When consumers feel inspired to shop and are looking for recommendations, help, or even discounts, mobile and apps are at the center of this encounter. Adobe Analytics also reports that these channels are the most popular for holiday shopping, with customers spending as much as $12.8 million every minute in 2022 on Cyber Monday.
The Internet and in-app purchases have obviously sparked a new holiday shopping frenzy. However, the change in the expense schedule is more noteworthy. People no longer view Thanksgiving Day as the “tentpole of the holiday shopping season.”. Opportunities abound well into January, when many customers with new smartphones as holiday presents have free time and a need to peruse shopping applications and deals.
Exploiting App Usage Data to Forecast Consumer Intent
Ads bombard customers every day, but how many do they really see? Either way, the battle for attention is fierce. And brands and organizations already have a tough time standing out during the hectic, high-volume holiday shopping season.
It’s only human for stores to want to recycle strategies that were successful the following year. One strategy that could need some rethinking, though, is offering steep discounts to entice budget-conscious consumers.
This is the perspective of Aampe, a novel type of marketing automation software for mobile applications that utilizes what Aampe’s VP of Growth, Jim Laurain, terms the “digital breadcrumb trail” of user behavior in order to forecast their further activities. Among these is app event stream data, which reveals the user’s behavior in response to push notifications and app use. An adaptive bottom-up strategy takes in data to figure out what people will do next and anticipate the most effective content and tone for messages.
Utilizing internal data and a survey of push notifications sent by big-name retailers like Macy’s, Walmart, and others, Aampe has developed a tool to assist marketers in sending messages that not only respond to but also anticipate client needs throughout the extended Christmas shopping season. Only CMSWire has access to these findings, revealing both expected and unexpected examples of effective practices.
1. Sales Aren’t Always Visible
A staggering 81% of the messages analyzed by Aampe began with some sort of sale or discount, suggesting that customers could save 50% or more on their purchases. The data, which can examine the substance of messages and the conversions they generate, shows that smaller discounts resulted in more engagement and more purchases. According to Larain, sales were most effective when they were between 20% and 30% off. The data revealed that even modest discounts, offering savings of 15-20%, drove more conversions.
Why consumers didn’t seek out steep discounts was outside the purview of Aampe’s research. Nevertheless, according to Laurain, Aampe has seen that customers are more likely to window shop when prices are low rather than really making a purchase. “With so many deals online, it’s becoming more difficult for stores to attract customers with low prices alone.”
The takeaway here is that while most stores are aiming their marketing efforts at bargain hunters in the run-up to the holidays, sending out an overabundance of promotional messages about sales and discounts does more harm than good. The more forward-thinking method takes advantage of data on user behavior to create a customer-led segmentation strategy that changes the discount amount (and other messages) based on the audience’s inclination to act.
2: Suggested products seal the deal
Marketing success hinges on making relevant offers to specific demographics. While product suggestions only generate 7% of e-commerce traffic, they’re responsible for 24% of orders and 26% of income, according to a landmark study from Salesforce. Plus, customers who engage with product suggestions are 4.5 times more likely to go on to buy what they started with.
Results from Aampe’s study of more than 800,000 users and 1.2 million messages corroborate the efficacy of product recommendations in generating major revenue. It showed that “standard notifications that lead to saving, deals, or discounts combined” were less effective than “product recommendation messages,” as Laurain informed me. “Messages that lead with product recommendations, suggest ideal holiday gifts, or tap customer data for personalized offers were driving a staggering 300% increase in clicks and 289% more checkout events.”
This article is related to the need to build strong emotional connections with customers.
3. Every word and deed counts
The stakes are tremendous for retailers now more than ever before, as one-third of customers are ready to abandon a beloved brand after a single negative encounter. Delivering marketing experiences that arouse emotions is just as important as aligning messaging tone, timing, and content with shoppers based on their behaviors.
With this responsibility comes the need for merchants to add a human touch to their marketing. Artificial intelligence (AI) really comes into its own in this area of marketing, analyzing data and coming up with ad creatives that will attract viewers and boost sales all year round, like a charm. Alison.ai, a software company that uses artificial intelligence models to extract insights and give recommendations for visual creatives like videos and images, analyzed hundreds of thousands of ad creatives from retailers across major ad platforms, including Meta, Google, and others, over the past two holiday seasons.
The findings, which were exclusively shared with CMSWire, present numerous actionable recommendations for improving ad creatives. In addition, they confirm the findings of previous studies that demonstrate the majority of consumers were persuaded to make a purchase after viewing a video ad, highlighting the critical significance of this advertising in campaigns to acquire customers.
Catering to Customers’ Changing Requirements via Time
Stores’ fates hang in the balance right now, but there are plenty of chances to connect with customers at every turn of their seemingly endless trip. The modern shopper “never shops.” This dynamic generates a deluge of touchpoints where businesses can contact customers and convert them, but only if they provide valuable and relevant marketing.
However, refrain from squandering resources by attempting to predict what customers truly desire. For every aspect of your customer experience—from choosing the right discounts to drive sales to matching video advertising with the text elements that will win over hearts and wallets—make sure it is consumer-led, data-informed, and built from the bottom up to anticipate what your customers admire most.
