Top 5 Tips for a Successful Admessage Retail Campaign

It won’t be long until the latest John Lewis’ latest ad hits our screens heralding the arrival of the Christmas retail countdown. The widespread adoption of “Black Friday” means the retail bonanza starts well before Christmas. In fact 21% of annual retail sales occur in this all-important period(Statista), so it’s crucial for retailers to get their marketing right. In this blog we give you the top 5 tips to help you get the most from your Admessage campaign during this key sales period.

It’s well proven that relevance is key to success. Reaching the right consumers, at the right time, in the right place will ensure maximum engagement with your Admessage. In order to do this, we need to understand their mindset at any given stage of the customer journey.

The main influencers of mindset at our control are time, location and context.

1. Time

Time can have a massive influence on consumer mindset, are they at home, at work, on the commute, or on their way to meet friends. This will affect whether they’re picking up their phone to research, entertain, or shop. Advertisers should reflect this by creating relevant messages to show at particular times.  For example, they’re more likely to take time to research purchases with a longer sales cycle, such as furniture, cars and holidays at home when they’re relaxed.

Conversely, Admessages aimed at promoting impulse purchases such as gifts and food are more impactful if they’re delivered during the day when people are out and about, and in close proximity to shops. Consumers will perceive these to be more relevant increasing their effectiveness.  Admessages at this time should be brief, and feature a strong call to action, reflecting the fact consumers are time scarce in these environments. If you want to learn more about modern consumer journeys Patrick Singer from Google’s academy offers some great insights.

2. Location

Location should also be considered when planning your retail strategy. In fact, time and location are inextricably linked. Time often determines where people are due to their regular travel patterns such as commuting to work, the school run, shopping etc. However, location can be used more generally. People will travel further for higher value purchases, so advertisers should target a larger radius from their stores. The opposite is true for low value and impulse purchases. So, location can help us minimise wastage by not showing our message beyond the distance a consumer will travel to store. But, bear in mind that 18% of all purchases in the UK are online enabling consumers to buy your product wherever they are. If you’re offering delivery location targeting can become less important.

3. Targeting

Context

By making sure your message is relevant to the content of a page can dramatically improve its effectiveness. People will perceive your message to add value to the subject their engaged with. Admessenger Intelligence is a great way of achieving this. It uses a technology called Grapeshot to “crawl” page content. If it finds matching keywords that are relevant to the category you’re targeting it serves an Admessage instantly. For example, someone can be reading a review about a family hatchback car. Grapeshot recognises the keyword “hatchback” and serves your car dealer’s Admessage. This ensures the Admessage is relevant increasing the likelihood of your Admessage being noticed and tapped on.

Demographics

Now that we’ve thought about the making our message as relevant as possible we can turn our attention to making sure it’s seen by the right audience. Admessenger Audience allows you to targeting people that most closely match your target audience. This generally means gender, age and affluence. However, it’s important to consider that focussing on too narrow an audience can limit your ability to deliver an effective campaign. The smaller the audience, the harder it is to find, and the longer you’ll need to run your campaign. It also makes it more expensive. In many cases it’s better to relax targeting to reduce cost and improve delivery. This is particularly true when you are targeting a small geo area.

4. Content

You can do all of the above but if the content of your Admessage isn’t compelling your campaign can fail to reach its goals. So, what makes a good Admessage?

  • Short messages work best, and make sure your offer appears early on to hook the audience.
  • Use custom options such as colour, bold, underline and italics to create standout.
  • Call to action – This can be general phrases such as: Click for more, Learn more, or Click now. However, a strong offer such as discounts, or a limited period can create urgency.
  • Be careful with logos. So often we see Admessages with logos that are way too big. These limit the space the copy has to scroll rendering the messages non-sensical.

Avoid Large Logos!

5. Path to Purchase

Consider your consumer’s path to purchase. A great way of doing this is to put yourself in your potential customers position. The way you react to advertising will be a very good measure of how your Admessage will be seen by your audience. Think of the number of times you need to see an ad before you’ll remember it, or act on it. Also think about your campaign goals. If you want someone to travel to your shop, show them how to get there, and give them a reason such as an event, or an offer that can only be redeemed in store. If you’re trying to encourage them to learn more about your product encourage with an interesting message, or useful tip relevant to your product.

On the other hand, if you want them to buy online think about how well they know you. Do they know enough about your business to buy from you online. If you haven’t done a great deal of marketing up to this point you may be better concentrating on brand awareness to build familiarity and trust. This will help convert customers longer term. If you’re confident a customer will buy from you online make sure that when they click through on your Admessage it takes them through to the specific product or offer. Consumers hate landing on generic home pages when they’ve clicked on a particular offer, and this in turn leads to higher bounce rates.

The other big no no is to avoid lengthy data entry. A clunky check out process on mobile will lead to dropped baskets and low conversions. You should also bear in the mind that the path to purchase may involve multiple touch points and devices. A consumer may notice your Admessage a few times but fail to click. If they do click through and research your offer they will often leave without purchasing. Instead, they go on to visit your website directly, or search for other retailers offering the same product. If your offer is compelling they might return to your site and use their laptop to purchase.

It’s important that your analytics are setup to reflect this complicated, non-linear route to purchase. Failing to do so can mean you end up placing too much emphasis on activity that drives last-click action. This is will be to the detriment of your long term sales as fewer new customers are introduced to your brand.

Follow the tips above and you’re far more likely to deliver successful retail campaigns. Remember getting your Admessage seen in the right context, by the right people, at the right time and in right location is crucial. Also, don’t scrimp on creative. Short messages with a strong call to action will always work better. But don’t stop there, think about where your potential customer goes next. Make the post click experience simple and relevant.  Finally think about the path your consumer takes to purchase and make sure you’re attributing all the parts of the process fairly.

Q4 Admessenger Retail offer

To get your retail campaign off to a great start offer we’re offering 15% off any Admessage campaign over 200,000 impressions booked before the the 15th November 2018. To qualify campaigns must be delivered by the 31st Dec 2018 and the code DISC15 must be entered in the comments section when booking.