Markus Malti, managing director of WeQ, offers advice on how to expand your mCommerce customer base in time for the holidays.

The 2018 holiday shopping season is already upon us and mCommerce platforms are already feeling the pressure to capture the full revenue opportunity that this final quarter of the year presents. It’s a critical time to drive current and new customers back into the shopping funnel, all with a seamless mobile purchasing experience, whether mobile web-based or through an app.

Over the next several months, mobile marketers should focus on targeting the most relevant audiences with effective advertising campaigns, as well as optimizing traffic towards high product page views and in-app purchases. Additionally, a key focus will be on optimizing the ROI of ad campaign spend by converting the largest percentage possible of new users making first-time purchases. To that end, we are happy to share some of our proven mCommerce user acquisition best practices below.

Identify Your Core Metrics
Marketers should begin by setting specific KPIs for the lead up to the holiday period and the holiday period itself. Key measured events start with the total number of new installs and also include post-install events, such as ad placement performance, product page views, add to cart attempts, and purchases.

Furthermore, marketers should customize KPIs for specific business targets. For instance, if the goal of your campaign is to drive subscriptions or bookings with new customers, marketers should set install rates and first-booking rates as the KPIs and optimize their campaign towards these metrics.

Be Proactive
First, set up post-install tracking so that you can identify the site names and sources using IDs in real-time. Your campaign budget and KPIs should be set in advance, with weekly subsite level optimization, and campaigns separated by geographic location.

If you’re working with a mobile advertising partner or agency, transparency is key: we recommend supplying the partner with your event data, such as installs, post-install events (date and time; ad placement performance; product page views; add to cart and purchase). They will leverage this data to improve audience quality over time, and keep traffic both consistent and stable throughout the course of the campaign.

It’s best practice to review your campaign performance weekly, and adjust defined KPIs and budget accordingly. Granular monitoring and optimization of event data can lead to optimal real-time budget distribution – resulting in relevant budget spend, with maximum ROI.

Optimize to Drive Results
Recently, we partnered with a global mobile shopping platform to develop a campaign like this and help drive their customer base. The mCommerce app offers the latest fashion pieces for men, women, children, home and lifestyle, at discounted retail prices. They have been known for offering excellent customer services since they started out. Today, they count more than 3.5m customers globally and are continuing to expand their user base. Our client’s goal was to target relevant audiences and optimize traffic towards high product page views and in-app purchases. They also wanted to optimize ROI.

Through optimizing traffic sources, analyzing real time site IDs and user behaviour, we were able to work together to increase the shopping platform’s mobile customer base by more than 22,000 new users, narrow down the target audience, and run an effective user acquisition campaign. Additionally, a positive ROI was achieved, with 30 per cent of users making purchases in the first week, and a large portion of these being first-time purchases. Traffic quality was ensured using our in-house anti-fraud solution, which allows our account managers to proactively identify and prevent the risk of fraud, which can affect the campaign performance.

Communicate Clearly and Often
It’s imperative to have constant information exchange and data transparency between mCommerce brands and their ad tech partners who are helping them drive targeted campaigns, and to continuously optimize ROI. Expert account managers and dedicated round-the-clock customer service will also lead to building trust and transparency, resulting in a rewarding partnership that helps grow your holiday campaigns, step-by-step.