How to Optimize your App for the Holiday Season?

In USA, the communities go to a great length and splurge to celebrate the grand festive season of the year. In the rush of the holidays, people can be seen scrambling to complete their shopping amidst planning, working, and traveling. It’s really difficult to prepare under these circumstances. Here, mobile apps come to the rescue that lets them do all the preparations easily for the most awaited holiday season.

According to a research, “24% of the US consumers are planning to spend 60% of their total holiday budget online.”

It signals people celebrated the Black Friday, Thanksgiving day and Halloween a few days ago by sending gifts, having a sumptuous meal and shopping for the holidays. That’s where the brands will witness extreme consumption and the spending of the year. But, is your app ready for a winter holiday strategy?

Make your app ready for the holiday and let it work flawlessly while the customers would bring in their holiday shopping list with a few implementations. Here, the festive season preparation checklist will help you know what your app holiday strategy already has and what needs to be incorporated.

We have ironed out it for you.

• Let’s be creative – modernize the app with a holiday theme

When the holiday season is around, joy and celebrations are in the air, and everyone is in the festive mood. Is your app aptly endowed with holiday spirit? If yes, it’s great, and if not, redesign your mobile app features and add festive elements to breathe holiday life into the app because your customers expect to get greeted in the holiday style.

It’s very simple. Your app’s home screen must share some resemblance with storefronts during the holiday season that’s decorated with Christmas trees, snowflakes, Santa Claus, red and green ribbons and much more. Why don’t you add the holiday flair to app interface?

You can tap the users’ shopping binge by changing the banner with a new image, specially designed for the holidays; add candy cane in your logo; makeover the icons with festive elements; design pop-ups with greetings and messages; display coupons with falling snows.

• Sync the app with loyalty program

A study has revealed that 80% of the customers switch the brands if they get higher incentives.

It signals designing the loyalty program that intrigue and delight the customers, and keep the business in a profitable state is a must-have.

Make the loyalty program in the month of November and December a bit special. Instead of just rewarding the customers with a gift card of a few bucks or doubling the loyalty points on every purchase they make, entice the customers to shop more with a simple twist.

Run limited-time loyalty rewards like- the gift card of $5 on the shopping worth about $100 in November/December, or offer the giveaways like- T-shirts, holiday mugs or decorative items on the distinct level of spending at the store. Such loyalty programs pay off right during the holiday season.

• Plan a holiday giveaway campaign

There is no one who doesn’t like to get the things for free. Draw the existing users or new users’ attention by offering exciting prizes.

Through social channels or emails, you can promote and distribute the giveaways to the users selected at random. For instance, restaurateurs can start offering the giveaway- ‘get $20 off at the first dinner in the restaurant this holiday season,’ to the people to download the app.

In the giveaway campaigns, the form should be kept simple with not too many fields to get the best results. Also, at the top of the form, the giveaway’s name and its description should be clearly mentioned along with holiday-themed icons in the header.

• Spread the joy of holiday with emails or notifications

It’s all-high time to reconnect with the customers who have been with you all year around. Send the push notifications or emails to the customers to greet them and notify about specials and deals the app is offering this season. Ensure the email or push notification content must be embellished with holiday visuals to convey a touch of holiday cheer. Beware! The content should not appear “Sellie.”

A year before, it’s analyzed that 70% of the customers used mobile coupons to make the purchase. 

The loyalty-filtered rewards are a great way to draw back the customers to your business. Design a strategic email campaign and define the distinct level of loyalty rewards to the customers based on the demographics, geography and purchase and send the email or notification in an automated way.

However, the research had proven that push notifications bring higher leads as compared to the emails because less often customers prefer to open, and read the emails and then click on the links.

• Host a holiday based picture competition

Nowadays, the photo contests are all the rage. Increasingly, the people are actively participating in such competitions, which in turn improve the brand awareness in addition to a great fun to the participants. This holiday season, create the photo contest with an engaging theme and make it a part of the app, which not just promote the app while becoming an eye candy for the people.

Launch a photo contest within the app where all the participants are required to submit the photos in the app. Sift through the user-generated images that fulfill the requirement, then declare the best image as a winner and even if the participants won’t win, feature the photos on the app’s Facebook or Instagram account that excites the participants.

The strategy works in every case, no matter the participants win or not. You can go for it.

• Highlight the products or services that make sense for the holiday

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for the businesses. They have to make variations in the products as per the seasons and festivals to stay synced with customer’s demands, increase the average ticket size and improve ROI.

The same goes for the restaurant apps where the restaurateurs should change the menu according to the holiday season to serve the customers what they like to have. Going forward, adding a unique menu item as special for the season would definitely lure in more customers to the restaurant.

• Go digital to get sync with tech-savvy customers

A QR code is so common that needs no introduction. Presently, on every product or services, be it offline or online, the embedded QR codes can be found that showcases the special content to the customers. Increasingly, the apps are taking the advantage of QR technology to market the products in a better way because more customers today prefer to consume the content digitally. Then, why not this holiday season, you make the most out of the opportunity.

As creating and populating the calendar with events for the holiday is a key to connect with the target customers, so inform your customers what you are doing special or what unique feature you have added to the app on this holiday season with holiday QR code. Don’t let customers miss out anything and hook them up.

• Spread the word on social channels

Make sure no one will be aware of or take interest in your app unless you promote the specials you have strategized and launched for the holiday. Promote the holiday marketing campaigns on different social channels along with a clear call-to-action and a link that squarely brings the customers to your app. Also, you can make the customers directly land on holiday special features.

The word-of-mouth and brand advocates are the powerful tools that influence a wide range of the customers and make the promotion easy peasy.

• Track the efforts

The holiday season is around and it’s the time to see the outcome of your months of planning and full-blown holiday strategy. It’s not necessary when it gets executed, the customers definitely love the holiday tweaks and the sales get doubled just after the launch. Absolutely, say no to the guessing game.

You have to understand and analyze the user behavior and patterns to the changes made. If all turns out well, you will be at the advantage, else, remove the things that are interfering with the user experience. Get into your customer’s shoes to see which tactic is working, otherwise, your investment won’t pay off.

• Load test – it begins and ends there

Many times, during the peak season, the traffic to the apps grow by manifolds, which increases the app’s loading time or app get crashes. Whether we like it or not, but the customers won’t show any mercy to such apps and shut it down instantly if it won’t open within the 5 seconds.

It implies any hiccups in the app’s loading motivate the customers to bin your app.

Load tests your app to make it ready for the holiday. Have experienced service providers to develop your mobile apps, so that you can also be assured that your app has gone through rigorous testing sessions to check and optimize to see whether it’s capable of handling the load or not. Know your app threshold limit and if required optimize it to perform under high traffic.

Closing words

As we all look forward to celebrating Christmas and end the year on a successful note, it will not be worth it if your app has been missing out on many of the important features listed above to lure your target audience. Share your mobile app development requirements and we’ll develop an app for you get the most out of your app and help you get ready in time for the next holiday season. I’ll suggest you start early and contact us today to make your mark in the market early.

Ashish Parmar

He is the Co-Founder and CEO of Prismetric . An enthusiastic entrepreneur, interested to discuss new app ideas, rich gadget tricks and trends, and admires signature tech business styles to readily embrace. He enjoys learning most modern app crafting methods, exploring smart technologies and passionate about writing his thoughts too. Inventions related to mobile and software technology inspire Ashish and he likes to inspire the like-minded community through the finesse of his work.