[Webinar Recap] Winning Black Friday Strategies For Mobile Shopping Apps

Rewatch our webinar on themes optimization: Winning Black Friday Strategies For Mobile Shopping Apps now:

Overview on current mobile commerce situation & statistics

First, let’s go through some statistics to have an overview of the current mobile commerce situation.

The truth is, mobile commerce is growing faster than ever. Consumers are quickly changing their behaviors, making more decisions, and doing more activities on their mobile devices. This change is even more clear when the coronavirus outbreak happened.

A survey in 2020 revealed that smartphones have the biggest increase in media device usage among internet users, with 70% of people answering that smartphone is the device that they’ve been spending more time using since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Among the activities that people do more than usual, online shopping is in the top ten, with 20% of people answering they are buying more items online while staying at home during the pandemic.

This change in consumer behavior leads to the change in the retail industry as well.

It is expected that by 2021, the world’s m-commerce sales will make up for 53.9% of all eCommerce sales.

In absolute numbers, mobile commerce sales are projected to reach $3.56 trillion in 2021—22.3 percent more than 2020.

And the worldwide eCommerce share in m-commerce is expected to reach 72.9% globally by 2021.

Looking at these numbers, it is undeniable that investing in mobile commerce is a reasonable thing to do and a mobile shopping app is a great start in the journey.

Facts you need to know about holiday seasons

Now, let’s go through some quick facts about holiday seasons that you need to know before optimizing your mobile apps.

First, Black Fridays sales reached a record high last year:

2020 Black Friday sales hit $9 billion and Cyber Monday reached $10.8 billion.

The next important fact is:

In 2020, 42% of people said they started their holiday shopping earlier than in prior years.

This trend is continuing this year too, as almost a third (31%) of people surveyed in the U.S. have already started their holiday shopping, which means many consumers begin their shopping as early as the beginning of October.

This insight is very helpful for our best practices in the next section.

Among those holiday shoppers, over 60% of them have used apps to purchase, with half of the people downloading new apps.

An interesting fact is that during the holiday season, more than 30% of shoppers have shopped with a retailer they have never purchased from before.

This brings hope to many new retailers who have just started with their very first mobile app.

If you get your timing right and do the right optimizations like the ones I’m about to show, you have a high chance of being successful.

Best practices for mobile shopping app optimization

Businesses have to be ready for an earlier holiday season than in past years and be present throughout the shopping process.

By ready you should prepare and allocate all necessary resources for the mobile app optimization that you will be doing before, during, and after the holiday season. This includes date & time pre-planning; media design for holiday theme changes on mobile apps, on app stores, and also on websites; human resource allocation; tracking & analytics setup, and so on.

ASO 

One of the first things that you should do is app store optimization because this is the first touchpoint for customers to reach you and also because it may take time for app stores to review and approve your changes. It’s better to do this earlier than later so that if your app gets rejected for any reason, you will have time to fix it before the holiday season comes.

One of the very first steps in ASO is keyword research. As seasonal trends cause user demand and search terms to fluctuate, the updates must be adjusted accordingly. You need to keep up with these changes to ensure your app store listings are targeting the terms and highlighting features that users care about at the moment. This will help your app stay competitive and make the most of the seasonal demand.

Again, this takes time and your app also needs time to build rankings, so you’ll want to give yourself at least a month to index and rank for the new keywords and see how well the optimization is working. Starting too late can result in missed opportunities to optimize for the season and give your competitors a head-start. Be sure to start early, so you can have a lead over your rivals as you enter the competitive season and rank well for your holiday-focused keywords.

If your app has holiday-related features or updates, it’s critical to update your metadata to align with them. This can help ensure your app will appear in searches for those terms.

Next, update your media to give customers a touch of the holiday spirit. This tells your customers that you have something different going on during the holiday and also makes your app stand out from the crowd.

Some updates that you can make are:

• Update your app icon
• Update your app screenshots
• Update your promo texts and video

Some tips for app store optimization are:

• Make use of Google Play store listing experiments
• Make use of Apple Store In-app purchases

Push notifications

Another important channel you can no longer choose to ignore is pushing notifications. 45% of mobile app users opt-in to receive push notifications, making it one of the most widely used mobile marketing channels. Push notifications are essential for activating new users, improving engagement, and driving in-app purchases.

