Why a Mobile Marketing Strategy is essential this Christmas

The days of shopping for Christmas presents on the desktop computer are disappearing and there has been a surge in mobile activity during the Christmas season. In December 2013 Mobile traffic accounted for 48 % of all online traffic, with a notable growth in Mobile sales accounting for 29 % of all online sales, up 40 % over 2012. Increasingly more and more consumers are now shopping on their mobile devices and turning to mobile to buy gifts.

Last December Smartphones drove 28.5% of all online traffic compared to tablets at 18.1%, making it the browsing device of choice. And when it came to making the sale, tablets assorted 19.4% of all online sales, more than twice that of smartphones, which accounted for 9.3%. Whilst 25 % of shoppers said they had a preference for shopping in-store  and 10 % of all shoppers plan to use their mobile devices to check retailer’s products or prices or read reviews, while they are already shopping

The multiple mobile devices being used by the consumer during the Christmas shopping journey means a multichannel shopping approach is advised for your mobile marketing strategy this Christmas season; For instance your customer orders online and then proceeds to click and collect in-store.

Below are some reasons why a mobile marketing strategy is essential this Christmas season:

Reach Extreme Last Minute Shoppers
Holiday gifting procrastinators
We have all been there, it’s 3.30 on Christmas Eve and you have yet to buy those Christmas gifts for loved ones, with the shopping shelves empty, and the wrapping paper scarce, you can’t help but panic. However with Mobile thrown into the equation panic mode can be sedated; and the rush to complete those purchases can somehow be more organised. Last-minute shopping is likely to be easier than ever; a later cut-off period for Christmas delivery together with click-and-collect options mean it’s easier for these last-minute shoppers to buy their presents online, 11% of shoppers in 2013 planned to leave their Christmas shopping until the last week. In the meantime, mobile-enabled consumers can compare prices, find nearby stores and with some retailers they can reserve stock while they are already shopping.  Retailers need to cater to these mobile-enabled shoppers by rolling out options on their mobile website and/or mobile app to check stock availability and reserve products in nearby stores.

Build Wish Lists and Shopping Lists
Their making a list and checking it twice…
As a retailer through usage behavioral segmentation in your mobile app you can become more responsive and coming up to the Christmas shopping frenzy you can encourage users of your app to tag favorite products or build wish lists and shopping lists within your app. And based on these wish lists created by the user, coupons that relate back to your users wish lists can be digitally delivered to their mobile phones, and similarly through coupons to digital wallets mobile coupons can be updated in real time. And its Christmas Eve, the shelves are empty and they have not gotten around to ticking everybody off their list. Well now with digital wallet capabilities you can conveniently send gift cards directly to a loved one’s smartphone.

Also for the last minute shoppers who may have a wish list but may be waiting until the middle of December to buy presents in online “Christmas sales” per say or for the shoppers who may be waiting for stock to be made available again, a particular size or color etc. As a retailer this is an opportunity to encourage users to download your app and build a wish list of items they possibly intent to purchase before Christmas day.

Through behavioral segmentation users who have created a “wish list” would then be able to receive an alert through a push notification if any of the items were to go on sale and or become available again.

Dedicate a Line For In-Store Pick Ups
Because the likelihood of having a clear path to purchase is as likely as Santa Claus traveling faster than light…
And lastly it is no secret that Consumers come out in their droves during the Christmas season and the likelihood of having a clear path to purchase is as likely as Santa Claus traveling faster than light. Most of the time Christmas queues are unavoidable, with one quarter of shoppers having a preference to visit stores rather than buying online. On the other hand for consumers who decide to pre-order their Christmas gifts through Click and Collect you can help your customers to avoid the queues by having a dedicated line for in-store pick ups. iBeacon technology can also be deployed in a store  to trigger alerts through push notifications to consumers when they arrive in store to direct them to their collection points.

