Make Your Whole Year Merrier with 8 Engagement Best Practices for the Holidays

Every retailer knows, app downloads spike significantly during peak shopping periods, especially around the week of Black Friday. However, sustaining user engagement beyond the holiday rush is a significant challenge. 

The cost of acquiring app users during the holidays is significantly higher than at other times of the year, so it’s important to maximize your digital opportunities for revenue and retention. 

With the holiday season approaching quickly, we’ve identified 8 best practices you can implement to help engage and retain your valuable peak holiday installer cohort and everyone else. 

Here are the best practices you need to get started:

1. Know your goals
2. Get to know your audience personally
3. Welcome them on board
4. Tell your story 
5. Make it exclusive, rewarding
6. Experiment 
7. Stay on-trend
8. Go beyond messaging with Embedded Content  

Define Your Goals
As the holiday season approaches, it’s prime time to leverage the retail frenzy to acquire more valuable app users. However, before diving straight in, it’s crucial to first establish your objectives.

Does app download volume matter the most? How about downloads at a specific Cost per Install? Maybe your focus is on generating social media engagement and extending the value of your app beyond those who already have it.  

The more closely aligned your holiday campaign is to your goals, the more likely your efforts will produce results that meet and even exceed your expectations. 

Get To Know Your Audience 
Understanding your customers’ needs and preferences is key to driving sales during the festive season. Leverage past shopping data and gather zero-party data to deliver tailored messages that resonate with your audience over the holidays. Personalize product recommendations, offers and discounts to your most valuable customers to create further incentive.

Welcome New Customers On Board
Sequenced, cross-channel communications should be designed to gently cultivate regular usage by helping new users understand the app’s value and how they can customize it to their personal needs and interests.

With Black Friday in sight, it’s the perfect time to work on a basic Onboarding Series. Instead of passively hoping for user retention, adopt a proactive approach by initiating a continuous stream of communications that follow these principles:

1. Welcome. We’re glad you’re here.
2. We’re ready to help you get exactly what you want.
3. Customize your experience and communications in our Preference Center.
4. The biggest rewards, special access and app-only exclusives await.

Holiday shopping seasons break records for app downloads again and again. Brands aiming to optimize their app’s performance should prioritize onboarding alongside achieving holiday sales targets. If you’re making significant investments to drive holiday downloads, don’t let all that effort and expense go to waste! Help ensure user retention with effective onboarding.  

Based on industry benchmarks, you are likely to get 40% more app downloads during Black Friday week than any other week throughout the year but 38% of new app installers only open your app once. This is where you must leverage that huge spike in app downloads to immediately provide a valuable and fun onboarding experience.

You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. A multi-screen, no-code Scene can direct new app customers to your more important features, promote the exclusive value they’ll get from the app and clearly articulate the importance and benefit of opting in to notifications or other marketing channels.

Now is the time to ensure that those downloads translate into lasting engagement, building the relationship between your brand and your customers around an ongoing exchange of respect and reward. 

Tell a Story 
App customers constantly look for the easiest way to access valuable content seamlessly. Brands continually try to present relevant content to their customers in a meaningful, actionable, and concise way. With over 900 million people engaging with Instagram stories daily, it’s no surprise that brands are eager to replicate Instagram’s familiar look and feel within their mobile app experiences. That’s why Airship introduced Stories.

Unlike screens in an onboarding flow, Stories progress automatically but can be paused with a tap, just like on social media platforms. Stories can also be customized and displayed to specific customer segments based on preferences, demographics or behaviors.

Social mirroring uses Stories inside the app to show the same video content being served across paid social channels. It extends expensive content and campaigns to provide consistent experiences to your most important brand-owned destination.

Brands can use Airship Stories to drive app engagement. Every year, without fail, consumers participate in major shopping events like Cyber Week. Now you can build “shopping haul” Stories showcasing the season’s most popular purchases among like-minded customers, filtered by region, preferences, behaviors or any combination of factors. Or highlight complementary products that go well together and inspire greater spend. 

Make It Exclusive With App-Only Deals and Discounts
What sets your app apart, even after a purchase? What advantages do your consumers get by downloading and keeping your app? 

You can make your mobile customers feel special and valued for their ongoing engagement by offering exclusive deals reserved solely for them. This will instill a sense of exclusivity and urgency, motivating them to take action. 

App-exclusive offers create a unique value proposition, encouraging users to download and keep your app long after their initial transaction. You can also leverage app-exclusive offers to cross-promote products or upsell by introducing app-only flash sales or extending additional discounts for in-app purchases. 

‘Tis the season to enhance customer satisfaction, increase app retention and drive overall sales.

Experiment 
Just like your auntie’s holiday cooking, sometimes you’ve got to get experimental! This is the perfect season to test innovative approaches.

Experimentation is key to discovering what resonates best with the people around your table this holiday season — your customers. So before you roll out your creative to the whole audience, take a strategic approach to your holiday campaigns by conducting multiple experiments concurrently or sequentially, each designed to optimize specific goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). 

To get you started, think through variants that may resonate with your audience. Some key elements we recommend brands test ahead of their holiday campaigns include (but are not limited to) these:

• More or less personal: experiment with what levels of personalization will drive more action. For example, you could leverage previous purchase history to make sales recommendations or serve offers based on their current behavior. 
• Exposed value: Experiment with the type of value your customers care about. For example, will customers be more likely to spend more if they see how many loyalty points they have available to spend or if they see how many extra loyalty points they will get with a higher purchase? 
• Time of day: Will the campaign be more successful launched around lunch time or in the evening?
• More or less imagery: Will rich push with images of the product on sale drive more or less app opens than a text push notification with an emoji 🎄?
• Percentage or currency amount: If you are promoting a price reduction, will a percentage or the actual monetary value resonate best with your audience?
• Imagery: Which campaign photo will drive the most action?

Stay On-Trend
According to Google, 40% of U.S. consumers had already started their holiday shopping by October. 30% said they were finding information or researching specific brands or products and 55% were looking for gift ideas or inspiration.

You can use social proofing to improve engagement. Essentially, proofing means providing a tally of what products are trending for the purpose of driving a behavior. Social proofing can occur across category and product detail pages and be promoted with push notifications, Scenes and Embedded Content. 

By leveraging social proofing, retailers can create a sense of urgency and popularity, encouraging customers to make purchases based on trending items and scarcity cues. Using data on what products consumers are viewing, saving or purchasing, marketers can tailor future communications to match individual preferences. For example, if a user frequently engages with tech gadgets, sending push notifications about trending electronics or limited-time offers in that category can significantly enhance engagement and conversion rates. Personalized recommendations based on previous interactions not only drive immediate sales but also foster long-term customer loyalty by showing that the brand understands and caters to individual needs and interests.

Embed Personalized Content
Elevate your campaign by embedding interactive elements within the mobile app such as Stories, videos, or loyalty offers that can be personalized to each individual customer based on their information. 

For example, you can add multiple content blocks throughout your app featuring different products, offers or survey questions for customer A versus customer B based on their behaviors, preferences and previous purchases. 

Implement & Engage with our Holiday eBook
Now that you’re up to speed with holiday best practices, you’re ready to start creating campaigns!

Download the eBook to explore 8 creative campaigns to generate holiday value for a lifetime.