This is especially useful during the holidays when you want to give customers many incentives to trigger their actions, like special deals or some limited discounts.

A best practice is to trigger notifications based on user characteristics and activities to personalize your messages. For example, you can push a message to a customer about an exclusive discount on a product that she/he has visited several times on your app but hasn’t made a purchase.

To be able to make such personalized customer segmentation, Simicart has integrated their customer apps with OneSignal push notification service, which is a really great platform for mobile app push notifications.

With personalized notifications triggered by user activity, you can boost CTRs by 3X and improve conversion rates.

Smooth checkout

When you have successfully driven app installs via ASO and persuaded customers to take purchase action via push notifications, the next thing that you want to optimize is the checkout process. It is extremely critical to ensure a smooth checkout experience for your customers that is optimized for mobile, from coupon code, payment to shipping, and even the order tracking notifications as well. The checkout process only ends when customers get the order.

An interesting thing that you should be aware of is that there might be some contradiction when optimizing for the holidays versus when optimizing your mobile app in general.

One example is the coupon code section. You may have read from our e-book of “30 Mobile App Design Best Practices for eCommerce”, in which it is recommended that you should collapse the coupon code field to avoid distracting users from completing their purchase since many users don’t have the coupon codes to redeem and leave checkout in the hunt for one, which ends up not returning to complete transactions.

This is true for most cases, but during the holiday season, you may want to do the exact opposite, which is expanding the coupon code field. The reason is that during the holiday, you will almost certainly offer one or more coupon codes for customers, which means this step is almost certain in the checkout process. Expanding the coupon code field by default means one less click for customers and in the checkout process the fewer steps the better.

Other optimizations include:

• Allow users to scan the card and auto-fill card information
• Allow users to auto-fill address using location
• Match the keyboard with required text inputs
• Allow users to checkout as guest

Customer Service

One important factor of the purchasing process that store owners often neglect is online customer service. Online buyers may have many questions during and after their purchasing process and they expect to receive quick responses right on the device that they are using to purchase, which is their mobile phones. It’s very unlikely that a customer browsing some products on the mobile app has some questions, and then opens their computer to go to your website to ask. They will just go to another store with better customer service.

So the best practice here is to provide some quick way for customers to reach you right in the app. Integrating some chat options in your app is a good way. For example, most of our customers are using WhatsApp, Tawk.to and Facebook Messenger in their app as a way to support their customers in real-time. You can also add a contact page where you leave your phone number so customers can call you when they need it.

Analytics

Every business is different, so it is best that you should use your historical data from previous holiday seasons to optimize your mobile app accordingly.

Things that you should pay attention to include:

• When do you get the most visitors
• Which sources bring the most valuable visitors to your app

To do this, you must already have an analytics tool set up. If you have not, I’d strongly recommend you set up mobile app tracking right away, not only for the holiday season but for mobile app optimization in general.

The most popular tool used for our customers’ app is Google Analytics. Since you’re likely to have Google Analytics installed on your site already, using GA for your app gives you a familiar view and unifies your data for both website and app.

On-site promote

The last recommendation for mobile app optimization is not actually on the mobile app itself but on your website. You can use your website to promote your mobile app by adding a banner and links to your app on app stores, with information about exclusive deals and offers only mobile app users can get. A good example is the Smart Banner feature of the SimiCart mobile app, which prompts users to download your mobile app when they visit your website from a mobile device.

Some of you may wonder why you should redirect users to the mobile app while they’re already on your website. Why not let them make their purchase right on the website?

The reason why you want customers to purchase via the mobile app over purchase via the website is that a mobile app is a greater commitment. To use your app users have to go to the app stores, download and install the app on their smartphones. Users who do that already show a little more commitment over those who just visit your website on their browser, and these users are more likely to be loyal customers. A website that they’ve visited on their browser is easier to forget than an app that is present on their mobile home screen.

