Mobile commerce trends and app insights to inform your next marketing campaign
Mobile phones have come to play an important role in today’s commercial landscape, in part due to the fact that consumers have been confined to their homes for much of the past few years. In reality, 90% of adults in the United States shop with their smartphones.
Additionally, shifts in consumer behavior during the pandemic will push m-commerce sales to 6% of all U.S. retail sales this year, from 4% just three years ago. This percentage is expected to reach nearly 9% (or $700 billion) by 2026. Smartphones – not tablets – are driving this growth, accounting for 85% of m-commerce sales today and 92% m-commerce. sales by 2026.
This increase in m-commerce goes hand in hand with a continued growth in the use of consumer applications. Today the fastest growing app categories are retail businesses or adjacent retail businesses – stores, food delivery, grocery services, etc. Meanwhile, retail companies continue to expand their shopping options through partners like Instacart, DoorDash and Uber. These trends provide great opportunities for brands to better understand and take advantage of changing shopping behaviors and the dominance of mobile shopping. But how can brands actually leverage them?
Mobile app insights have never been more important when it comes to informing retail strategies and audience addressability – and ultimately driving successful advertising campaigns. .
By examining first-party data on app ownership and frequency of use, retail marketers can study changing consumer behaviors, modify their strategies, and optimize their ad spend accordingly. Here are some examples of how marketers can leverage app insights.
Unleash valuable audiences
Based on app ownership and engagement data, marketers can separate luxury shoppers from bargain hunters. They can customize audience segments, focusing only on moderate or heavy users of certain apps. Or they can look at cross-segment usage, comparing one app’s usage with a competitor’s.
Take the food delivery space, where the major players are focused on expanding their business options. The ability to identify an audience of people who have installed multiple food delivery apps can be invaluable.
Looking at a food delivery audience using the T-Mobile Advertising Solutions platform, we find that 47% of those users own Uber Eats, 40% own DoorDash, 34% own Yelp, and 25% own Grubhub. This audience is also five times more likely to own Instacart and six times more likely to own Grubhub. This information, combined with the tools to speak directly to this audience, makes for a potentially powerful campaign.
Inform advertising campaigns
Retailers are faced with rising costs and shrinking budgets, which means they need to be more efficient with their advertising budget. Campaigns shouldn’t be limited to driving an app install. After all, that’s not where the real value lies. Instead, marketers should complement install-focused media with post-install re-engagement efforts to help drive retention and deeper user value.
For example, we recently looked at some major promotions on three major QSR apps using our platform. While all three apps recorded positive install metrics during their promotion windows, the decline in post-promotion installs was steep and severe for those that did not supplement those promotions with re-engagement campaigns. For those who continued to run campaigns beyond the initial promotional window, the decline was less pronounced and sustained engagement was much higher.
Discover new channels
Finally, app insights can help marketers find new advertising channels aligned with their target users. For example, the industry has seen a resurgence in DOOH advertising, with particularly explosive growth in ride-sharing advertising, which operates through in-vehicle entertainment screens in Uber and Lyft vehicles.
Such advertising presents a great opportunity for brands to reach captive, high-income, tech-savvy audiences at scale. Now suppose a brand’s app users over-index ownership of Uber and Lyft apps. Armed with this information, this brand has a chance to stay ahead of the competition by advertising in rideshare vehicles using interactive videos and buyable ads.
As consumers continue to spend more time on mobile, an app-focused advertising and insights strategy is becoming increasingly crucial for marketers. And with the holiday shopping season fast approaching, retail marketers specifically need as much information as possible about changing consumer behavior to optimize their media planning, shopping and targeting. .
By reaching consumers where they shop most often – in mobile apps – today’s marketers can take full advantage of the huge momentum behind mobile shopping.
