PALM DESERT, CA – Zappos executives at eTail West 2015 discussed the brand’s future plans for augmenting its mobile strategy, including mobilizing a retargeting platform that saw success on desktop, placing a bigger focus on programmatic and ramping up efforts for mcommerce campaigns to convert browsers into shoppers.

During the “Mobile Summit: Keynote: Making the Cross-Device Shopping Experience Work: A Zappos Holiday Case Study” session, Zappos.com revealed its hopes to offer consumers continuity across all digital channels to ensure a streamlined shopping process, whether a user happens to begin browsing on mobile and ends up purchasing on tablet, or vice versa. By analyzing metrics and running mobile campaigns, the brand believes it will strengthen its strategy for the mobile site and application in 2015.

“In terms of cross device and mobile: don’t rely on pull, rely on push,” said Lisa Archambault, head of demand generation marketing at Zappos, Las Vegas, NV. “Omniplatform is a big piece of how we get the consumer across these different areas.”

Recognizing demographics
Zappos aims to connect with each consumer individually, based on their shopping habits and demographics. As many consumers now spend significant amounts of time browsing and shopping via smartphones and tablets, those avenues are ones the brand is placing higher focus on this year.

Zappos has found that its clothing customers and shoe customers demonstrate varying purchase habits, prompting the company to dive deeper into data to differentiate the two types of consumers and develop campaigns that will resonate with both.

This also means bringing the brand’s successful retargeting program from desktop to mobile.

“We have a really healthy retargeting program that we have on desktop,” Ms. Archambault said. “We need to get that on mobile.”

The brand also tapped conversion as a key focus for 2015.

“We all know people who browse your site tend to be more loyal, so we need to have a relationship with those browsers,” Ms. Archambault said.

Holiday campaign
Zappos shared creative and results from its recent holiday campaign on mobile, which yielded valuable data. The brand and its partnering vendor developed mobile-optimized ads showcasing specific product items along with a daily weather forecast that corresponded to the relevance of the product.

“This was a mobile test in the sense that we wanted to see what we could glean and use for the future,” said Mikelle Laker, mobile media buyer at Zappos, Las Vegas, NV.

The campaign was able to help the brand place consumers in demographics and determine the best placement breakout.

Most importantly, it showed that the 35 to 44 age group ranked highest for conversions, while millennials indexed highest for clicks, fuelling Zappos to ramp up conversion efforts for the younger demographic this year.

Zappos’ future plans include thinking about social integration and branding on mobile.

“The campaign was really beneficial to our mobile strategy in general,” Ms. Laker said. “We want to speak to our consumer in a consistent way.”

Final Take
Alex Samuely is an editorial assistant on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York