Chrysa Karamanidi, Chief Innovation Officer at Upstream, explains how to successfully deploy mobile marketing strategies throughout the year.
Without doubt, seasonal shopping events are the focal points of the year for bargain hunters. From Black Friday to post-Christmas and New Year sales, Easter shopping and summer discounts, even Valentine’s Day and the growing phenomenon that is Singles Day, a Chinese shopping holiday to celebrate people not in a relationship that is rapidly being exported throughout Asia and elsewhere, the stakes for retailers are huge.
The success of seasonal events often determines whether a retailer ends the year in the black or the red. For instance, spending online over ‘Cyber Week’ in 2022 broke a record of $35.3bn (£28.5bn) in the US, with mobile shopping contributing towards 55 per cent of sales on what has been billed as the biggest online shopping day of all time, according to figures from Adobe. Elsewhere, in the UK, the British Retail Consortium says Christmas shopping and the World Cup during December boosted sales by 6.9 per cent.
As such, these holidays are a time to be bold with marketing. How best to capture consumers’ attention, drive traffic, and convert sales requires careful consideration and marketing campaigns that ‘think outside the box’. However, this type of thinking shouldn’t start and end with just the festivities. The most successful marketing strategies can be applied for year-round success.
Personalize, build, broadcast and convert
In particular, mobile marketing has huge potential, with global mobile commerce expected to exceed US$4,7 billion annually by 2027, according to ResearchandMarkets. This is especially true in emerging markets, where consumers are much more likely to be mobile-first when it comes to how they use the internet.
In 2022, we worked with multiple retailers across Brazil, the second fastest growing eCommerce market in the world, to boost the effectiveness of their Black Friday multichannel marketing campaigns. By incorporating advanced mobile messaging and automation strategies into their campaigns, retailers we worked with were able to boost the average value of their orders by 8 per cent, with mobile messaging campaigns also attributing to over 8 per cent of total customer revenue.
Here, are four strategies I single out, which can be applied all year around and don’t just stop once holiday shopping is over:
Learnings from seasonal sales
Our experience from the campaigns we run for our customers around the globe shows that brands can use mobile messaging to significantly enhance their customer bases, smash their marketing and sales KPIs and boost their revenues.
In an ever-competitive landscape, with consumer spending hit hard by inflation, brands should be creative and daring with their marketing. Applying the most successful mobile marketing strategies throughout the year, not just during the traditional sale periods, is a must for retailers wanting to strengthen their prospects.