Insight: A guide to Black Friday Nigel Arthur – managing director EMEA, Urban Airship
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Amidst the chaos of Black Friday, there’s a fine balance between engaging consumers and overloading them with information to the point where they become annoyed. With so many retailers broadcasting their offers over multiple devices and channels such as email, social, print, SMS, television etc., brands need a way to cut through the noise and engage consumers on their terms. Research shows:
- Retailers sent 56% more holiday notifications in 2016 than in 2015
- When highly targeted, these notifications recorded a 129% increase in engagement
- Black Friday was the top day for app downloads, which peaked at more than 1.2 million app installs
This year, many brands are following the lead of Amazon and have been running daily deal campaigns in the days and weeks leading up to Black Friday — a great way to keep customers engaged throughout the holiday season as opposed to years past when retailers released a bulk discount on Black Friday. We have also seen travel companies jumping in on the retail action with many airlines promoting sales on flights and holiday packages such as RyanAir, Wow Air, EasyJet and Norwegian.
Mobile and mobile notifications have proven to be an effective way to reach customers during the holiday season. Last year, retailers sent 56% more holiday notifications than the year before and consumer engagement rates increased to 19%, up from 18% in 2015 and 16% in 2014.
Tech-savvy retailers are segmenting mobile notifications using location customer preferences, demographics and other user-level data to create a more personalised experience that presents users with the most relevant offers. Last year, 84% of notifications were highly targeted, and the highly targeted notifications saw a 129% increase in engagement over broadcast messages that were sent without any segmentation.
We looked at one retailer’s ROI from Cyber Week last season found that for every £1 spent on mobile engagement, £103 was made in revenue.
The full report can be found here
