How are you optimizing your mobile marketing efforts to take advantage of the increase in holiday shopping? Mobile marketing around the holiday season depends heavily on text blasts sent strategically in order to help impulse shoppers find gifts for friends and family. In this article, we’ll show you why Christmas ‘tis the season for mobile marketing.
Use SMS Marketing to Send Text Blasts
One of the most popular ways to reach out to customers on their mobile devices is with a text message. If your customers have left their mobile device number with you and specifically acknowledged that you can reach out to them for marketing purposes, you can use your list of contacts to send holiday reminders and special promotional offers to customers. It’s worth noting that around 60% of patrons prefer to be contacted by brands with special deals via text message. If you’re just sending advertising with no offer attached to it, you could cause some offense.
Time Your Marketing Efforts Correctly
The best time to reach out to customers around the holiday season is Black Friday, when customers are gearing up to begin their holiday shopping and still have cash in their pocket and plenty of names on their lists to check off. Black Friday is a time for deep discounts, so mark down your product substantially or use other promotional tactics to drive purchases, like buy-one-get-one-free or by offering a small-value gift card free with purchase.
As Christmas nears, around the second week in December, customers are beginning to search high and low for that perfect gift. Advertising spending typically goes up around this time as well, so that’s a good indicator that it’s time for a mobile marketing campaign.
Finally, if your product supports it, a last-minute opportunity around the 22nd of December can help customers who are scrambling to put together their gift list at the last minute. Since you’ve already sent two messages, the third can be short and sweet.
Put a Time Limit on Your Offers
Christmas shopping is an impulsive activity. By placing a time limit of two or three days on your promotional offer, you give customers enough time to mull over the decision in their heads while not allowing another marketer to jump in and entice with a different offer. Depending on how in-demand your product is, you might opt to put a shorter time-frame, like twelve hours, on your promotional offer, but two days is generally a good average.
Don’t Forget Email
It’s worth noting that most users automatically forward their email to their mobile accounts, and many have their phones set to automatically display a notification with the email’s subject line when the email arrives in their inbox. This means you’ve essentially got fifty characters to make a quick pitch for a product or service in an email that will entice the reader to open the email and see the rest of the offer’s details.
When should you prefer to use email over mobile SMS? If your product or offer needs explanation that would exceed the 140-character limit of an SMS, prefer an email. If you don’t know your customers well, prefer an email. Mobile marketing is a great way to reach your most loyal customers, and there’s no reason you can’t combine mobile text messages and emails to create a campaign that doesn’t push too much advertising on the customers that are sitting on the fence about trying your product or service.
To learn more on how to utilize mobile marketing for your company, please contact us.
I'm the Director of Digital Services and Partner at Ballantine, a family-owned and operated direct mail & digital marketing company based in New Jersey. and started in 1966 by my great uncle!
