The holiday season is just around the corner! As we enter Q4, marketers need to develop marketing strategies while reflecting on some important 2015 statistics.
During the 2015 holiday season, it became very apparent that the retail industry’s customer journey has changed. Mobile traffic was a bigger factor than ever before, with mobile traffic accounting for more than 45% of web traffic between November 1st and December 31st, 2015. While more customers completed purchases on a desktop – accounting for 77.3% of all online sales – mobile accounted for 22.6% of online sales, a 27% increase from the previous year.
Given these stats, there are several important trends in cross-device and cross-channel marketing that retailers should consider as they’re ramping up for the holiday season.
1. Drive holiday sales with sequential messaging
The customer journey has fragmented across devices, with mCommerce rightly drawing a lot of attention. Mobile devices are now responsible for nearly 50% of overall online U.S. retail traffic, according to IBM’s annual Online Retail Holiday Readiness Report, and a BI Intelligence report found that by 2020, mobile commerce will make up 45% of total e-commerce, equaling $284bn in sales. However, mCommerce doesn’t offer a complete solution for retailers – at least not yet. The same BI Intelligence report found that mobile conversion rates still lag behind desktops. With small screens, finicky keyboards, and harder-to-find product details on mobile, many customers still prefer to convert on desktop.
Placing messages sequentially across devices with cross-device data can drive increased ROI. Marketers are able to target a consumer with a rich video ad on their mobile device in the morning, followed by ads offering more information on the product delivered on a customer’s tablet later in the day, before encouraging a purchase with a strong call-to-action on their desktop. Marketers can now deliver a cohesive, personalized campaign with the right message, on the right device, at the right time.
2. Drive in-store sales of big ticket items
Research by Rubicon Project found that 66% of parents are planning on buying a big ticket gift during the holiday season this year, and 68% of millennials are planning to do the same. Bricks-and-mortar outlets still account for around 90% of all sales, and that won’t change dramatically. The challenge for retail businesses will be adapting to the increasing fragmentation of the customer journey and the way customer behavior has changed due to the many devices being used throughout the buying process.
This holiday season, retailers can merge online and offline to create new opportunities. Consumers are using their mobile device to search for information, so marketers should leverage the mobile channel to reach consumers while they are still in the consideration phase. By running a cross-device video campaign which drives customers to a store, retailers can have the best of both worlds: the advanced targeting capabilities that only digital video can offer combined with the personal touch of an in-store sales representative.
3. Use geo-fencing and geo-targeting to reach customers
Geo-fencing and geo-targeting have been relatively slow to emerge as tactics, but both have the ability to help retailers bridge online and physical stores by delivering useful and personalized content to customers in close proximity. Geo-fencing involves targeting customers when they enter a pre-defined area and geo-fencing targets customers based on their geographic location. Geo-targeting, on the other hand, allows you to send a message to a customer regarding a store sale, to help drive footfall
Fiat launched its Fiat 500 campaign with geo-targeting, targeting customers with promotional messages within half a mile of its billboards. One in five people reported that they were happy to visit the dealership after seeing the campaign. Mazda reported similar results with its location-based campaign.
4. Use geo-conquesting to target customers in your interest group
Geo-conquesting goes a step further than geo-targeting. Using location-based advertising to direct customers towards a specific business when they are physically near a competitor’s location. For example, if a local coffee shop wants to use this marketing tactic, they might target users who are at large coffee chains such as Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts with messages emphasizing local deals.
With customers using their smartphones up to 150 times a day, targeting customers based on their physical location is an effective way to reach customers who may be interested in your product. Upon entering the region, the potential customer would see a display ad within an app with an active location service (i.e. the Weather app). The ad would remind customers of specials and other promotions and offer a click through to a landing page with directions to your nearest location
The effect of geo-conquesting is two-fold: first, it increases awareness of your brand among consumers who are currently engaged with a similar product. Secondly, marketers can combine geo-conquesting with cross-device to achieve a single view of a customer across all of the devices they own. Targeting customers where they shop (and where they are likely to be using their mobile devices) provides marketers new opportunities to deliver more personalized and targeted messaging to customers.
5. Achieve a single view of your customer across devices, channels and platforms
The holy grail for marketers is achieving a single view of the customer as they move through the purchase funnel. In 2016, last-touch attribution is no longer good enough: marketers need to be able to account for cross-device attribution, and the role that devices play in influencing purchases on other devices or channels.
The customer journey is more fragmented than ever before, and marketers must be able to understand how each channel influences customer behavior. Cross-device technology will tell you how many of your customers are researching products on mobile, and ultimately how many of them complete a purchase on desktop or in a bricks-and-mortar location.
Adbrain provides ID mapping technology for optimizing cross-device marketing.
Favorite