The rapid increase in mobile shopping promises to be one of the defining characteristics of this Christmas for retailers, along with further growth of click-and-collect. Along with consumer confidence on the up, a strong retail trend is expected to continue this Christmas season. And what better way to embrace these trends than to carry out a mobile marketing strategy of your own and allow your brand to shine.

If you would like to hear more about how XtremePush can help you to reach your extreme Last Minute shoppers and much more – we would love to hear from you.

Afterall – tis the Season to have a Merry Mobile Christmas!!!

5 Brands using Snapchat to Engage their Target Audiences

Mobile marketing today is all about owning the moment and Snapchat is all about living in the moment. For brands who want to own the moment and reach their target audience in a creative way Snapchat provides the perfect platform to do just that. From a content marketing perspective Snaps on Snapchat are a lot more consensual and from a users perspective Snapchatter’s must deliberately add a brand’s username to their list of followers in order to receive their images, so the users are much more likely to want to engage with the content they’re receiving.

Snaps and stories are temporary which creates that sense of urgency to capture time sensitive information, whether it be a promotion, give away or a behind-the-scenes point-of-view. Ultimately the promise of unique, real-time information is your audience’s incentive to follow you.

Currently only 1 percent of marketers are using Snapchat with 700 million messages daily as of last November. And the Majority of users, 70 percent in fact fall into the age profile of the under 25’s and the millennials. Brands can now advertise for follower opt-in by leveraging other social media channels such as Twitter.

Here at XtremePush we have identified  five brands using Snapchat to Engage their Target Audiences Creatively:

1.) General Electrics

General Electric’s first Snapchat was One Small Step for Brand Kind. The industrial giant sent out fun drawings on Snapchat that depict space travel while syncing their marketing play into the 45^th anniversary of the moon landing.

2.) Sober Lane Dublin – recruitment on Snapchat

Publican Sober Lane based in Dublin and Cork turned to social media to recruit the best publicans. Sober Lane in Dublin sent out a tweet stating that they were only receiving applications via their Snapchat account. There was a tremendous response with 1,300 applications received in the 24 hours following. Each applicant had approximately 15 seconds to shine, one chef filmed himself cooking. Sober Lane is all about Personality and so is Snapchat.

3.) The Bucks sports team

The Bucks sports team along with a continuing effort to engage fans have been using Snapchat. The Bucks will use the account to give supporters an inside look at the team, previews of upcoming promotions and much more. The Snapchat Stories the team create will be stitched together to create a narrative and viewable for 24 hours after. The league was able to generate “hundreds of thousands of views” on Snapchat during the finals. So what are Buck’s key ingredients to success on Snapchat? Melissa Rosenthal Brenner, the NBA’s Senior Vice President of Digital Media stated “We’ve found what works is using Snapchat to tease content and gave fans unique vantage point“, and that “Snapchat makes content more precious, and because its generally secretive what players do before games or on draft night, it gives fans a sense of being a fly on the wall”, that most certainly makes a change from being a fly on the wall on their Facebook page…

4.) Electric Daisy Carnival

Snapchat carried out an experiential campaign using “My Story”  with the Electric Daisy Carnival music festival in June 2014. This allowed Snapchatter’s who were at the event to simply add a Snap to “Our EDC Story” and for those who couldn’t make the event Snapchat made it possible to add “EDCLive” to check out the event live through a series of Snaps. “My Story” a Snapchat feature introduced in October 2013 has transformed the app from a simple photo messenger to a storytelling platform. Stories create the opportunity to engage your followers, introducing the demand for higher-level content creation. And as stated by Snapchat “If you can’t make it to an event, watching Our Story makes you feel like you’re right there”.

5.) Audi – a sponsor of TV series “Pretty Little Liars”

Audi which is an official social media sponsor of TV series Pretty Little Liars has been Snapchatting exclusive bonus content from the ABC Family program Pretty Little Liars and the show’s stars in real time. The show itself scores high on millennial viewers. This marks the first time a Snapchat campaign has been activated to correspond directly with show content.The marriage between Pretty Little Liars and Snapchat seems perfect given their matching audiences as stated by Gartner research director Julie Hopkins.

