Omnichannel opportunities – make the most of peak periods
If you are in the retail industry, you already know the crucial opportunity presented by seasonal sales periods. Now that Black Friday and the Christmas shopping season are behind us, we’ve taken the opportunity to reflect on what we learned about how retailers can get the most out of high volume shopping periods.
Your marketing messaging on peak shopping days has a key impact on your outcomes for those days. Not only do days such as Black Friday provide an opportunity for your business to unlock massive profits, it also enables you to expand your permissions base, collect data, and deepen brand loyalty among your customers. In this article, we will walk you through the insights we gained into high volume communication days during the 2020 holiday season, and how you can leverage these during this year’s January sales period and beyond.
These marketing automation best practices are more important than ever on critical days
Peak periods offer some major opportunities – but to capitalise on these, there are a few key considerations. As with any marketing automation campaign, it is important to build your communications in line with best-practice recommendations. These include:
- Plan ahead of time
- Be relevant in your communication
- Use different channels to engage your customer
- Make sure that you import your data sets in advance
- Ensure that you execute your campaigns at the optimal and relevant time
These measures are always important to sending out the best possible messaging and achieving the desired outcome. However, they are more crucial than ever on high-level sales holidays – from Black Friday to Cyber Monday and across important Christmas sales days – when good communication will massively boost your bottom line, and mistakes can be extra costly.
How to prepare for a high volume period
There are several special measures to take before critical days:
- Drive reactivation campaigns in the weeks before high volume periods to:
- Ensure that your specialty campaigns reach as many people as possible
- Prime your customer base for the deals and communication to come.
- Maintain high open rates, so that you are not communicating with customers who are no longer interested.
- Ensure that your specialty campaigns reach as many people as possible
This can be done through mechanisms such as VIP campaigns, which incentivise your customers to sign up for your newsletters in time to receive your promotions.
- For the remaining customers, who you cannot successfully reactivate, it is important to remove them from your mailing list, which enables you to:
- Maintain high opening rates
- Avoid creating brand frustration and disillusionment among customers who are not interested in receiving your messaging
- Maintain high opening rates
- Retailers should ensure their typical automation flows are put on hold to:
- Ensure that customers are not spammed with these on top of your promotional communications
- Make sure all your communications on that day are relevant to your campaigns
- Ensure that customers are not spammed with these on top of your promotional communications
- It is a good idea to share your campaign flows and have a dialogue with your marketing automation software providers so they know when you are sending out high volumes
- Always test your content, flows and everything you will be sending out at least two to three weeks before peak days to:
- Minimise risks such as broken links, errors and incorrect content
- Ensure that if anything goes wrong, you have all-hands on deck to problem-solve
- Minimise risks such as broken links, errors and incorrect content
If you follow all the steps and recommendations in the preparation stage, it should be smooth sailing through your high-volume days. With a great marketing automation tool, you have the technology to achieve your marketing goals at scale and ultimately drive sales.
What to expect from a good marketing automation software provider?
Should anything go wrong, be sure to use an omnichannel marketing provider that you can rely on for support. Since Agillic sends out double the communications of a typical day on Black Friday, we prepare over a month in advance to mitigate any risks. We are available to our clients, offering extended support leading up to critical shopping weeks like Black Week.
Plan, prep, test and deliver
When planned and executed optimally, high-volume days provide a significant opportunity for your business. With a successful approach, you can not only sell more, but you can grow your permissions base and create more customer loyalty, enabling you to increase the personalised, and highly impactful lifecycle communications and maximising the customer lifetime value.
To learn more about how to introduce lifecycle communications, watch our past webinar “From Newsletters to Omnichannel Marketing” here.
To learn more about Agillic or to request a demo, please see here.
