For disengaged users (across all channels), test infrequent messaging with high value content so that you do not literally push these customers to delete your app.

Mobile use continues to grow dramatically. While mobile conversion is still lagging, the fact that your consumers are always on means that your brand must be as well. Test these strategies today to be primed for the holiday season!

Find out more about Sailthru’s holiday strategies for success by downloading our complete holiday playbook, free to DOWNLOAD NOW.

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Neil Capel, CEO & Founder of Sailthru