‘Twas the year 2022, when we began to see a delightful trend
It was soon to be the biggest holiday season in US history, despite concerns of decreased spend
So if your mobile marketing campaigns are not yet set and ready to go
Vibes has some ideas that are sure to help your revenue grow
Although things like inflation and ongoing supply-chain issues are not expected to slow the shopping season down, it’s also predicted that a whopping 90% of consumers plan to switch brands.
There are 3 primary reasons why:
- Price. Just because holiday spend isn’t expected to slow doesn’t mean consumers don’t care about the price tag. They’ll be on the hunt for discounts and major sales to get the biggest bang for their buck.
- Convenience. In addition to price being a major buying motivator this holiday season, 52% of consumers say that half or more of their purchases are influenced by convenience. Consumers no longer have the time to spend hours shopping online or in a store, and they are most certainly looking for brands that can save them time.
- Personalized Experiences. 71% of consumers worldwide expect retailers to deliver on this – not as a nice to have, but as a requirement for consideration to purchase.
In order to deliver on these consumer expectations to keep their loyalty – and since you’ve been very good this year – we’ve brought you some mobile marketing ideas that are guaranteed to have an impact.
Why Mobile Marketing Should Be Your Priority Channel
Because consumers are always on their mobile phones – 4.5 hours a day to be more precise.
But consumers are not just dedicating this screen time to streaming content and playing games, they’re also spending a lot of time shopping on their phones. Recent research found that 79% of smartphone users had made a purchase on their phone within the past 6 months, which checks out given how much easier mobile makes it for consumers to make purchases. Compared to other channels, mobile creates the least amount of friction in the buying process.
This means there’s an immense opportunity to interact with your customers through mobile and benefit from the estimated 20% jump in mobile commerce sales this holiday season.
If you’re wondering how exactly to use mobile to interact with your customers, SMS is the most-utilized channel by far – even more than social. This is because SMS and other mobile-centric channels like Mobile Wallet and Push can effectively make the consumer’s buying journey seamless, quick and easy, and tailored to their needs.
You’ll be happy to read that 86% of consumers who are signed up for SMS marketing messages are actively engaged in promotional messaging, so you have their attention. However, keep in mind the estimated adult attention span as of last year is a whopping 8 seconds, so keeping consumers engaged has to be fast and worthy of their continued attention.
To make the most of this holiday season, we’re offering up some mobile marketing ideas that are sure to position you as the go-to brand for consumers and boost sales.
Use Zero and First-Party Data to Effectively Target Your Audience
Using customer data to segment your SMS subscribers is the first and most important step of mobile marketing, and is the best way to create tailored content that will catch their attention and motivate them to shop.
The good news is mobile as a channel can curate the customer data you need without facing any privacy repercussions. The mobile channel naturally helps you:
- Collect information on how your customers engage with your brand, from the text messages they open to the post-click browsing they do on your website, which is known as first-party data
- Capture information your customers voluntarily offer up to you, be it quiz responses, webforms or 2-way text message interactions, also known as zero-party data.
How your customers engage with you
The mobile channel’s ability to collect behavior-based interactions and use it to engage 1:1 with your customers is practically baked into its DNA.
In peak shopping seasons like holiday, some of the most effective ways Vibes customers have segmented and targeted their SMS customers include:
- Level of Interest. Offering up the ability for your customers to text in a keyword to join a holiday-specific SMS subscriber list makes it easy for you to target a highly engaged audience with holiday content.
- Consistent vs. Seasonal Shoppers. Knowing this helps you to effectively customize the frequency, message content and timing for every SMS message sent.
- Discount Driven. Gives the coupon-only SMS subscribers what they want, and scales back on massive coupon blasts so as not to hit your margins nearly as hard.
What your customers are telling you
Information they’re most likely to share if they believe they’ll get something in return that is personalized to them.
With more than half, or 57% of consumers, willing to share data with a brand for tailored experiences you are certain to have a rich pool of customer data that makes mobile an intimate channel vs. a spammy one.
Recover Revenue by Helping Customers Recover Their Carts
Globally retailers have seen $18B in annual losses purely through abandoned carts. Since abandoned cart messaging is urgent and a shopper’s window to not lose those items in their cart before they return to it, SMS is more critical than ever.
By automating this type of message they’ll be set and ready to deploy immediately to your SMS subscribers based on an action they’ve taken (the action in this case being abandoning their online shopping cart).
Cart recovery SMS messages can transform your ecommerce business. At Vibes we’ve seen our retail customers generate 6-digit figures of incremental revenue from cart recovery SMS messages. For one retailer, their cart recovery SMS messages contributed to 7% of the total revenue driven by their SMS program overall.
Offer Shoppers the Best BOPIS Experience Through SMS
Expectedly, BOPIS continues to be incredibly popular with shoppers. That’s because it increases convenience, the top benefit that 52% of consumers say influence half or more of their purchases.
And since mobile as a channel also increases convenience by making it easier for consumers to make purchases, that’s double the improved customer experience (a must-have on brands’ lists this upcoming season).
Browse with Ease on Mobile with Holiday Deals Page and Gift Guides
This year holiday ecommerce is expected to grow 16% to $236B. Give your online shoppers a taste of in-store product discovery by creating a holiday gift guide, making it easier for consumers to find and purchase great gift ideas directly on their phones.
