The holidays are fast approaching. While consumers are still preoccupied with settling into back-to-school routines, forward-thinking marketers know it’s time to kick their efforts into high gear. As it stands, the United Kingdom is the leading holiday retail spender in Europe.
Cost-conscious shoppers will be flocking to savings events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday to take full advantage of the deals. Therefore, the effective promotion of goods at a discounted price will be crucial for retailers’ success.
Getting your customer data clean
Retail marketers should now be getting their contacts list in order. While it’s not the most exciting of tasks, it is essential. It’s also imperative to clean up contacts lists to improve email deliverability. According to Cheetah Digital’s 2022 Consumer Trends Index, email continues to sit comfortably as U.K. consumers’ preferred channel for receiving offers, content, incentives, and rewards from brands. In fact, when it comes to driving sales, email beats paid social and display advertising by up to 128% in the U.K.
At the same time, retail marketers can also begin leveraging interactive experiences to opt-in consumers. Questionnaires, polls, quizzes, contests and social stories can incorporate reward mechanics that give consumers a genuine reason to engage and submit their first- and zero-party data and opt into your holiday marketing campaigns.
It’s now also a prime time to re-engage dormant customers. Retention will always yield a far higher ROI than acquisition. So try and win back less engaged customers by asking them questions, offering deals and adding a personal touch. Segmenting by length of inactivity will help here too.
Get your discount strategy right
The days of retail marketers ‘casting and blasting’ one single message to their entire database are hopefully a thing of the past. Customers’ lives evolve. That’s why learning about them is a perpetual process. This is where progressive profiling comes in.
Forward-thinking retail marketers progressively profile customers’ interests, preferences, motivations and desires. This allows them to ask the next-best question to expand knowledge on an individual. New data gives marketers new reasons to reach out with a more relevant message or offer.
Now is also a great time to decide on a discount and value-exchange strategy. Unsurprisingly, customers will love — and be expecting — discounts next month. But retail marketers can also add value with early or exclusive access to products, the chance to win a prize, loyalty rewards and unlocking content.
Get your IP Santa-ready
With a couple of months left before Santa’s arrival, it’s important to make sure your IP is ready for big email send volume. ISPs expect a level of consistency in email sending. Therefore, it’s best to start warming up email lists with smaller batches before rapidly increasing the volume. Sudden and large increases in email sends may result in some providers marking emails as spam.
Prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday
While Black Friday and Cyber Monday are still relatively new concepts in the U.K., the excitement for these big retail sales days is growing. And they will undoubtedly be the biggest days for email and SMS volume, transactions and revenue in the entire year. This is where marketers’ hard-earned first- and zero-party data shines.
To make sure marketers continue to dazzle consumers, they must zero in on the best time to send their emails. A quarter of consumers have felt frustration with brands because of communications sent at the wrong time of day. Between 8 p.m. and 4 a.m., email send volume is low and engagement metrics above baseline.
November is also a great time to ramp up email messaging with dynamic content, offering products consumers have expressed an interest in. It’s also important to note if the products fit within their declared budgets. At the same time, marketers will find great success when peppering in keywords they know will elicit engagement.
Finally, marketers should ensure their SMS and email campaigns aren’t identical. Rather than just mirroring email campaigns, SMS should be used as a follow-up to reinforce the message a day before an offer expires, serving as a time-sensitive reminder.
Getting ready for the rush
With a host of unique eCommerce days in December, there’s finally a little time to relax from the fervour of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Marketers can use this time wisely to communicate last-chance shipping days with customers in messaging as well as on owned channels. And get ready to assist them with additional options for purchasing like express delivery, click-and-collect, curbside pick-up, gift cards, etc.
It’s also a great time to analyse Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns. Decipher what worked and what didn’t and then formulate a strategy to optimise and improve December campaigns.
‘Wrapping’ it up
Finally, wrap up campaigns with a heartfelt “thank you”. Campaigns with subject lines, expressing gratitude from the brand, boast higher open and click-through rates than industry benchmarks.
Cheetah Digital, a world-class product solution part of CM Group, helps marketers and brands look beyond transactional data to build thriving customer relationships at every touchpoint. With Cheetah Digital’s Customer Engagement Suite, marketers and brands have an entire platform at their fingertips to build the most relevant, integrated and profitable customer experiences. It’s the highest-tech, most effective avenue to start building lasting customer relationships in the holiday season and beyond.
Find out more by downloading your copy of The Relationship Marketer’s Playbook for Holiday Planning 2022 by Cheetah Digital.
Tim Glomb
