How online startup business can meet the mobile shoppers during the coming holiday season?

You must be getting ready to buy your most wanted goods during this fast approaching holiday season through online channels so are the online startup businesses getting ready to set off their mobile sales. With the rapid increase in the online sales through the mobile devices (m-commerce), online start up businesses that do not have any mobile strategy included in their business marketing plans are sure to left behind in dust, especially during the upcoming holiday season of this year.

According to the statistics provided by the recent report from IBM, it is predicted that there will be 37% increase in the m-commerce from 2013 till 2014. With the increasing usage of mobile devices to do online shopping, its share in the e-commerce industry this year will also see a rapid increase during this holiday season. This means that it will be a fabulous opportunity for the online start up businessmen to leverage their mobile marketing efforts as a primary factor to boost up their business during the holiday season 2014.

Most of the mobile marketing efforts of the online startups are focused on launching the mobile compatible websites or to provide the people with their downloadable app but to meet the challenges and to leverage the power of holiday season, you need to build up a business marketing strategy that delivers through the complete channel;

·         Driving the acquisition of the customers: make effective use of emails and ads to target the potential customers and buyers (this will be the upper part of the channel).

·         Re-engaging the mobile customers: to encourage the existing customers and the target buyers to shop through your mobile apps, re-engage them and attract them through the push-notifications and ads (this will be the middle part of the channel).

·         Make experience, the focal point for driving conversions: make efforts for creating a seamless experience for the users by creating deep links which take directly to the products pages and also try to streamline the process of purchase and checkout (the lower part of the channel).

When you start to develop your mobile marketing strategy for your online startup business, you should make sure that you include the tactics that are mobile specific. Otherwise you will not be able to take the full advantage of the business during this holiday season. By including the mobile marketing strategies your online startup business will definitely be on the win-win side.

Here are some of the key marketing tactics which you should use for creating and developing your mobile marketing plan that will drive your business towards a huge success in this holiday season:

1.       Make use of personalized and powerful content: you can make highly efficient use of the e-mails and push notifications to give a feeling of personalization to the people. They will feel that they are being especially attended to by your company. You can leverage the perfect marketing tactics such as sending an immediate welcome message to the customer when he/ she signs up with your website. also, it is important to take into consideration the time at which the users might be interacting most with your company’s mobile app. You can then communicate with them at that time which will give them even more deep feelings of personalization.

By knowing about the browsing and purchasing behavior and habits of your customers, you can use it to develop the ads which will be liked by them. You can also build –up partnership with the mobile-marketing platforms which permits you to delivers such ads and messages of the products to the customers which they really want to view. This in turn will pay you back in the form of higher levels of engagement and higher lifetime values.

One of the good and smart examples of re-targeting and personalization is Joss & Main. It is website that offers daily deals on the designer home furnishings. They re-target their users through their previously browsed history of their mobile app and leverage the mobile ads, offers and suggestions for the similar kind of products, that the customer might desire to buy.

2.       Ensure that your creative web design also works effectively for mobile: effective design is one of the key components of the successful mobile marketing strategy for your online startup business. It is essential that you take into account the various different platforms which your consumer will be using to view your messages. So your should make sure that your creative graphic designers should take into consideration large fonts display (16-22px) as they are viewable on the mobile device, keep it the website simple and layouts intuitive and should design touch-friendly buttons for calls-to-action.

One of the online travelling companies, Orbitz is a great example of using the email practices by taking the mobile devices into account for planning their mobile campaign. In this given example of the image, you can see that the page can be easily read, clear and have large buttons for call-to-action.

3.       Build-up deep links within your app for making purchasing easy for the customers: now as you have already invested your money, efforts and time to build-up awareness and engagement of the consumers on your mobile website, so you should also make sure that you should give your buyers a convenient and hassle free pathway towards their purchase. For this you need to ensure that all your email notifications and ads are directly and deeply back linked to the product page of your mobile app.

Take an example of ShopBOB, who is an international fashion e-retailer. It makes effective use of both the emails and the push notifications for sending the instant alerts to their customers about the products that they have viewed in the past and also to inform them the about the designer merchandises which they like to wear. When the consumers click on the provided links in the notifications or e-mails, they are immediately transported to the product page where they can make the purchase.

4.       Keep a track and accredit your accomplishment: ensure that you are keeping the track of the key metrics of your mobile business website. You can find numerous different mobile-tracking solutions for this purpose. Then you should accredit them to the channels through which the response was received. Some of the core-components or the Key-Performance Metrics (KPI’s) of the mobile-marketing includes click-thru rates, conversion rates and the actual purchases by the buyers.

You should ensure that you are sharing the data of your mobile transactions with your mobile-marketing planners, so you could extract which channel is actually causing the purchases. Once you get that data, make efficient use of it! You will come to know about how effective are your e-mails, push- notifications and ad conversions in driving the purchases. This will enable you to improve your overall performance and tactics. There is always a room for improvement!

If we take an overall view of e-commerce channels, mobile still seems to be comparatively a small channel. But with the rapid increase in the use of mobile devices, it is a need of the time that you should also allocate your considerable resources towards the mobile-marketing campaign of your online start-up business.

During this holiday season, there is a tremendous opportunity for the online startup companies that are investing in their mobile-marketing strategies that consistently and relevantly communicated with their consumers. This will definitely results in increasing the sales and yielding more customers during this holiday season 2014.