The Holiday Season is a spectacular opportunity for app developers to grab users’ attention and popularize their apps! By crafting holiday-themed strategies, you can increase engagement and retention; drive more installs and sales. Here’re some tips for creating a strong mobile marketing strategy and making the best of this beautiful time.
Test Your Campaigns Ahead of the Holidays
Don’t wait until the last minute to test your campaigns or neglect to test them at all. You won’t be able to predict the success of your campaigns if you fail to test and modify them adequately before launch.
When testing your campaigns, you’re better off starting as early as the fall. This is because you want to prepare sufficiently all of your creative assets and messaging within six to eight weeks before the holiday season kicks off. You can test your campaigns via A/B testing ahead of the holidays, which entails using two ads, push notifications, or other content featuring a different feature. This differing element could include a message, app layout, messaging, CTA, or emojis. Based on what resonates with your audiences and what underperforms, you’ll know which assets to drop and which to use.
Give your app a Christmas makeover 🎄
Introducing visual changes in your app is an excellent way to get your users in the holiday spirit! Making minor adjustments to your app icon, user interface, and messaging will surely catch the users’ eye and drive them toward engaging with your app. A good Christmas makeover shows you are staying up-to-date and caring about the user experience.
Make sure that your ASO is at its best📲
ASO (app store optimization) is the way to increase your app’s popularity and user appeal in the app stores and is one of the most vital aspects for driving installs. Each store, such as Apple App Store or Google Play, has specific guidelines for ASO, and the better you optimize the app’s page on the store, the more your app will stand out and reach users.
Use push notifications to stay top of mind 📳
Urging existing users to engage with your app is as important as trying to acquire new users. Creating unique, holiday-themed messaging will remind the users about your app and encourage them to visit. You can research consumer needs and emphasize them in your messaging with catchy CTAs. Remember to be timely and relevant, not to overwhelm your users. Push notifications are a great way to decrease session intervals and increase engagement.
Be Santa Claus for your users🧑🏼🎄
What time is better than the holiday season for gifts? Users always appreciate being rewarded or offered good deals, and offering mobile-exclusive deals such as promo codes, discounts, or referral points increases the session time. In addition, Rewarded engagement (offerwalls) campaigns can drive so much value for your app. In-app actions such as adding an item to a cart or reaching a certain level of a game are great ways to achieve that. Discover how we help mobile apps grow with Rewarded Engagement campaigns.
Get your app in front of millions with App Discovery 🎁
Millions of people will unwrap their new mobile devices during the Holiday Season, and you have a chance to be the first app they see! App Discovery (OEM) delivers your app directly to the devices of targeted users with on-device app displays. You can pre-load your app to Android devices or choose to appear in the recommendation engines. Either way, App Discovery is the most innovative and effective way to reach users during the Holiday Season. Learn more about AppSamurai’s App Discovery expertise, and start your campaign!
Keep Your Goals in Mind
Think specifically about what you want to achieve with your app this holiday season. Some brands may want to generate more sales through their app among existing users, while others will want to focus on generating new users. However, many brands may also not know what to expect from the holidays.
Establish specific and achievable goals to ensure your app is a success before the holidays. These will give your campaigns a clear direction to go in and enable you to measure success effectively.
Determine Whether Volume or Value Is Important
As you set your goals, a big part of the process will come down to whether you want to increase the volume of users or their value of them. If your brand’s top priority is to boost ROI, you’ll want to emphasize value and maximize your users’ profitability. Conversely, you might be primarily focused on building your audience and engaging new users to dominate app stores.
In other cases, you may want to incorporate a balance between both goals, increasing your user base while driving more in-app sales or repeat purchases.
Help Users With Pre-Purchase Research
Pre-purchase research is critical among consumers, with 92% of them researching gifts online throughout the holiday season. Many shoppers begin the research process as early as October or September. In the process, many of these consumers are likely to download retailer apps and other third-party apps. After all, people want to make sure that the gifts they buy are just right for their friends and family, and they’ll also want to purchase many of them ahead of time before they sell out.
Identify Audiences to Build
When building your audiences during the holidays, use a combination of first- and third-party data and provider data. First-party data includes your own sets of user data, including website visitors, DMP or CRM data, and app data, while third-party data may come from your mobile tracking partners
Once you’ve collected enough data about your audience, you can develop certain buyer personas based on existing users, giving you certain personalities to target with your app advertising efforts.
Retarget Users When They Switch Devices
People who purchase new devices may not all be new users to you. Some people could be previous users who upgraded their mobile devices over the holidays. As they make the transition, they may avoid re-downloading any apps they rarely used, or they could rediscover them. This is why connecting with current or lapsed users leading up to the holidays is crucial to maximize their exposure to your brand. Building this connection will also help boost sales and engagement, increase user acquisition via cross-device promotion, and increase overall loyalty among users.
Meanwhile, competitors that don’t take the same steps will likely fall behind as you increase user retention.
Connect With Micro-Influencers to Reach Niche Audiences
With your specific audience in mind, you need to market to them in an influential way. One of the best ways to drive interest in your app is through micro-influencers within your specific niche. Although larger influencers may be more ideal to target in many marketers’ minds, micro-influencers are more cost-effective while enabling you to reach plenty of people with a particular interest. Micro-influencers often have hundreds or thousands of loyal followers who eagerly consume their content on a regular basis, often daily. An endorsement of your app from one or more of them could be invaluable in connecting with the audiences you share.
When establishing a relationship with a micro-influencer, focus more on their engagement rate than their audience. You may want to target a micro-influencer based solely on the shared audience, but their efforts won’t help unless people actively engage with them. Engagement rates will also differ depending on influencer users’ social media platforms. For example, the average engagement rate of micro-influencers on Instagram is 3.86%, while TikTok micro-influencers see an average engagement rate of 17.96%.
Try to pinpoint what a good engagement rate is based on the niche and platform, and use that data to carefully select the right partner
Don’t Stop After Christmas or New Year
Although millions of apps are downloaded during the holiday season, most of them are abandoned after. If you experience this, fear not! Most users are open to reusing an app if updates are made. Analyze your users’ behavior, and see at what point they’ve decided to stop using the app. You can track in-app actions and get a better understanding to create a plan for re-engagement. Also, try to improve your app’s onboarding process, give your users relevant information about the app and find value propositions that’ll increase their motivation to come back. Always learn from your mistakes to do better next time!
