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How Push Notifications Help Marketers Catch the Moment During Holiday Season

How do you get your brand noticed during the busy holiday season? Beat the holiday retail rush with push notifications to capture your audience's attention instantly to grow sales.

How Push Notifications Help Marketers Catch the Moment During Holiday Season
Written by Florian Steps
Mapp

As the holidays approach, people are constantly on the go. Whether spending time with family, getting an early start on shopping or preparing delicious meals to be enjoyed by family and friends.

Amidst all this hustle and bustle marketers are fighting for every bit of their customers’ attention. There are many channels to help you reach your customers, including email, web, social and mobile. However, to ensure your messages get through, your first choice needs to be mobile.

Why use push notifications during the holidays?

When a user downloads your app to their smartphone, it creates a special relationship with your brand. The app goes wherever the user goes. Today’s customers can research a product from anywhere via their mobile devices. They read your product reviews, and use social media to request feedback while physically in a store, while comparing store prices.

Unfortunately, mobile customers are easily distracted. Receiving a phone call or a Whatsapp message can take your customer out of the purchase process, resulting in lost revenue. When they are on the go it is even harder to keep them engaged, as they could also be distracted by offline experiences.

How push notifications engage customers

STAT
4x

higher open rate is achieved with personalized push notifications

Push notifications are best used to connect the customer to offline and online experiences by providing information relevant to the customer’s current location and activity. Think of push notifications as the essential bridge between the customer and your brand.

Push notifications come in various forms, including web push notifications (sent through browsers), app push notifications (delivered via mobile apps), and mobile push notifications (directly sent to a mobile device’s lock screen or notification center).

What push notifications are available to use

Each type serves a different purpose:

  • Transactional Notifications: Triggered by user actions, such as purchase confirmations, shipping updates, or password changes.
  • Promotional Notifications: Used to inform users about special offers, discounts, or new product launches.
  • Reminder Notifications: Sent to re-engage users, reminding them of abandoned carts, upcoming events, or subscription renewals.
  • Geolocation-based Notifications: Sent when a user enters a specific geographic area, offering location-based deals or information.

Why you need to be selective with mobile push

Mobile push notification on a phone
Example of a push notification

Although a direct line of contact with the customer, push notifications must be used strategically to avoid overwhelming customers. This is because sending too many can quickly erode trust and lead to disengagement. It’s important to strike a balance—delivering messages that add value without becoming intrusive, especially with mobile push.

On top of this, push notifications should be integrated within a cross-channel marketing strategy, ensuring these complement other communications rather than overlapping. For instance, imagine coming across mobile push and website push notifications for the same promotion – it would feel pretty overwhelming and repetitive. By aligning messaging across channels, you create a seamless customer experience that feels cohesive rather than repetitive.

To get it right, start with a Customer Data Platform (CDP) paired with automation and analytics. These tools unify data to build and enrich customer profiles with first-party data. This gives you a near real-time view of your customers’ demographics, behaviors, and transaction history. Using this data, you can map the customer journey (🗺️ with our handy customer journey map template), create personalized push notifications, and automate their delivery—ensuring each message serves a clear purpose in guiding customers along their journey.

How to use push notifications in your holiday marketing

Pre-holiday

Tips for your pre-holiday mobile campaigns:

  1. Plan your campaign with intent: Ensure targets are set and goals are laid out. A clear strategy will bring better results.
  2. Reflect on last year: What are the lessons learnt from last year’s season? What went well and could be replicated and what should be improved? Use your performance data here to help support your decisions.
  3. Prepare content and visuals for your campaigns: Don’t wait to the last minute to create your messages. Prepare the copy and test it. Ask your designers to come up with stunning visuals to compliment your content and plan when to use each one. This is the time for marketers to get creative. Plan push notifications which incorporate jingles, lyrics and catchy holiday phrases.
  4. Integrate cross-channel marketing: Integrate an automation platform to ensure a multi-channel shopping experience. Integrate your holiday marketing campaign on other platforms as well. Promoting your app through email, social media and your website will increase your app’s exposure. In outgoing campaigns prior to the holidays, include a call-to-action to download your app and explain customers why they should download your app.
  5. Update your app to increase engagement: This is a great chance to update the app user interface to include a holiday theme or add functions to make shopping easier. It is important to give your users visual, auditory and textual cues to show that this time of year is unique. For instance, a store could create an updated version of its app exclusively for Christmas. It could provide sections for top gift ideas, sales, recipes and ingredients. It could then send notifications to customers with individualized information based on behavior, keeping it relevant for each customer. Music as well as Christmas imagery could be added. Just like that, your app could become a unique and fun holiday shopping experience.
  6. Make sure your payment and transaction systems are easy to use: Choose a mobile-friendly payment system to stay competitive and not lose customers as a result. Use an analytics platform to get an understanding of page performance in case there are errors on critical pages, e.g. checkout page. This enables you to act quickly.
  7. Anticipate problems: Anticipated problems should be dealt within the planning stages. To launch an app update for the holidays, make sure to plan ahead and submit it with enough time for it to be approved. Plan early to ensure your servers have enough capacity to handle traffic spikes.

