As part of an ongoing thought-leadership series, Wunderkind teams up with thought-leaders from around the industry to discuss the hottest trends and most effective marketing strategies. This time, we teamed up with Julio Lopez, Associate Director of Client Strategy, Movable Ink to recap some of the biggest takeaways from Cyber Week. We discuss the most successful holiday tactics and find out how your brand can iterate on holiday success and activate your customers in the new year.
Maintaining customer engagement
Cyber Week 2019 has come and gone, but your work isn’t over yet. It’s time to think about how you can keep customers engaged through the rest of the season and well into the new year.
Cyber Monday had a year-over-year growth of 19.7%, making it the very first $9 billion day in eCommerce history. This statistic underscores how important it is for brands to stand out during the holiday season. But the best practices that are grabbing attention now shouldn’t be short-lived. Customers are ready to spend, and brands have to pull out all the stops to get that share of wallet throughout the holidays and beyond.
Serve your customers after they browse and purchase
During the holidays, customers are purchasing from multiple retailers. Because of this, there’s likely an uptick in abandonment. Marketers need to be prepared for that increase in abandonment activity and make it easier for the customer to complete their transactions. Make sure your triggers are ready to go. For browse abandonment and cart abandonment, you can create data-driven campaigns that present each customer with products that are relevant to them.
You should also make sure your post-purchase nurture stream is ready to go. This is the time to capture new customers, and in order to keep them, you need to nurture them post-purchase. You might even get an additional sale if you use your post-purchase communications as an opportunity to recommend related products.
Level-up your ongoing promotional strategy
In the past, retailers used to execute separate campaigns for each holiday. You had your Thanksgiving Sale, Black Friday Sale, or your Cyber Monday Sale, and they were all distinct events. Now, the sales and marketing for these events bleed into each other. They are starting earlier than ever before, and are also lasting longer – way past Cyber Monday.
With longer-lasting promotions and the increasingly difficult fight to grab a customer’s attention, marketers need to find a way to stand out. One key way to stand out is to incorporate relevant and engaging creative.
Your triggers should contain product creative from the browse or abandon cart, and should also be timely. It may sound like a terrifying undertaking to revamp triggers for each holiday or season, but working with a partner like Movable Ink enables you to update creative in real-time without any manual changes to your trigger program.
Make sure your cross-channel experiences are cohesive
Direct website traffic, paid search, and email are all extremely important. Relevant, engaging marketing is more successful when you take a cohesive, multi-channel approach to your messaging.
Your customer sees every interaction with your brand as just that – an interaction with your brand. They don’t think of you differently in email vs. web vs. ads. Their expectations remain the same: they want a personalized, relevant, engaging, and consistent experience. Instead of thinking of your channels as separate vehicles, think about them being parts of a holistic journey.
To get more technical, your customers are also your big data set, and so your multi-channel campaign should be rooted in relevant customer data. Leverage as much information as possible to create those relevant, personalized, and engaging experiences consumers are looking for, including contextual data like location and weather as well as browse and purchase behavior. Learn more about creating personalized, cross-channel experiences in our ebook.
Innovate beyond the holiday season
Once the holidays are over, marketers will be inundated with new customer data, and Q1 is the perfect time to leverage it. Ensure your welcome series is engaging and personalized, scrap holiday products from your recommendations engine, and focus on the post-purchase stream. This is your chance to ask for reviews, send follow-up instructions, and otherwise start the new year on a great note, and a year-in-review campaign is a great place to start capitalizing off of your holiday success.
Work with your partners and vendors in a truly collaborative way. A vendor will typically see more campaigns across multiple industries in a single week than a retailer may see in a month or a year. Volume leads to expertise, so work with them to leverage that expertise. Their success is your success, so you can trust they are trying to do everything right by you.
As far as tactics are concerned, a great place to start is to create reusable templates that are easy to update. Through integrations with vendors like Movable Ink, you can create campaigns with creative that updates in real-time. You can create campaigns that you never have to touch again, and are still personalized using your most recent and relevant content by pulling from data sources like APIs, contextual information, and directly from your website.