5 Strategies to Improve Your Holiday Retail Performance

During my 10 years at Airship working alongside global enterprise retail brands, I’ve observed a common challenge regarding mobile: internal hurdles and over-refinement can often delay campaign execution and time to market.

As we approach the busiest time of the year — a season that moves at lightning speed — what if we paused, took a deep breath and adopted a “crawl-first” mindset, emphasizing progress over perfection. Starting early, starting small and iterating quickly can yield better results than spending 6+ months on a campaign or new functionality that could easily miss the mark with your audience.

Five Strategies You Can Implement Immediately — No Developer Support Required

1. Customize Experiences for the Season: Infuse holiday-themed content into your mobile app or website to evoke the same warmth and charm as a decorated storefront but digitally. Start with onboarding — allowing customers to build a wish list to ensure they are motivated to stick around — and carry through to messaging and loyalty offers.  
2. Test and Optimize in Real Time: Experiment with cross-channel campaigns as well as app and web experiences — from message timing, content and button placement to onboarding and preference-setting flows — and refine as you go. Always include a control group to measure the lift effectively.
3. Launch an Abandoned Browse Campaign: Use push notifications to re-engage customers who have browsed but not acted. Lean into time-sensitive, interest-tailored messaging. Share exclusive discounts or offers to incentivize customers to convert. Build multi-screen product buying guides for heavily browsed categories to learn customers’ buying criteria and influence their choices. 
4. Leverage Surveys to Personalize Content: Encourage customers to share their shopping preferences and product interests. Consider enabling a “Wish List” to learn who and what they are shopping for so you can tailor messaging and offers to their specific needs.
5. Create Engaging, Embedded Stories: Showcase special promotions or recommendations through rich, interactive content like a “Deal of the Day” carousel or “Trending Gifts” highlights. Embedded content drives 4.6x total time spent with experience and 3x time spent with the brand compared to interstitial experiences.

Additionally, capitalize on the increased app traffic during the holidays to:

• Collect Opt-Ins: Grow your owned communication channels — email, push notifications, SMS and mobile wallet — so you can pave the way for more opportunities to connect in the future and encourage repeat engagement.
• Enhance Customer Profiles: Use surveys to understand your audience better and optimize your holiday and post-holiday messaging. Applying zero- and first-party data to customer experiences can help you scale personalization and, in turn, fuel purchase behaviors. Show your customers you know them — Airship research finds identified users purchase 43% more frequently than anonymous users.

The holiday season offers unparalleled value creation and revenue generation opportunities in today’s mobile-first world. With consumers increasingly relying on their phones to browse, compare, shop, and even return items, small optimizations can drive significant impact.

It may be December already, but it’s not too late to implement these strategies and boost your holiday performance. Sometimes, starting small is the quickest path to success.

Airship has a dedicated team of strategic consultants and campaign specialists ready to bring industry and platform expertise to accelerate your efforts and help you quickly implement any of the above strategies. Reach out and we’ll be in touch!

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