One of the best times of the year to market your app is around Christmas, which remains one of the biggest holidays of the year. If you’re not already engaging in mobile app Christmas marketing, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to reach audiences and increase user engagement and sales. With the right Christmas mobile marketing strategies behind your app, you’ll have the chance to connect with audiences of all types this season.
To help guide your strategies, the following are some mobile app marketing strategies for Christmas that are worth trying.
1. Start Your Campaigns Early
To get the best results from your Christmas mobile marketing strategies, you must plan them early in the months leading up to December. The earlier you begin planning your campaigns, the more you can optimize them before launching them.
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As early as September or even over the summer, you can take the time to start developing your holiday campaigns, and test various ads and other content to determine which content people want to see.
2. Find Out What Worked for Others’ Christmas Campaigns
Another way to determine how best to approach Christmas mobile marketing is to look at what others are doing in your niche. Take a look at some of their past Christmas campaigns and find out what kind of results they yielded. Based on competitors’ performance, you can better gauge how to approach your own campaigns.
For example, if you serve specific service areas through a delivery app, you can determine which areas have the highest demand during the holiday season and around Christmas.
3. Incorporate a Christmas Theme
To get into the Christmas spirit, make sure your designs are aligned with the season. For instance, you could change your in-app icons, themes, and other elements with Christmas-themed shapes and colors, converting your app into a decorative green and red showcase of snowflakes and Christmas trees, or other related thematic changes.
By creating a Christmas theme in your app, you’re likely to attract many users who engage with these themes across various brands at this time of year. Meanwhile, other apps that stay the same are less likely to generate engagement during the holidays.
You can also optimize your app store page with Christmas-themed content, including descriptions and screenshots pertaining to the holidays.
4. Create a Sense of Urgency
One of the most effective ways to connect with audiences around Christmas and the rest of the holiday season is to generate a fear of missing out (FOMO) if people don’t engage with you.
There are many ways you can use FOMO to attract users and drive more engagement and sales. For example, you can send emails to audiences that advertise promotions or sales available through your app. You can also offer limited-time discounts for first-time users to generate more app downloads and installs. You can also send push notifications letting users know that they only have a limited amount of time yet to take advantage of certain offers.
Taking these and other steps will help bring new and existing users to your app in the days leading up to Christmas.
5. Maximize Your App’s Compatibility
Ahead of the holiday season, you’ll want to reach as many audiences as possible. You can more easily do so if you make sure your app is available on all major platforms. This is particularly important leading up to Christmas when many people are likely to receive Apple and other mobile devices as gifts. Be sure to test your app on each device to make sure the experience is consistent across platforms, and you’ll ultimately increase your user base and loyalty among audiences.
6. Create Enticing Push Notifications
Christmas-themed push notifications are critical to send throughout December or even earlier. You can use push notifications to remind users about Christmas promotions and discounts, including reminders that time is running out. Additionally, you can invite people to come back to your app to complete a purchase if they added items to their cart and abandoned them.
Keep in mind that personalization is key when it comes to push notifications, as personalization can increase open rates by up to 9% or more. For instance, you could send push notifications with unique offers for users based on their interests or order history. Doing so will make users feel as though you’re speaking more directly to them.
7. Integrate SMS Marketing
In addition to push notifications, you can use SMS marketing to reach audiences, many of whom may not currently have your app installed. Using SMS marketing, you can send personalized Christmas-themed texts to offer promo codes, send reminders, and more. You’re also likely to see a lot of engagement with SMS marketing, with many mobile marketers seeing open rates of 98% with these messages.
One way to use SMS marketing is to send out coupons. Users can save the SMS texts they receive, which means that users can easily access SMS coupons at any time. This is much more effective than sending printed coupons that often wind up tossed out. In addition, you can send out reminders about SMS coupons to help ensure that users don’t forget about them.
8. Use Omnichannel Marketing
Mobile marketing entails many elements that make it ideal to use an omnichannel strategy. Users and customers may want to submit a question or complaint to you, and omnichannel marketing would enable them to do so on a variety of platforms to facilitate clear communication.
On mobile devices, you should make sure that people can reach you via any platform of their choosing, including everything from Facebook Messenger and Twitter to WhatsApp Business and Telegram, among many others. Providing this accessibility along with top-tier customer service will help you get and stay ahead of the competition around Christmas and the rest of the year.
9. Optimize the Checkout Process
If you own a shopping app, your in-app checkout process should be consistently smooth and reliable. It shouldn’t take too much time or effort to get from product pages to checkout and complete their purchase. People will spend a lot of time shopping, so a poor experience might be enough to turn shoppers away from your app entirely if they can find a better experience elsewhere.
You can optimize checkout by allowing people to make transactions via multiple apps, and you can enable one-tap shopping and other convenient methods. The more efficient the checkout process is, the more sales you’ll make over the holiday season and beyond.
10. Highlight Best-Selling Items
Another important step to take is to highlight your most popular items, which could include best-selling products, services, or in-app items. Based on what performs the best, you can determine what specifically to promote ahead of Christmas. You can also take a look at what sold the best over previous holiday seasons and target your marketing for those. In turn, you’ll likely drive more sales for the items that everyone loves, increasing profitability over the holidays.
11. Proactively Watch for and Address Issues
You can invest in the most comprehensive and effective mobile marketing campaigns, but these efforts will be for naught if your app doesn’t work the way it should.
This is why you need to consistently test your app and identify any errors before they have the chance to fumble your marketing efforts. This entails making sure there aren’t any bugs and that your app doesn’t crash. It should provide users with the same experience across all platforms, making it necessary to test it on Apple, Samsung, and other devices to maximize usability.
If you can spot any issues early on and mitigate them, you’ll benefit from an app that doesn’t let you down during the Christmas season.
12. Engage With Users Year-Round
While customers spend more time shopping online in December than any other time of year, you must continue to invest in mobile marketing before and after Christmas to build and maintain momentum. There are many ways to go about marketing in the days after Christmas to increase loyalty and keep users coming back to you.
For instance, you could issue a Christmas greeting along with a “thanks” to shoppers for making a purchase. You can also send them SMS text messages, push notifications, and emails promoting similar products related to their purchase. You can also offer the chance to contact you along with a convenient method of reaching out to you for assistance. Taking these steps will increase the longevity of your campaigns and improve loyalty.
Gear Your Mobile App Christmas Marketing for Success
Keeping these Christmas mobile marketing strategies in mind, you can develop a highly successful campaign that resonates with audiences. By taking the right steps, you’ll have the chance to connect with prospective and existing users across all platforms, which can ultimately boost engagement and ROI from your campaigns. Subsequently, you’ll be able to figure out what works every year as you properly prepare your campaigns ahead of every holiday season.
If you’re looking for one of the most effective means of acquiring new users and increasing retention with your strategies, turn to App Samurai for a reliable user acquisition platform. This AI-driven platform makes it easy to develop highly optimized campaigns that attract new users with a wide range of resources for various campaign types. Using this platform, you can develop highly targeted campaigns that yield optimal results throughout the Christmas season and the rest of the year.
