Holiday Special: How to Prepare Your App Strategy for Christmas

With the holidays around the corner, and the end of 2022 approaching, app marketers must prepare for one of the most intense promotional app strategy periods of the year.

Table of Contents

1. Give Yourself Enough Time to Get Ready for the Holiday Season
2. Work on Your App’s Organic Presence With App Store Optimization
3. Plan Holiday-Themed Offers and Align Your App Strategy Campaigns
4. Use Marketing Automation to Your Advantage
5. Don’t Forget In-App Personalization
6. App Strategy Conclusion: Make the Most of the Holiday Season

By aligning app marketing strategy and activities with the holidays, apps can increase downloads, visibility, engagement, and conversions. However, the holiday season, especially the end of the year, means an increase in advertising spending by major brands driving up the eCPMs of most advertising channels.

To ensure that we are able to maximize our results in the app growth race during the holidays, mobile marketers need to focus on a few things that can collectively have a positive impact on growth. For this reason, we have collected in this article the top mobile app marketing tips during the holidays to grow our mobile apps in the best possible way.

Related: 7 Mobile Marketing Trends to Look Out for in 2023

1. Give Yourself Enough Time to Get Ready for the Holiday Season

Throughout the year, there are several vital occasions that mobile app marketers can take advantage of to boost their app growth activities. Depending on the region you are targeting and the user base, one holiday might be more important than another.

Having said that, Christmas is nowadays a very consumer-centric holiday. Even in those countries where it is usually not among the festivities, it still plays a role in people’s lives.

For this reason, having a holiday calendar ready for the whole year can simplify planning and the organizational aspect behind making an app successful.

As we will see through the article, succeeding at a mobile app strategy for marketing during the holidays is not simply about spending more money on ads. Still, it’s a collective effort among different departments.

2. Work on Your App’s Organic Presence With App Store Optimization

Despite many marketers seeing ASO as a long-term activity that cannot have an immediate impact on growth, App Store Optimization can actually be used to our advantage to maximize organic visibility and conversion from both organic and paid traffic.

There are so many different actions that can be taken from an ASO perspective that we might need to write a separate article about it. Still, for now, we will focus on four main activities a marketer should take to maximize mobile app strategy activities from an organic perspective.

Let’s get started with the four main activities for the app strategy!

Align Visuals With the Holiday Season

Regardless of the category our mobile app is in, aligning the Store Page visuals (icon, screenshots, preview video) with the festivities can tremendously impact the conversion rate. For some app developers, this might come more naturally than for others.

Still, where possible, marketers should identify one or more elements that could be used to give our Store Pages a holiday feeling.

Add Seasonal Keywords

Even though images speak louder than words, keywords also have an impact on visibility and conversion. Like the previous point, some mobile apps might have an easier life than others just because specific terms are more naturally associated with the brands than others.

With some of our partners in the eCommerce space, for example, we noticed that by adding the keyword “gift” in different localization and with a few key products that sold well during holidays, we were able to outrank many competitors and gain a noticeable increase in organic traffic.

When thinking about Christmas time, it’s not just about shopping. Fitness and health apps should also start their organic strategy early enough to grab a piece of the pie for the post-holiday season.

Use Custom Product Pages

CPPs are, without a doubt, one of the biggest opportunities for mobile app marketing professionals during holidays. We can create up to 35 variations of our Store Page and connect them to specific promotional and holiday-themed campaigns.

Although it might not seem necessary, aligning the user experience with the same visual and textual message, from ad click to app download, can have a dramatic impact on conversion rate. At REPLUG, we are big fans of CPPs and have tested them in multiple categories and countries, seeing uplifts in the conversion rate of 10% to 22.5%, depending on the year period.

Get Creative With In-App Events

Apple’s in-app events offer another unique opportunity to mobile marketers to maximize their organic reach. In-app holiday-themed events can give us extra visibility in the Stores. On top of that, if we are able to align also the in-app content to these in-app events, we can also re-engage some of our existing users.

3. Plan Holiday-Themed Offers and Align Your App Strategy Campaigns

After working on the organic part of our mobile app marketing strategy, we want to focus on paid activities. As mentioned at the beginning, the holiday season, especially Christmas and the end of the year, is paid ads peak season. Thousands of brands will push ads on several different media platforms, increasing the eCPMs of our campaigns.

Depending on our budget, we might find ourselves in a difficult situation. However, creativity is the key to breaking through the noise of millions of ads. Planning holiday-themed campaigns with customized creative assets and content can lead to better click-through rates.

We are big fans of user-generated content and think this can play a role in differentiating our positioning during holidays. Nowadays, however, UGC ads are being overused by many brands (for the good or the bad), so it won’t be just about another content creator showing our apps.

We need to combine user-generated content with performance-driven creative assets to convert users.

During holidays, we can’t prevent our users from being over-exposed to all sorts of ads. Still, if our ads, regardless of the format, are aligned in messaging and communication style, we might be able to grab their attention.

4. Use Marketing Automation to Your Advantage

Holidays, however, are not just about acquisition but also about retention. Mobile marketers have the possibility to convert again, and again, their existing customers through the proper use of automated messaging via push notifications, in-app messages, and emails.

Let’s not forget that our existing customers are also exposed to ads and, if we miss the chance, they might end up buying elsewhere what they could have bought from us.

Mobile CRM and automation play a critical role throughout the year, but during holidays these activities need to be planned in advance and aligned with other marketing activities.

It’s not just about sending another push notification with a discount code.

Thanks to CRM tools, marketing automation can help us personalize the communication experience post-install. However, personalization comes in different forms. We can divide our audience into sub-segments depending on their level of activities in the app and the use of different promotional strategies.

For example, core users (or champions) might not need a heavy discount during holidays because they might buy anyway. We could give them a gentle reminder with a small discount to purchase once again from us. When looking at users at risks, we could instead adopt a more aggressive approach and “make them an offer they can’t refuse.”

5. Don’t Forget In-App Personalization

In-app personalization can also be a nice touch with the upcoming holiday season. Marketers can take advantage of their mobile CRM tool to schedule some in-app messages that are customized. Still, the real opportunity is also in personalizing the experience within the app.

This level of personalization requires a bit more effort than other points shared earlier, so perhaps it’s not easily accessible to everyone, as it is heavily dependent on the resources dedicated to the mobile app.

However, we believe that this further step can increase further the conversion rate for down-the-funnel metrics. Users love personalization, and we should take advantage of it when possible.

App Strategy Conclusion: Make the Most of the Holiday Season

The holiday season represents a major opportunity for all app developers to connect in a different way with their existing and potential customers. Although many see this time of the year as a challenge due to the increase in competition, there are many non-paid activities (and paid ones) that mobile marketers can take advantage of.

Let’s remember to:

1. Enable all possible touchpoints and align the communication style
2. Start planning ahead of time, as app strategy in marketing is a team effort that should involve multiple departments
3. Make use of in-app events (for iOS) to celebrate the holiday season
4. A/B test holiday-themed creatives and visual metadata in the Store Pages (screenshots, icons, preview videos)
5. Implement marketing automation campaigns that are focused on the holiday spirit, e.g., special promotions
6. If possible, also align the in-app experience to improve the user experience

Are you looking to maximize your mobile app marketing activities during the holiday season? Get in touch with us, and one of our experts will get back to you!