By Polly Alluf

Black Friday has long been about much more than just the Friday after Thanksgiving. As soon as the Halloween decorations get put away, we start seeing promotions – in stores, online and pretty much everywhere else – for the upcoming shopping bonanza. But there is one channel that is still underutilized when marketing Black Friday: mobile.

A BI Intelligence report from last year predicted that in 2016 mobile spending will account for 20 percent of all commerce. But what if you could use the company application to drive better sales in the other 80 percent?

Your app can be your secret marketing weapon, full of insights about your users’ preferences and shopping habits. It provides the perfect platform for creating personalized and contextual messaging to drive more of your customers to your store on Black Friday, well before they start shopping in the app on Cyber Monday.

So you have a lot of data about your app users. Now what? Here are three in-app marketing strategies you can implement before Black Friday to help drive foot-traffic to your stores:

Push smart
Push notifications are a tricky business. You want to make sure they are relevant to the user, or else they will be treated like spam.

Luckily, app purchase history can help you segment your audience and only push relevant promotions to them in advance of the holiday.

For example, a cosmetics retailer alerts a user to a specific sale in which she might be interested. Using her name, basing the offer on her past purchases, and giving concrete information about store opening hours makes her much more likely to revisit the app as well as the store.

Ramp up anticipation with video
Short videos are ubiquitous in our social media environment, embedded throughout our Web and mobile experiences. Video bursts are a great way to convey content, build excitement and diversify the app user’s experience.

For example, a footwear retailer pushes a video to users browsing for shoes, to get them excited about what is going to happen in stores on Black Friday.

The video might feature a store employee walking people through the store, talking about particular promotions, or giving a sneak peek to giveaways that will happen in the store.

Get decorated
You usually decorate your house in preparation for the holiday, and certainly stores get all decked out in anticipation of Black Friday.

Giving your app a special Black Friday theme is a great way to extend the brand message across channels, creating a cohesive shopping experience for the user.

For example, a retailer can give the app a special overlay, one that would echo throughout the Web site and in stores. This can be launched into the app in advance to get users planning for their Black Friday shopping trip.

MAKING YOUR APP an integral part of your brand’s overall marketing strategy is not only a necessity, but an inevitability.

Users spend 90 percent of their time on their phone in apps, and connecting their app experience to their brand perception is guaranteed to drive better ROI in the app and beyond.

Each of your app users is walking around in their pocket with a direct line to you. Get them interested.

Polly Alluf is vice president of marketing at Insert, Yakum, Israel. Reach her at [email protected].