Week of the holiday

This is your time to shine! Make the experience even more dynamic:

  1. Provide locally relevant messages: Send information and offers specific to customers’ localities, reflecting on data such as weather and traffic conditions. Include offers related to local holidays and events and content that will complement an activity customers might be engaging in. Help the customers to get to your store - consider sending a push notification and sharing your location via Google Maps or Maps for iPhones and iPads.
  2. Offer mobile and in-store engagement: Use multi-channel strategies to target your customers on their mobiles and in your store. Capture in-store data using QR codes and tablets at point of sale interactions. Send offers relevant to their current interest as well as for additional products to complement the purchase. Allow them to create lists which they can access from within your store and then steer them towards their chosen product. Maybe you want to offer in-store pickup?
  3. Initiate mobile-only deals: Give your customers an incentive to make a purchase on their mobile. The holidays are a great time to offer loyalty rewards to those responding via mobile.
  4. Send a product sneak peek: Excite your customers with sneak peeks of various products. Take advantage of opportunities for engaging messages wherever possible.
  5. Send highly interactive messages: Here is your chance to bring out those perfectly designed holiday themed messages complete with all the sleighs, bells and whistles. Be sure to encourage customers to take immediate action. A push notification with a limited time incentive that includes a clear call-to-action will increase your conversion rate. Keep the text of your push straightforward.
  6. Send highly interactive messages: Here is your chance to bring out those perfectly designed holiday themed messages complete with all the sleighs, bells and whistles. Be sure to encourage customers to take immediate action. A push notification with a limited time incentive that includes a clear call-to-action will increase your conversion rate. Keep the text of your push straightforward.
  7. Make your customers feel loved and appreciated: Holidays are a great opportunity to thank your customers. Send them a notification telling them how your brand appreciates their loyalty and wish them Happy Holidays. Make them feel your appreciation in order to increase their trust.
  8. Send an abandoned cart campaign: People can be easily distracted during a purchase, especially during the holidays. Make sure to send them a reminder to complete the purchase or they might complete it elsewhere.

Post-holiday

While you may rightly be focused on the holiday season itself, the most successful mobile marketers are also thinking about January too.

  1. Plan to retain your customers: As people return to their normal schedules, app usage will fall. Consider kicking off special promotions or sending well-planned push notifications throughout January to promote your app and re-engage customers. Don't wait until January to create this plan, it should be created in the pre-holiday planning phase and now is the time to execute it.
  2. Incorporate your brand value into the ‘New Year’ theme: How can your brand help the customer achieve their New Year’s resolutions?
  3. Make room for new products: Post-holiday is a good time to push the stock left from the holidays. After the holiday season officially ends, you can send customers a last chance opportunity to purchase leftover items in their carts or on their wish lists that they just never got around to purchasing during the holidays.
  4. Nurture your customers: Taking on a campaign means nurturing your customers through the whole process and completing it correctly. Plan your push notifications accordingly and keep in mind what your customers are focused on, now that the holiday is coming to a close. What do they want and need from you? Surveys can help you capture this data.

Push notifications opens the door for interaction

Today, mobile is key and push notifications are the force to actually open the door. Used correctly, push notifications will differentiate your brand. Make sure your marketing strategy is solid, tested and prepared for the holiday turmoil.

People lead busy lives and sometimes they need a push in the right direction. As a marketer you can assist them by sending out individualized and relevant messages at the optimal time. Highly effective targeted campaigns via various digital channels will help you keep ahead of the competition.

By adopting these techniques you can make this holiday season even more successful than last year, all while keeping your customers happy and engaged.

Make your holiday campaign successful with our guide

If you’re looking to implement push notifications into your marketing, we can show you how to do this in a data driven way. Simply contact our team and we’ll help answer your questions.

And if you’re looking for more help around your holiday marketing, have a read of our guide: Sleigh Your Holiday Marketing: 7 Tips for End of Year Success.

LEARN HOW TO SLEIGH YOUR HOLIDAY MARKETING

READ THE GUIDE ›

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