Mobile phones have come to play a large role in today’s commerce landscape, driven in part by consumers being confined to their homes for much of the past few years. In fact, 90% of adults in the US are shopping with their smartphones.
Additionally, shifts in consumer behavior during the pandemic will push m-commerce sales to 6% of all US retail sales this year, up from 4% just three years ago. That percentage is expected to rise to nearly 9% (or $700 billion) by 2026. Smartphones – not tablets – are the driving force behind this growth, accounting for 85% of m-commerce sales today and an expected 92% of m-commerce sales by 2026.
This rise in m-commerce goes hand-in-hand with continued growth in consumer app usage. Today, the fastest-growing app categories are retail or retail adjacent—shopping, food delivery, grocery services, and more. Meanwhile, retail companies are continuing to expand their commerce options through partners like Instacart, DoorDash, and Uber. These trends present big opportunities for brands to better understand and capitalize on shifting buying behaviors and the dominance of mobile shopping. But how can brands actually tap into 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 looking at first-party data on app ownership and frequency of use, retail marketers can study evolving consumer behaviors, shift their strategies and optimize their ad spend accordingly. Here are just a few examples of how marketers can put app insights to work.
Unlocking 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 usage of one app with that of a competitor.
Take the food delivery space, where major players are focused on expanding their commerce options. The ability to identify an audience of people who have multiple food delivery apps installed can be invaluable.
When looking at a food delivery audience using the T-Mobile Advertising Solutions platform, we find that 47% of these 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. These insights, combined with the tools to directly address this audience, make for a potentially powerful campaign.
Informing ad campaigns
Retailers are facing rising costs and shrinking budgets, which means they need to be more efficient with their advertising dollars. Campaigns shouldn’t be just about driving an app install. After all, that’s not where the true value resides. Rather, marketers need to supplement install-focused media with post-install reengagement efforts to help drive retention and deeper value from users.
For example, we recently took a look at a few large promotions across three major QSR apps using our platform. While all three apps saw positive install metrics during their promotion windows, the drop-off in installs post-promotion was steep and severe for those that didn’t supplement those promotions with reengagement campaigns. For those who continued running campaigns beyond the initial promotional window, the drop-off was less steep and the sustained engagement was far higher.
Discovering new channels
Lastly, app insights can help marketers find new advertising channels that are aligned to their target users. For example, the industry has seen a resurgence in DOOH advertising, with particularly explosive growth in rideshare advertising, which operates via in-car entertainment screens in Uber and Lyft vehicles.
Such advertising represents a great opportunity for brands to reach captive, high-income and tech-savvy audiences at scale. Now let’s say a brand’s app users over-index for Uber and Lyft app ownership. Armed with those insights, this brand has a chance to stay ahead of the competition by advertising within rideshare vehicles using interactive video and shoppable ads.
As consumers continue to spend more time on mobile, an app-first insights and advertising strategy is becoming increasingly crucial for marketers. And with the holiday shopping season fast approaching, retail marketers specifically need as many insights as possible on evolving consumer behavior to optimize their media planning, buying and targeting.
By reaching consumers where they’re shopping most often – in mobile apps – today’s marketers can take full advantage of the massive momentum behind mobile shopping.
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