In a few months, the retail world will be abuzz with the annual sales-stimulating holiday shopping season. If you are involved in the retail shopping industry, you will likely be working a lot harder, preparing your business for the madness to come. If your company has an online presence, you will likely be crafting email blasts and a string of jaw-dropping promotions, and trying to enhance your eCommerce presence to ensure conversions are at an all-time high. The stress of these activities can be immense, and the IT resources needed to support such broad marketing campaigns can be expensive and troublesome.
In 2014 John Lewis recognized the need to launch promotions frequently and in a timely manner. With consumers being primarily mobile, especially during heavy shopping seasons, they wanted to put their products where their customers were looking: on mobile. But the question was, how to do it simply and easily? Using U-Campaign, John Lewis was able to launch landing pages quickly and cost effectively. Initially, John Lewis’s focus was on promoting their 150th anniversary. Once this campaign was built, they were able to keep it running all year long. What’s more is these microsites and landing pages were reusable, and John Lewis was able to leverage them for the upcoming shopping season. For Black Friday, they rapidly launched landing pages promoting flash sales items, making themselves relevant in the consumers mind and putting them ahead of their competition. To ramp up for post-black Friday shopping, the retailer rolled out their famous “Monty The Penguin” campaign. It initially started as a commercial, but the tear-jerker video soon made its way into stores and then onto mobile. U-Campaign gave John Lewis’s marketing team the tools to build out this promotion on mobile exactly how they envisioned, seamlessly connecting the offline and online experience.
Last year, mobile traffic in general jumped a lot faster than anybody really expected, accounting for 44.6% of all online traffic. With Black Friday right around the corner, brands must execute an effective mobile strategy in order to stay ahead of the game. If 2015 pans out to be anything like 2014, Marketers will need to follow in suite of John Lewis and focus on adjusting their digital strategy to stand out amongst the retail noise.