Like any landing page on your website, these gift guides can be delivered anywhere a URL can be placed.
With the resurgence of QR codes, we recommend using them along with SMS and social media to link directly to your gift guide.
Since shoppers this year are searching for the best deals possible, you can incorporate any holiday deals or offers that they can quickly browse while interacting with the gift guide. With just one click your customers can be presented with a mobile wallet offer to easily save to their phones.
Appeal to Your Visually-Driven Customers with MMS
85% of shoppers surveyed say product information and pictures are important when deciding which brand to buy from. With multimedia messaging services (MMS for short), you can include images, GIFs or videos in the body of your message to grab your customers’ attention.
MMS allows for many more characters than SMS does, giving you the opportunity to include more details if necessary.
A creative way we recommend you use MMS this holiday season is visually displaying your top-selling items. It lures your mobile audience in while also giving them a leg up on buying the more popular items before they’re sold out.
Make Holiday Shopping Fun with Tap-to-Reveal Experiences
Reveal experiences, such as tap-to-reveal or spin-to-win allow consumers to participate in an interactive experience before receiving a mobile wallet offer, which can easily be added to their phones and redeem in-store or online.
Vibes customers who activated a reveal experience in past holiday seasons saw mobile wallet redemption rates as high as 86%.
Spark Interest Quickly with a Text-to-Win Contest
It’s no secret that consumers will be on the hunt for discounts and major sales to get the biggest bang for their buck this holiday season. Why not get into the holiday spirit by putting on a text-to-win contest?
By having interested participants enter by simply texting a keyword, a giveaway can be seamlessly executed.
Since we know different brands have different requirements when it comes to prizes we’re here to give you options. You can:
- Enable a winner to be selected automatically (less effort than a manual pull)
- Set the number of winners, be it one winner overall, one winner per time period, every nth winner, and more
- Opt to automatically notify just the winners by text or automatically notify all participants if they’ve won or not based on the rules you put in place
Aside from some SMS compliance rules that text-to-win contests often require, this contest is practically seamless for both the consumer and you the marketer.
Bonus Recommendation: Text-to-wins are a great opportunity for inviting entrants to sign up for your SMS program if they are not already subscribed. The easier and more fun you can make it for consumers to engage with you the more likely it is they’ll want to get more text messages from you, which is likely why Vibes customers have seen an average 11% opt-in rate of users prompted from a text-to-win contest.
Keep Shoppers in the Know with Timely Back-in-Stock Messages
Drive more revenue by letting your SMS subscribers know when a favorite item is back in stock. Include a URL that takes them directly to that product-specific page to help increase traffic, making it simpler than ever for them to complete their purchase.
Boost Post-Holiday Sales with Mobile Wallet Gift Cards
Although supply chain woes aren’t expected to slow holiday spending down, it does push consumers to spend differently. To avoid headaches like out-of-stock items and shipping delays, many consumers are turning to gift cards.
Retailers saw increased spending this past January by gift card shoppers, seeing them spend 40% more than the value of their gift cards during their post-holiday shopping.
And yet, 51% of US adults forget to redeem their gift cards so what’s a brand supposed to do?
Mobile Wallet is the perfect solution for gift cards.
A mobile wallet gift card is a digital version of a physical gift card, reflecting the same details of a physical card but without the risk of the recipient misplacing it.
Unlike mobile apps consumers must seek out and download, Mobile Wallet is the summary term for the native apps, “Apple Wallet” and “Google Pay” built into all iOS and Android devices. They require no extra download or signup by customers to use.
With Mobile Wallet, something like a gift card that one might find in their back pocket or purse, is instead housed and organized as a “pass” in a single location – a person’s mobile device – where they can easily be found and used.
The pass is prominently branded, clearly shows the gift card amount, allows for placement of all necessary terms and conditions, and has a bar code, QR Code, or alphanumeric code for easy redemption in-store and online.
Another major benefit is that the mobile wallet pass itself is completely dynamic, meaning all the real estate on the pass can be updated at any time, as often as you desire, and in real time.
So unlike a physical gift card that is discarded once all of the funds are depleted, a mobile wallet gift card can be used as an ongoing channel to continuously engage with your customers.
And just like a push notification a user receives from an app, you can similarly deliver mobile wallet notifications to the lock screen of the consumer’s phone, giving you the ability to nudge these gift card holders to act when they might not have otherwise.
The Bottom Line
The holidays are a great opportunity to connect with your customers on an emotional level, get to know their preferences and shopping behaviors, and live up to their expectations they have for brands. You can achieve this by meeting consumers where they are and make the holiday shopping experience as convenient, seamless and personalized as possible.
Mobile is your trusted channel this holiday season, and the proof is in the holiday pudding:
- 86% of those who are signed up for SMS are actively engaged in promotional messaging already
- Consumers are 10x more likely to redeem discounts and offers deployed through mobile over other channels
So what are you waiting for? Talk to your Customer Success team or contact our sales team to learn more about how you can use the power of the mobile channel to have a substantial competitive advantage during this holiday season and beyond.
Cheers for what we hope to be a highly successful season for you!
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