7 Tips to Enhance Your Mobile App's Holiday Marketing Strategy

Why is holiday marketing important?

For many companies, the holidays provide a golden opportunity to connect with customers and create more organic avenues for engagement and conversion. Although it can feel perfunctory, adding those additional end-of-year touchpoints to your marketing calendar can have a significant impact. Holiday campaigns can drive revenue, improve brand awareness, enhance customer loyalty, and help differentiate your app from the competition.

As you close out Q4 and plan for a new year, use these tips to ensure your holiday marketing efforts drive results for your app:

1. Express Gratitude

There’s no denying that the holiday season can be stressful. In addition to being a busy time of year, the holidays are filled with choices about how best to spend your time, money, and energy.  As the year comes to a close, it’s also a time when many individuals and companies reflect on the previous year and make plans for the future. Expressing gratitude and appreciation for customers is a great habit regardless of the time of year, but that message can hit home even more during the season of giving and resolutions. As you craft your holiday marketing campaigns, think about ways to work gratitude into your messaging and themes like these three examples from Inc Magazine. Doing so will help strengthen your brand relationships and build goodwill.

2. Leverage Multiple Communication Channels

Email marketing is one of the highest-grossing channels for holiday campaigns and is a powerful marketing tool year round — even for mobile apps. This tried-and-true channel has an ROI of $42 for every $1 spent, making it an incredibly lucrative platform. Studies have shown that using email alongside other channels like push notifications can significantly increase user retention and engagement. Creating campaigns for different channels including in-app messages, email, and push notifications will help you reach a wider audience, regardless of whether they’re actively engaged with your app.

3. Personalize Your Recommendations & Promotions

Personalizing your recommendations and promotions can help improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns by making the content and offers more relevant and appealing to your target audience. It can also help improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, as customers are more likely to engage with content and offers that are tailored to their interests.

There are several ways you can personalize your recommendations and promotions, including using data analysis and machine learning algorithms to identify patterns and make recommendations, segmenting your audience based on shared characteristics or behaviors, and leveraging user feedback and in-app surveys to gather insights about their preferences.

4. Add Some Holiday Flair to Your Campaigns

Although it may feel cheesy, festive imagery and wordplay really work during the holiday season. Holiday-themed content tends to be shared more on social media and there’s evidence to suggest that holiday-themed subject lines outperform less festive email content. That said, it’s important to align your holiday content to your brand style and tone and find the right type of cheer for your brand. Remember, you don’t necessarily need to alter your brand colors to make content more festive.

5. Re-engage Churned Users

During the holiday season, competition for user’s attention reaches an all-time high. This time of year, it’s not uncommon for users to drop out of the user journey shortly after downloading an app or churn at a critical point during app onboarding or conversion process.  However, just because a user disengages doesn’t mean that they’re lost. Creating automated re-engagement campaigns (also known as remarketing or message retargeting) via push notifications, in-app messages, SMS, and email will help maximize your holiday ROI and set your app and your users up for success in the new year. Get inspiration from these 7 real-world push notifications to drive re-engagement.

6. Be Inclusive

As you create your holiday campaigns, it’s important to keep in mind that not everyone celebrates the same holidays.  Be respectful of the different traditions and customs that your audience may have by being inclusive in your design collateral and avoid using terms that can be exclusionary to certain groups. Avoid religious imagery and opt for more neutral or generic holiday-themed imagery such as winter scenes, gift-wrapped presents, or festive decorations.

7. Optimize Your App for the Holidays

Mobile app optimization is important year-round, but that’s especially true during the holidays. Holiday campaigns often mean more app traffic, users, and subscribers, so it’s essential that your app is up to the challenge. If there are any bugs or points of friction in your app experience that have been on the back burner all year, make sure that they’re addressed before you launch your holiday campaigns.

The same principle is true for your app store listing on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. Optimizing your app store listing can help you attract and convert more users at a time when they’re actively seeking out new content and experiences. Putting effort into improving your app reviews and ratings leading into the holiday season can help you real-in significantly more new users towards the end of the year.

Automate Your Cross-Channel Holiday Campaigns with Journeys

There’s no denying that managing multiple one-off campaigns can be a logistical challenge and a time suck when most of us are ready for a much-needed break. With our Journeys builder tool, it’s exceptionally easy to create automated, cross-channel holiday campaigns that are triggered by user interactions and personalized to their experience in real time. The best part? You can set up all your cross-channel campaigns ahead of schedule in a single workflow and reap the rewards while you get some deserved R&R. Unlock access to Journeys to set yourself up for success for the new year and every holiday to come.