Having an effective marketing campaign is critical to getting traffic to your store and has a direct impact on the revenue you create. In this Tap Tips article, we will break down the tried-and-true best practices by channel and recommend a few fresh strategies for your audience as well. Let’s dive in. 

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Email

Despite being a highly-saturated and competitive channel, email is still highly effective, too—specifically when it comes to BFCM promotions. In our report, 64% of respondents noted they hear about BFCM sales from email—making email the leading channel for awareness. Here are some tips for leveraging email to promote your app on BFCM:

•  Start announcing your app’s BFCM promotion schedule a few days in advance to allow your customers to plan ahead
• Announce the start of any app exclusive promotion through email
• App exclusive promotions should have clear CTAs in the subject of the email 
• Display the App Store/Google Play store buttons within the email footer

Organic Social Media

Despite algorithm woes, organic social is an effective way to promote your sale and create shareable word-of-mouth content. When promoting without paid efforts, you do have to keep a few strategies in mind for the best results:

• Use a combination of stories, reels, and news feed posts across popular platforms like Instagram and TikTok 
• Video and reels are increasingly preferred by algorithms, with still images often lacking in reach
• Tease upcoming app exclusive promotions in advance to give customers time to download the app and opt-in to push notifications 
• Use a dedicated webpage that can host both app store links across stories and captions 
• Include the app download link in your bio

Paid Social Media and Advertisements

It's no mystery that it's become increasingly difficult for Shopify stores to access their audiences.  Since 2020, Facebook ROAS post-iOS 14.5 has gone down -30.85%, and the year-over-year price increase to reach customers on Facebook and Instagram is up an average of +89%. Fun. This number fluctuates throughout the year and becomes even more expensive during BFCM. With an owned marketing channel like push notifications, you cut out the middlemen and directly access your audience. No more allocating tons of your budget to a "maybe shoppers will see it" auction model that relies on mysterious algorithmic distribution. Instead, you control your message, from when it is sent to who sees it. And the best part? You save a ton of money. 

Now with that said—ads should still be considered an integral part of your marketing strategies. By no means are we advocating you don’t run paid ads—our message is: diversify. When running paid campaigns for BFCM, here are the best ways to get a bigger bang for your buck.

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Mobile Download Banner

A banner that encourages app downloads is a quick and easy execution that drives traffic to adopt your app, without a ton of heavy lifting. If you were to only choose one piece of advice from this article, we would highly recommend you create a download banner to drive downloads to your app. Especially if you are offering app exclusive discounts or products and, dual pricing strategies. Things to keep in mind:

• 70% of all web traffic happens o mobile devices 
• The mobile web banner is a free app acquisition tool to help capture your mobile audience 
• Incentize customers to download your app using 27 characters
• Include promotional App Exclusive copy to help drive customers that are chasing BFCM deals. For example, “DOWNLOAD BFCM DEALS 50% OFF”

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Capture Kit

Ah Capture Kit. One of our favorite ways to generate downloads and get people to redeem BFCM deals. With Capture Kit, you can add a QR code that directs shoppers directly to download your app. There are a ton of places you can slap this bad boy on, and a few that will be super effective during BFCM:

• Direct desktop users to download the app using a pop-up QR code 
• Design your QR code in the Tapcart dashboard to match your desktop theme 
• Use BFCM promotional copy to incentivize your customers to download the app 
• Create a BFCM themed app icon that will be hosted in the QR code on your website

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Push Notifications

You already know how we feel about push notifications, but instead of us talking about how effective we know them to be, let’s look at the numbers. When shoppers were asked where they typically hear about BFCM sales, respondents indicated email (64%) followed closely by online ads (60%) as the most common. SMS (29%) and mobile push notifications (21%) were both markedly less common ways for shoppers to hear about a sale. However, when we asked shoppers which channels they had made a Black Friday/Cyber Monday purchase from, 44% indicated they’d made a purchase from a marketing email or online ad, 40% indicated they’d purchased directly from a push notification, and 31% from SMS. What’s surprising is the proportional difference in the effectiveness of promotions delivered through these channels (AKA revenue conversion).  But here’s the kicker: push notifications are 177% more likely to elicit a purchase compared to email, 159% more likely to elicit a purchase compared to digital ads, and 78% more likely to elicit a purchase compared to SMS.  Plus, they drive instant spikes in traffic and conversions. The average revenue for a single push notification sent on the Enterprise plan drove $12,870 when sent during the week of BFCM. Here is how to send killer pushes to market your sales:

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• Communicate your BFCM promotions to your app users through push notifications 
• Use a combination of transactional and non-transactional messaging to keep the content rich and entertaining
• Create a sense of urgency to encourage users to take advantage of opportunities before they are gone
• Recommend gift ideas to inspire your customers to complete their holiday shopping 
• Announce the start & final hours of time-sensitive promotions

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Have questions? Book a walkthrough and we'll be happy to help you out!

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