How retailers can use mobile apps during the holidays

How retailers can use mobile apps during the holidays

The world's leading retailers are beginning to recognize the crucial role that mobile plays in the omnichannel shopping experience. The stationary locations no longer represent the majority of holiday traffic. Retail mobile apps and their role in marketing, sales and operations are an important and dynamic part of this transformation.

The statistics of the Black Friday weekend 2017 show some convincing trends, which are happening at the omnichannel shopping. As retailers deliver a unified experience across all touchpoints (mobile, desktop, and stationary), sales increase.

Roughly 58 million people only bought online this Christmas season, surpassing in-store locations by 7 million. Consumers spent about $ 82 more on the online and in-store business than those shopping online. Likewise, those shopping across multiple touchpoints spent about $ 49 more than those shopping in physical locations.
Mobile is arguably the most important digital touchpoint for retailers to attract and retain loyal customers. As you dive deeper, it's obvious that mobile becomes more and more important during the holiday season, especially:

Mobile sales accounted for 42% of Black Friday sales.
For the first time on Black Friday weekend, 61% of all digital traffic came from mobile desktop desktop traffic by 22%.
Smartphone traffic has increased by 39% since 2016.
Mobile Commerce on Cyber Monday generated 33% of total revenue over the weekend.
By 2020, the share of mobile in all e-commerce sales is expected to be 45 percent.

While aggregated data shows that mobile devices are an invaluable tool for increasing holiday performance, retailers looking to capitalize on them need to be strategically aligned.
If consumers are looking for specific products on their phones before they get to a physical location, then your brand needs to become a resource. A retail app can pinpoint reviews, reviews, availability, and other relevant information that may impact a customer's purchasing path. Similarly, targeted mobile advertising can help increase in-store traffic.
One of our previous posts has shown how mobile apps drive omnichannel retail. The same principles apply - and may be even more critical - during the holiday season. As shopping reaches its peak, customers expect a seamless experience across all channels, from desktop to in-app to in-store. The following tactics can help merchants use mobile apps during their holidays. Be omnipresent Ensuring that your retail app integrates seamlessly with the shopping experience of your other channels helps you optimize the buying and selling process during the holiday season.
Retail marketing strategies must focus on enabling conversions for each channel. One way to achieve this is to provide a single, coherent shopping cart across all digital buying paths. If a customer selects a number of items to purchase on a mobile channel, they must be able to complete that purchase on their desktop and even in the store. In addition, buyers must be able to make digital purchases and avoid shipping by picking up items at a stationary location. Integrate beacons Beacons have become increasingly popular in retail because they can communicate with users' smartphones and provide detailed insights into store user behavior and many other applications.
Through the use of beacons, retailers can combine the digital and physical shopping experience during the holiday season, and enable push notifications in the store that are tailored to specific interests and behaviors, location in the store, buying history, and more. In addition, beacons are a gold mine of analysis that allows retailers to track things like visitor frequency, business activity patterns, timeliness, and frequency of visits, as well as many other insights that can help guide future holiday seasons. Use push notifications If you offer incredible holiday deals, your users want to know about them.
One of the best tactics for smartphone communication is push notifications. According to Leanplum, push notifications sent on Black Friday are opened 2.6 times more frequently. Getting the value of push notifications is usually a daunting task for marketers, but the number of opt-in conversions is increasing over the holidays. On Black Friday weekend, 50% of shoppers say they will activate push notifications to receive information on exclusive discounts.
Push notifications can also reduce the abandonment rate of shopping carts. Push notifications are a communication channel that reaches users outside the app itself. It's important to monitor in-app analytics to see which users add items to their cart, but never complete the purchase. In this case, send a targeted push notification to stop the sale. Conversion rates can be increased by 14% with this tactic when strategically deploying messaging.
Use data to align your shopping experience Data from mobile apps in retail can be used to enhance customer experiences, enhance engagement, and increase revenue. For retail, mobile apps provide very robust records that can not be found on any other medium. Among the many different metrics retailers can track through mobile apps, information such as shopping spikes, demographics, and business data flow can help drive marketing decisions, improve push messaging, increase conversions, and even help with operational issues such as employee assignment. While retailers are looking for innovative ways to increase sales during the holiday season, mobile apps for end users should be on the radar - if not this year, then the next. As mobile becomes a very important touchpoint in the customer journey, retailers who want to compete with market leaders need to make sure they have a Mobile First mentality.