- Remember your mobile (and personal) tone.
Mobile is deeply personal. So, take the time to consider your mobile brand persona and how you’ll engage with your customers. What tone will you use? Are your customers excited to shop for the holidays, or are they just trying to get it over with? Be sure to answer these questions when developing your mobile voice. Technology can also help to personalize – use the customer’s name, order info and more in messages and within your app.
- Provide location-based store hours notifications.
Do you have special store hours for the holidays? Make sure your local shoppers know about them! Send mobile messages to customers based on their location using geo-targeting, location segments or even ZIP codes. Use dynamic fields to include the store location’s name and special hours of business.
- Use rich notifications for seasonal branding.
Rich notifications for mobile apps provide an excellent way to incorporate holiday branding into your messages. Push notifications are often used to deep-link to rich notifications with offer details, images, and even video. Bonus tip: Use rich notifications as scannable coupons for in-store redemption and house them in the user’s app inbox.
- Promote alternative payment options early in the season.
To help reduce friction in the mobile buying process, send a communication early in the holiday season that promotes payment alternatives, such as PayPal or Visa Checkout, that eliminate the need for hurried shoppers to enter their full credit card information. To further reduce mobile cart abandonment, make sure these options are prominently displayed within your online checkout process.
- Use a preference center to let users manage notifications.
Some customers may not be interested in receiving the above-average volume of holiday messages many retailers send, so provide tools they can use to control this frequency. For app messages, consider offering an in-app preference center where users can personalize the types of messages they receive. For example, they may not want seasonal offers but still wish to receive shipping notifications.