Also, when your app is already installed on customers’ mobile devices, you have the ability to send targeted push notifications. This gives you more power to persuade customers to make a purchase.

Things to avoid when optimizing your app for the holiday seasons

Now that you know what best practices to follow when optimizing your app, let’s go through some common mistakes that businesses make that cause them to fail in the holiday seasons.

Go overboard with your optimization

The first mistake which is observed in businesses is over-optimization. While this may not bring you to failure directly, it had better avoid because it consumes unnecessary resources that you may need for other important tasks. In some cases, over-optimization may even counteract your efforts and bring unexpected results.

For example, some businesses follow the best practices of app store optimization for the holidays but they go a bit too far on the visual changes in the app, to the point where the app is almost unrecognizable and looks like a whole other app. So instead of giving users a sense of holiday spirit, it confuses them because the updates give them an app that they’re completely unfamiliar with.

To avoid this, try to be careful with any of your changes and do A/B testing if possible to get insights from the data to drive you to the right actions.

Make returns complex and costly to the consumer

An important thing that businesses often neglect is the return process, especially in the holiday season. I understand that no one wants their products to be returned, but the thing is that it happens out of your control and when it happens you should be prepared for it.

When customers have to return a product, they’re already unsatisfied and in a bad mood. If you make the return process hard and long and tedious, it will only make them more frustrated and make the situation worse. Customers may leave a bad review on your channels and advise their family and friends against your brand. The result is you’ll end up losing more than one customer.

So, you should prepare in advance for the return process, making it simple for customers. Users should be able to do that easily on your mobile app. A smooth product return may not be a happy ending, but at least your customers will leave with a good experience and they will not leave a bad review or tell others how bad their experience was. In the best-case scenario, they may even go back to explore your other products.

Provide unclear details about shipping fees and delivery times

Customers demand personalization throughout their buying journey, and those expectations also extend to shipping. Neglecting shipping may be a huge mistake because shipping and delivery options play a huge role in a customer’s decision-making process—they’ll often select one merchant over another based solely on shipping information.

A survey from a previous holiday shopping season found that 56 percent of consumers were disappointed with retailers due to difficulties with shipping.

So, here comes advice for shipping optimization:

• Starting early in the season, add a ‘ship-by’ calendar to the homepage
• If your customers are located in multiple time zones, make sure you have a geolocation feature for the calendar so that shipping dates can be personalized to the customer’s location.
• Beyond the homepage, be sure to communicate shipping and delivery information throughout the app, in banners, and in the checkout section, so customers will clearly know when their purchase will arrive before buying.

Q&A

1. I’m struggling with app store optimization. How do I get my app in front of more people?

You need to understand that app store optimization takes time and is not an easy task. For holiday seasons, if your app does not have the ranking that you want then my honest advice is to use ads.

It may add up to your budget but the great thing is that your app will come right to the top where you can instantly reach more people, and if you do it right like communicate the right message, target the right people… then ads campaign can bring you a good return on investment.

2. How early is enough to start doing my mobile app optimization for the holiday?

Every business is different and you should refer to your historical data for insights about when is the moment that you start getting more users and start optimizing from there.

However, as a rough reference, start your optimization at least a month before the holiday season starts so you can have enough time to optimize your mobile app, especially for app store optimization.

3. My website is using Google Analytics and it’s fine but on the app, we are still struggling to get it working. Do you have other recommendations for mobile app tracking tools?

Yes. There are other tools that are also good at mobile app tracking but the reason why Google Analytics is highly recommended is since it’s free and also the most popular analytics platform for your website. Also, you can try Mixpanel. 

Adjust or MoEngage are also good tools to consider because apart from app analytics they also provide other features for your to act based on the data you get such as customer segmentation or marketing automation.

4. After the holidays, what’s the best way to keep users engaged?

Millions of people will download apps during the holidays, but half of them will eventually abandon an app because it wasn’t as useful as they thought it would be. That’s really a waste of effort that can be avoided if you understand your users better.

Start by using analytics and tracking in-app events to better understand when and where your users drop off and then build a plan to re-engage them. Then, focus on delivering the best message to the right users, so they not only download your app but come back over and over again throughout the year.