Other brands embracing Snapchat include Comedy Central and Groupon. For some comedy effect you can now add Comedy Central on Snapchat and for time sensitive exclusive deals you can add Groupon on Snapchat. Groupon’s current Snapchat craze is for An exclusive deal for a trip to attend the Wiz Khalifa album release concert in Colorado for just $4.20 dollars. Sometime between Aug 4th and 11th Groupon will send out a snap notifying followers when the deal is live, the catch being that the you will have to be the first person to follow the link to the deal page in order to purchase it.

Consumer Wearables, Beats by Dre and Google Glasses

Consumer wearables are hot this season and are expected to become a “must have” for consumers over the next several years. The “wearable technology” group encompasses several types, including fitness monitors, activity trackers and smart clothing. Wearables can include smart watches, fitness bands, glasses along with smart bras, smart t-shirts, wearable cameras and more recently but still in the development faze rings and bracelets. The purpose of wearables is for users to take real-world actions by providing relevant, contextual information precisely at the point of decision making. You will find consumers wearing them on their sleeves walking down the street and models on the runway, with the exception of Google Glasses, which lets face it wearers of them probably won’t be getting their own spread in Vogue anytime soon…. Meanwhile Beats headphones which deliver exceptional sound quality to its users is another consumer wearable whose entire existence has been based on being a fashion and status symbol. Celebrities wear them, and people want them. Apple also want them and is rumored to buy beats for the value of $3.2 billion dollars, some have speculated that Apple is simply buying Beats to replenish its “cool factor”. Speaking of cool celebrity rapper Dre himself has a stake in Beats with his own collection Beats by Dre himself with an estimated worth not shy of $1 billion.

One of the latest and not so fashionable consumer wearables as mentioned above is Google Glasses. Kenneth Cole is a brand collaborating with Google Glasses to promote a new product range, it has recently rolled out a Google Glass app to promote its new cologne. The campaign encourages consumers to photograph themselves performing one good deed a day for 21 days,the goal being to be seen as early adopters and innovators. Other wearables include the Smart Bra that tells you if you are eating too much, the T-shirt that tracks your heartbeat and the Wearable Camera that can quietly and automatically take photographs from the wearer’s neck and lapel. Fitness devices make up the vast majority of the wearable technology market at the moment, with an estimated worth somewhere between $1bn and $3bn today. And worldwide spending on consumer wearable technology will hit $1.4 billion by the end of 2014, and By 2018, the market is expected to hit $19 billion.

Among wearable tech owners, Fitness Bands were the most popular devices (61%), followed by Smart Watches (45%) and Mobile Health devices (17%).

So what is it that motivates consumers to purchase wearables in the first place? One interesting motivation underlying Smart Watch owners decision to purchase their device was to supplement their everyday Smart Phone addiction. To the consumer more than 75% of them believe wearables will positively impact their wellness.

Retailers can benefit most from smart watches and glasses, as they present new opportunities for customer engagement. One more recent development is the focus on wearable tech that is functional but aesthetically pleasing. Although wearable technology still needs to gain a lot of traction before it can really take off, Retailers and brands already embracing it include Barneys New York and Kenneth Cole (as mentioned above). Barneys New York and the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), are collaborating which will result in the development of a “Smart Bracelet” powered by Intel. The “Smart Bracelet” will be sold exclusively at Barneys, making the retailer one of the first luxury store chains to carry this type of item, a mix between tech device and fashion accessory, very cool indeed. Ultimately when choosing wearable tech, consumers look for special features to fit their needs and match their styles.

So what’s next for consumer wearables? Has anyone had first hand experience with any of the consumer wearable devices? Google Glasses, has anyone lost a pair…? we know Dre will be able to buy Google Glasses for a small town if this deal with Apple goes through. We would love to hear your thoughts.