5 Top Tips To Boost In-App Revenue During the Holiday Season
October 20, 2020

Leaves are falling, days are growing shorter, and everyone is overeating. This can only mean one thing - the holiday season is here! And with it comes a host of opportunities to engage users and boost mobile sales. We’ve compiled this guide to help you stand out and increase your incremental revenue during this hectic, lucrative time.
However, the mobile industry needs to make some key preparations in order to earn its fair share of these online sales. Mobile apps have an 81% cart abandonment rate, amounting to $4 trillion dollars worth of merchandising left in shopping carts.
We’ve collated a number of tips to help you ensure a strong holiday season:
1. The early bird catches the worm
Start running campaigns early to ensure that your optimization is at full potential before the holiday season kicks in. In the case of app retargeting, a successful campaign can require several iterations before it is fully optimized, so the earlier you can start the better. When it comes to Q4 marketing, consider planning and testing to find your best converting ad by Black Friday. Then, reiterate or apply learnings towards the end of year festivities.
2. High quality creatives
Visual saturation can reach a peak at this time of year, with the same overused holiday motifs blending together so that campaigns become indistinguishable. Here are three tips on how to make your campaign stand out:
- Shout about it: The best way to push conversions is with a clear, well-timed offer or discount. So if you’re offering something special for Black Friday be sure to show it loud and clear on the creative.
- Pay attention to your microcopy: You know your audience better than anyone. Take time to think about the precise tone and wording you feel will engage them. Ask yourself how you can create an emotional connection with your users.
- Go Dynamic: Going dynamic is the key to ultimate relevance during the holiday season. Take advantage of our dynamic ads setup and templates and your ads will always display the most up-to-date information on pricing and available products. These real-time updates mean ensure that the right content is delivered to the right user every time.
3. Smooth out the kinks: Get deep links
Deep links are crucial for reducing friction during the holiday season. Deep links enable you to direct users to a specific point within the app, such as the purchase or subscription page. They are a vital component of a good user experience and their relevance is not confined to transactional apps. Verticals such as gaming, travel, and entertainment will find that deep links improve engagement and enable users to move fluidly through every stage of the app.
4. Select a partner with a product recommendation engine
The key to driving holiday revenue is knowing what users want and showing them ads with those precise products. This is achieved with a product recommendation engine that predicts what a user is likely to buy next based on what they’ve bought previously.
If users are looking for a product in the lead up to Black Friday, you can start sending them ads for products that are similar or related. In a Product Recommendation Engine, existing user data is analysed to identify related purchases, eg. users who buy a pen are then likely to buy a notebook. This is then used to show users related purchases.
5. Don't stop until you get enough
In their report on how seasonality affects apps, Adjust noted that there wasn’t much variation in volume of sessions for e-commerce apps month-to-month. This indicates that, while the boost during the holiday season should be harnessed, it is also vital to maintain consistency in marketing and retargeting efforts once the holiday season has passed. Ensure you have new creatives ready for after the holiday season and make the most of low CPMs in January.
As we’ve said, when it comes to retargeting for the holidays, there’s no time to waste. Are you ready to get your retargeting campaigns started for the holiday season?