The festive season is here, and this period is considered to be the busiest time of the year. Mobile apps emerge as a unique niche that compels people to fulfill all their needs and wants. And during festivals, people tend to indulge and splurge by shopping for different products and services. A survey by Think With Google highlights that people download more apps during the Holiday season, as compared to any other time.

The holiday season gives ample scope for businesses to capitalize on marketing their apps. It can be a great contributor towards generating maximum user-interest that would eventually lead to increased traffic, app downloads, and sales.

Getting your App Holiday-Ready
Mobile apps can enhance the number of visitors, engagement, and sales in this season. A business can start with small changes like scheduling ads, special discounts, to something more significant, like adding a holiday theme in the app-features. Let’s take a look upon some of the significant changes that a business can make to prepare its mobile app for the holidays:

Boosting Discoverability
Holidays are probably your best bet to retain your customers for a long time. You can start by focusing your attention on App Search Optimization and making it unique according to the holiday season. It includes tweaking your app description by adding the details of holiday deals and unique features to be launched. It also includes adding keywords relevant to the particular season. If you have just established your name, you can consider concentrating on keywords that have less competition. While adding long-tail keywords, focus on the app-functionalities to come up with some creative ones for better rankings.

Creating a Sense of Urgency
Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) messages are capable of evoking a sense of urgency among the audience. These messages can include flash-sale announcements that also have no shipping costs with it. Shopping surges are a common occurrence in the holiday season. By charging free of cost shipping, short-term conversions can get encouragement. Brands can start preparation for the holiday season well before the holidays to set the right mood for customers. They can begin by allocating budget to different features that include brainstorming sessions to generate creative ideas for efficient mobile app development.

Brands should also make sure to make last-minute preparations for the customers who usually shop in the end. These can include extending deadlines with push notifications like, “Hurry up! Only one day left!” Holidays are busy schedules for everyone, so people are most likely to make last-minute purchases. Building a content calendar can facilitate seamless scheduling of various social media posts. It eventually helps in promoting communication between a brand and its customers.

Keeping User Interaction Intact
App user engagement is exceptionally significant in the holiday season. Brands should not only focus on new customers; existing customers are equally crucial. Since the competition increases in the holiday season, brands must also give equal attention to the existing customers. Brands can deploy many techniques to keep their user base excited and keep them from abandoning their app.

For enhancing app user experience, brands can integrate in-app chat for gaining valuable feedback from their customers. They can also consider re-targeting their advertisements for their existing audience. These ads would be served based on analyzing key elements like user-sessions and interactions. Brands can also employ gamification strategies for increasing communication.

Local App Marketing
Localizing your app can be highly beneficial for retaining the audience base. It helps in narrowing down the message a brand wants to convey. While introducing promotional ads across various digital channels, singling out demographics and user behavior patterns can be significant. Most of all, the messages and ads should be upbeat and spread happy vibes. While localizing the app, it’s incredibly essential to facilitate a seamless user experience for both the existing and new customers.

Apart from sending out emails and ads, brands can introduce some contests and discounts to keep customers excited. Brands can also implement a paid user acquisition strategy to go along with their organic ones. It assists a brand in getting engagement from the audience that doesn’t even know about their app. It can also help in increasing a brand’s organic ranking.

Adding Holiday Features
Features that define the convenience of functionalities are the main reasons why customers keep using the app or leave it. Hence, it becomes significant to incorporate the elements that convey the holiday spirit. Customers would be more compelled to click on them and make a purchase. Features are highly dependent on how well a brand knows its customer base. Hence, the holiday season requires some in-depth customer insights, research, and analysis before setting deals in front of them.

Push notifications are another vital feature capable of boosting holiday-sales. Push notifications serve as friendly reminders to the customers, informing them that an important date is approaching. Its a perfect way of telling them how can they make the most out of an essential occasion by purchasing their products or services.

Testing the App for Traffic Surge
There are three crucial areas where brands should leave no stone unturned: Functionality, Compatibility, and Convenience. Seamless flow across two devices and a convenient checkout process are two main issues that need attention when traffic spikes up. Hence, testing the app is always recommended to measure performance, new features, and loading speed. The brands should be capable of handling the transactions almost ten times than usual in such scenarios. The holiday season is a period of immense traffic, so the app needs to perform well under stressful situations.

Winding Up
The holiday season can take a brand’s creativity to the next level, or a level down – whatever works well for your brand. Creative involves everything from icons, preview videos, and screenshots. Thinking outside the box has now become quite an old phenomenon; hence, thinking inside the box might provide a fresh perspective for the creatives. Since a brand already knows what they might want to tweak while Adding Holiday Features, constraints might land them even better ideas.

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