With the nights growing darker and colder, there’s one thing we can always rely on to improve our mood… Shopping!
It’s no surprise that the holidays have long been a huge source of revenue for businesses, with up to 45% of annual revenue being generated between Cyber week and Christmas. Due to increased screen time and less high street shopping, businesses now battle to stand out from the crowd with their festive deals and it is becoming increasingly difficult to attract new customers.
Lucky for us Marketing cloud has all the tools needed to satisfy customers’ 3 P’s: Painless, Personalisation and Preferences!!
Painless
With so many options to purchase from, customers are increasingly turning to companies that offer quick, painless shopping experiences. People want a smooth buying journey, from adding products to their basket, completing the transaction, through to purchase confirmations, any friction point can lose a company a conversion. Real-time engagement with customers is, therefore, key for creating contextually relevant experiences. Something Interaction studio specialises in!
Using Einstein to harness the power of AI, you can recommend products and/or content to specific customers based on their online shopping characteristics, providing real-time suggestions on where to go next in their buying journey. Combining both offline and online behaviours with algorithms in Marketing Cloud to match customers to profiles allows relevant content to be presented during the buying process.
Customers are also more likely to be repeat customers where the initial buying journey was found to be smooth and painless, so it is more important than ever to ensure you are listening to what makes your customers’ experience easy. Progressive profiling used to prefill forms and A/B testing on website pages are simple low-effort tactics you can implement within your customers’ buying journey to help make their browsing more enjoyable.
Personalisation
Customers’ window shopping on your website can provide invaluable information to help drive conversions. Leverage: click behaviours, page views, and attributes gathered during form completions to segment your customer base into specific audiences and drive content or product recommendations.
Queries, filters and code can all be used to further filter customers into Data Extensions based on attributes. This granular data can provide suggestions for customers’ next move on the website and ensure every possible customer journey is accounted for.
Social media is also a large part of customer’s shopping experiences, with suggested ads and banners being displayed on every web page they visit. It is therefore imperative that you are displaying the correct adverts to the correct audience at the correct time! Advertising studio allows you to do just that.
Using similar audiences to reach out to new customers on Facebook and Google while not advertising to existing customers, Advertising studio allows you to optimise your marketing budget and save that extra cash for the holiday party. What could be better?!
Preferences
Knowing which channel to market to your customers is essential, with SMS, Email, and Push Notifications all a possibility. Use a custom-built preference centre to capture your customer’s preferred method of communication and ensure your messages are delivered via the right channel with no annoying cross-channel messaging.
With screen time increasing due to shorter commutes and greater flexibility in WFH environments, push notifications straight to customers’ handsets have seen a surge in popularity. The majority of customers, however, tend to be logged into multiple applications at the same time and find a constant barrage of texts, emails, and push notifications overwhelming.
Using Journey Builder, you can create tailored journeys to send messages via apps in a controlled manner, creating push notifications when your customer is on your app and SMS and email at intervals during a time frame you specify. Ensuring you do not spam your customers with messages on every platform is a great way to avoid customers unsubscribing.
Understanding your customers needs and meeting expectations is the most pivotal part of creating an awesome marketing strategy. Customers remember the good experiences they have and encourage friends and family to follow in their footsteps and purchase from the same business. Using the tips above, Marketing Cloud can be used to keep your customers happy over the holidays which in turn I’m sure will keep you happy too!
