The Holidays are a Mobile App Opportunity

Mobile eCommerce is important in this holiday season with 16% of consumers planning to do “all or most of their shopping via a smartphone or tablet.”

Ported Post: This entry was originally published in the Artisan Mobile blog. Artisan was rebranded as In-App Marketing after being acquired by TUNE in July of 2015. 

Remember when people only used mobile devices to research gift purchases during the holiday shopping season? You know, back in 2011? According to the “Mindset of a Multichannel Shopper” survey from MarketLive, this year a full 16% of consumers plan to do “all or most of their shopping via a smartphone or tablet.” This statistic highlights the importance of mobile eCommerce for retailers.

Most companies no longer question the importance of having a strong mobile presence, but there’s still a big leap between knowing that mobile is important, and really understanding its financial impact. In recent years, analysts have tracked new holiday shopping trends largely by attempting to connect online mobile activity to offline in-store results. While that type of analysis is still important, we are starting to enter into an era where more of the purchasing process will take place entirely on mobile devices.

Given consumer attention to mobile, ecommerce companies need to consider their mobile strategies as carefully as their in-store strategies. Mobile apps from retailers should engage users, making it easy both to browse and to buy products. If it’s not easy, people won’t do it.

Retailers should also recognize the longer term potential of hooking new users during the holiday season. Once an app is downloaded, it stays on a mobile device unless and until the user makes an effort to delete it. NBC Universal played on this insight brilliantly when it converted users of its popular Olympics app to NBC Sports Live Extra after the Olympic Games finished. NBC introduced an entirely new app in the update process, but it’s now possible to tweak or optimize your existing mobile app easily for a new purpose once the holidays are over.

Tis the season for mobile apps… now and all the year through.

Author

Becky is the Senior Content Marketing Manager at TUNE. Before TUNE, she handled content strategy and marketing communications at several tech startups in the Bay Area. Becky received her bachelor's degree in English from Wake Forest University. After a decade in San Francisco and Seattle, she has returned home to Charleston, SC, where you can find her strolling through Hampton Park with her pup and enjoying the simple things between adventures with friends and family.