(marketingland.com)
Want to take advantage of a growing mobile audience this
holiday season? It's not too late. Columnist Brent Hieggelke shares his advice.
With the holiday season quickly
approaching, retailers are putting the finishing touches on digital properties,
from mobile websites to native apps, striving to cash in on mobile’s growing
influence.
As mentioned in my previous column, digital interactions
will influence 50% of in-store sales by the end of 2014 – up from 36% in 2013 –
with smartphone adoption accounting for the majority of that growth.
The holiday season is when retailers make it or break it,
accounting for anywhere from 20-40 percent of a retailer’s annual sales
according to the National Retail Foundation.
With that urgency and importance in mind, and our purview
into what some of the world’s largest retailers are focused on this holiday
season, we thought we’d offer advice on the six latest and greatest mobile
innovations that retailers still have time to adopt to better serve their
customers and get cash registers ringing.
1. Drive Deeper Interaction & User Insight With
Interactive Notifications
In the past, app users either swiped a push notification to
respond, or ignored it in the moment to possibly remember it later.
This basic form of push messaging drives four times greater
engagement and doubles the retention rate for app users that receive them
versus those that don’t, in addition to eclipsing email marketing results with
some brands experiencing 50% higher open rates, ten times higher click-through
rates and even 1200% greater conversion.
However, the basic push notification format offers little
opportunity to learn about those that don’t respond. In addition, everyone that
does swipe-through is treated exactly the same way, arriving at the same
destination.
Interactive notifications with iOS 8 (rich notifications in
Android and Fire OS) include action buttons within push messages, giving
consumers greater choice and multiple paths to engage in effortless interactions.
These interactions offer immediate feedback into what they want more or less of
and how you can best engage with them in the moment and over time.
notifications
While basic push messaging drives higher response and
conversion rates than traditional marketing channels, it largely relies on
users’ immediate response or users’ remembering the message and opening the app
later as a result.
With a simple Remind Me Later button, businesses can capture
and cultivate user interest and send appropriately-timed reminder notifications
to drive higher conversions.
In addition, understanding users’ affinities for certain
types of notifications and content at the messaging-level offers a continual
stream of fresh and dynamic user-centric insight.
In-app preference centers, while still important, are
typically levels deep within apps and only reach a portion of your audience
with surface-level controls (e.g., weekly vs. daily deals, men’s vs. women’s
clothing).
In-app behaviors offer a wealth of user insight, but are
dependent on ongoing app use and cyclical, developer-led tagging of app pages.
With dozens of pre-defined action buttons and customizable
ones, even non-technical staff can launch campaigns that generate substantially
more user insight than best practice approaches deliver today — from users’
initial button taps and clicks on deep-linked app and mobile web pages, to
their response to follow-on automation campaigns.
2. Use Mobile Marketing Automation To Create Responsive
Experiences. That Move Customers Closer To Conversion
Marketers can more easily react to campaign responses and
other customer behaviors — including inactivity — by defining triggers and
messaging sequences spanning push, in-app messages and deep-linked landing
pages.
As one example, apps can more effectively on-board new users
by automatically triggering a welcome message that highlights key features the
day after first app open. Subsequent messages can be tailored to focus on
different app functionality based on users’ interactions with the first message
— creating an adaptive, multi-step welcome series.
Beyond customers’ responses or non-responses informing the
next message they receive, timing delays and frequency limits help ensure a
relevant and responsible approach to driving engagement and fine-tuning the
customer experience.
For example, a business might trigger a free shipping offer
two days after a shopping cart is abandoned, but avoid sending it more than
once per-month per-customer.
Automation personalizes messaging experiences based on where
the customer is in their shopper journey, using conditional automation rules
and any combination of segmentation attributes such as user preferences, in-app
behaviors, and responses to interactive push buttons and deep-linked landing
pages. It builds off of prior push relevancy efforts — including user controls
in preference centers and segmentation and targeting — to help respond to
users’ actions in real-time.
3. Leverage Good Push To Aid In Acquisition, Not Just Engagement
& Retention
The requirements of downloading an app and opting in to
receive push notifications have always meant the channel is more oriented to
customer engagement and retention.
Now, through a Share action button as an option to use with
interactive push, users can easily amplify relevant messages through their
social channels in a few taps, aiding in acquisition efforts as their friends
and followers see the value of the app and its messaging and consider
downloading it themselves.
part three
Message response is a great indicator of customer intent,
but when users socially share or add items to wish lists or shopping carts,
they show even greater signals of intent and loyalty.
4. Take Advantage Of In-App Message Centers & Widgets
Not every push requires a shove and not every message is
appropriate to light up your users’ device screens.
Some messages — video highlights, mobile coupons, free
downloads, tutorials — are more beneficial when stored where users can easily
return later to consume the content at their convenience. In-app message
centers are ideal for these categories of content.
In-app message centers also have the benefit of reaching
your entire app audience — not just those opted into push— in addition to
reaching targeted audience segments with rich, multimedia content. With badge
updates on app icons, users receive a very visible but more passive indication
that new content is waiting for them in the app.
With iOS 8 and Android, widgets offer new and extremely
valuable real estate, as consumers can add an app’s widget to the Today View of
the iOS 8 Notification Center or anywhere in the Android experience for the
ultimate accessibility. Widgets have potential to usher in a land rush as
brands compete to offer consumers dynamic, bite-sized content to earn their
place in this new owned-media bonanza.
message center widget
5. Use Dwell Time To Reveal Shopping Patterns &
Preferences
When customers enter a store they can trigger a greeting
from your application and as they make their way through the store, with
beacons detecting their proximity to certain displays and triggering relevant
messages.
By studying the data from these in-store interactions,
retailers can gain valuable insight into what is working well in the store, as
well as what departments interest the consumer most.
At the individual level, this information can be used both
immediately and down the line to engage consumers with information they find
appealing — for instance, retargeting shoppers that spend two minutes or longer
at the winter apparel display for later cross-sell campaigns.
6. Maximize Push & Location-Sharing Opt-In Rates Through
Value-Focused Interactive Walkthroughs
To take advantage of most all of these mobile innovations,
retailers need to maximize the number of users opted into push messaging and
location-sharing.
opt in rate
The majority of apps just serve up standard iOS language on
first app open before users have had the chance to explore the value of the app
or any explanation of the value of opting in.
This is why we see such a massive delta between apps
achieving the highest opt-in rates compared to those at the low-end.
A better approach is to describe the value of opting in
through interactive walkthroughs shown on first app open. Victoria’s Secret
does a nice job explaining the value of opting into both push notifications and
location-sharing.
messaging
You can also get creative and think about other places in
the app or customer journey where asking for push and location opt-in might be
more contextually relevant than during the initial app open, such as the first
time users try to access functionality leveraging these opt-ins.
Make Your Holidays Very Merry With Mobile
Mobile apps offers retailers a direct method of engaging
consumers and learning more about them than ever before, in addition to being a
core way to convert window-shoppers into buyers.
By studying consumer behavior to reveal personal
preferences, utilizing segmentation and automation to understand and respond to
their context and interest, and reengaging customers on their terms, retailers
have the tools to achieve greater success this holiday season.
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