By Arun Pattabhiraman, InMobi
During the second half of 2016, while a whole nation has been keenly following the developments in the political landscape, retailers across America are studying the burgeoning retail landscape to gear up for the upcoming holiday season. The massive online influence, especially mobile, is shaping how marketers seek to maximize budgets and amplify campaigns for achieving the best return on investment this holiday season.
2016 has been a year of strong economic growth with stable macroeconomic trends. Valentine’s Day, the first big holiday of 2016, witnessed the highest-ever consumer spending in years. More recently, household spending shot up 1% from a month earlier in April, recording a seven-year high. While Britain’s exit from the European Union has yet to create a major impact, the fast-approaching holiday season has retailers reflecting on the learnings from last year.
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Last year, the National Retail Federation (NRF) reported a 3% rise in retail holiday sales to USD $626 billion despite unforeseen weather events across the country. The average consumer spend on Christmas gifts, forecasted at $830, reached a whopping $900. As offline sales grew marginally at nearly 2%, e-Commerce sales grew by 13.4% year-on-year, with m-Commerce accounting for 40% of all e-Commerce growth and 20% of all e-Commerce sales.
Millennials, with a strength of 75 million and a smartphone adoption rate of 85%, are driving spends on travel, accessories, electronics and entertainment. To leverage this trend, retailers are innovating by introducing dedicated online sales events such as ‘Cyber Monday,’ with a staggering 183 million unique shoppers participating in it last year. Even traditional events like Thanksgiving and Black Friday drove a 50% growth in unique mobile visitors, indicating a clear channel shift and change in user behavior.
More recently, retailers such as Amazon are capitalizing on this with their ‘Prime Day’ event, a self-created holiday for Prime customers held on July 12 this year. The Amazon mobile app saw a 50% rise in mobile visits compared to an average day, with a near 30% rise in overall revenues. Leading retailers saw shoppers spend the majority of their time on mobile in apps. Mobile apps had conversion rates 20% higher and average order values 2% greater than desktop. So how do retailers win with mobile this holiday season?
Winning With Mobile Remarketing
Retailers today recognize the value of engaging and retaining existing customers to maximize sales. It’s no wonder then that mobile remarketing has become a central strategy for retailers this holiday season. By remarketing to existing high value customers with personalized discounts based on purchase history, shopping cart abandonment etc., retailers can activate sales on mobile channels. Nudging customers with relevant offers based on user intent through dynamic creative and seamless transaction capabilities is essential for retailers to succeed this holiday season.
Understanding user intent based on in-app activity, such as product display page views, purchase history, add-to-cart or wish list additions is the first step towards crafting a personalized shopping experience. Combining user intent signals with data around user profile and context, such as demographics and location, can help deliver personalized and highly relevant offers to users, boosting the effectiveness of a brand campaign. For instance, an apparel retailer could retarget existing users in and around the location of the store, promoting personalized offers about the latest fashion sale or discounts on interested brands.
Leveraging Native And Video
Relevant recommendations, however, should be delivered in a format that users engage with. Remarketing is impactful when retailers can re-create the app’s form and function within the ad unit with HD images, price details, reviews and ratings or payment options. Native and video ad formats help create a rich experience that mimics the retailer’s app, gently guiding users from a state of consideration to a state of transaction.
Videos, set to comprise two-thirds of all mobile traffic and with the highest conversion rates, have had a telling effect in delivering brand propositions even for retailers. Experiential products like movies will receive a huge boost because of innovative video formats such as vertical, 360-degree and virtual reality (VR). Industries like travel, fashion and entertainment can guide customers through virtual holiday tours, product trials and movie trailers and effect subsequent bookings.
Finally, to succeed with remarketing, retailers need to ensure a seamless transaction experience. A click on the ad should reduce conversion friction by deep-linking — landing directly on the specific page within the app that showcases the product or offer details. Further, through deeper back end integrations with the retailer’s inventory management system, ads can be served dynamically to showcase products based on product availability.
Racing Ahead With Programmatic
Mobile marketers today demand precision targeting, transparency and efficiency for their marketing campaigns, and this is shifting dollars towards programmatic advertising. Programmatic advertising, which already accounts for more than 50% of the U.S. digital display ad spending, has the unparalleled ability to pair rich audience data with ad inventory. Precisely buying audience segments that are more likely to convert can give the much-desired boost to year-end sales. At a time when consumer spending seems to be on a record high, marketers who seize the moment and engage consumers with the perfect mobile shopping experience alone will come out as clear winners.
Arun Pattabhiraman is the Vice President and Global Head of Marketing at InMobi, a mobile advertising and discovery platform. Having led more than a dozen product launches at InMobi, he brings extensive experience in mobile and Internet businesses including mobile advertising, mobile payments and m-commerce. As the Editorial Director, Pattabhiraman produced “Apponomics –The Insider’s Guide to a Billion Dollar App Business”, a guide to app developers looking to acquire, monetize and retain loyal users for their apps. Before joining InMobi, Pattabhiraman drove prepaid voice revenues at India’s largest telecom operator, Airtel. He graduated from the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, with an MBA in Strategy and Marketing and holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the College of Engineering-Guindy, Anna University. E-mails should be sent to
