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5 Omnichannel Marketing Ideas For Black Friday And Holiday Campaigns

5 omnichannel marketing ideas for Black Friday and holiday campaigns.

Black Friday and the holiday season is just around the corner and all marketers are getting ready like crazy. Be it an entry-level or big brand – everyone is eager to get its piece of holiday shopping cake.

The biggest headache for most of the merchants is how they can stand out from that overwhelming flow of promotional messages that all businesses send. How should they reach their customers and earn their attention?

Obviously, there is no single recipe for that.

However, in this article, you will find five scenarios on how to catch your customer’s eye even if, at first, they missed your message. What’s even better, the solutions are not rocket science, but are easy enough to skyrocket your sales in this upcoming holiday season.

5 Omnichannel Marketing Ideas for Black Friday and Holiday Campaigns

Repeatedly approach subscribers that don’t open your initial email campaign

Usually, the open rate for ecommerce is around 18%. During the holiday rush, the open rate drops to 12-13%. So you will have a lot of subscribers that somehow will miss your email in their inboxes. You can blame subscribers being overwhelmed with emails, bad message timing, or the subject line – that’s not so important anymore.

You can give a second chance to your campaign by resending it with a new subject line to subscribers that didn’t open your initial one. The data shows that resending your campaign to non-openers can improve your campaign results significantly.

What can you do next with your promotion? Outreach the audience that hasn’t opened both of your emails via text messages.

omnichannel-marketing-holiday-campaigns1

The popularity of SMS/text messages is growing significantly. More and more businesses use this channel to reach their audiences. Last year, Omnisend customers spoke about yielding more than 2000% ROI from this channel.

Furthermore, this workflow is cost-effective because the vast majority of your audience is being reached via email, which is the most affordable of all channels. And you invest more into text messages only to those subscribers that you didn’t succeed in reaching via newsletter.

For this scenario, you will need the following:

  1. Phone numbers of your subscribers. You still have time to update your signup forms and start gathering the data.
  2. An email service provider which would be capable to provide you with email re-sending and integrated SMS service.

Win Back Abandoned Carts With Basic And Advanced Techniques

You probably already know that during the sales period there’s going to be A LOT of abandoned carts.

That’s the reality.

But there is something you can do to prevent your store from huge loses.

Unexpected costs and indecisiveness are the main reasons why people abandon their shopping carts. And I’m sharing with you several ideas on how you can address these issues and get your customers back to the checkout page.

#1 Idea To Win Abandoned Carts. Advanced

To win back the customers that abandon your cart, you have to automate this process. So you need to launch an automated workflow that will be triggered when someone abandons a cart in your store.

There are many different options for what “players” you will choose for this game.

The first idea that pops into my head is using a combination of a push notification, an email and Facebook retargeting. Let’s take a closer look at how those channels and messages would complement each other.

omnichannel-marketing-holiday-campaigns2

So 15 minutes after your visitor abandons his/her cart, send them a push notification with a reminder about the cart. It might be that he/she is browsing for the same or alternative products in different stores and that’s great that you can pop onto their screen at that right moment and remind about yourself.

If this doesn’t work out, send them an email with a reminder. Include all the necessary information, the absence of which could stop people from buying from you: a link to the return policy, shipping rules, contacts, etc. Maybe that’s the time to offer free shipping if you haven’t before.

Only if those two channels don’t convince your visitors to back and make a purchase, launch Facebook retargeting. This channel is more expensive but helps to stay your brand at the top of your audience’s minds.

#2 Idea To Win Back Abandoned Carts. Basic

If you don’t feel confident in automating messages, or using omnichannel resources is still pricey for you, you shouldn’t miss the opportunity of winning back your carts anyway. Just stick to a simple sequence of three abandoned cart emails.

Sometimes tools that provide email service have already pre-defined automated workflows with texts in place. So you don’t have to strategize or write copies by yourself. You launch the workflow once and it works for you 24/7.

See the example of a predefined email sequence at Omnisend. Hundreds of customers send this kind of email without any extra adjustments.

omnichannel-marketing-holiday-campaigns3

Up-sell While Confirming Shipping

Shipping notifications are critical for every ecommerce store. It’s an automatic message with standard text sent just after the product has been shipped to the buyer.

A shipping confirmation email has a very high open rate. So why not use it for upselling?

Inform your customer about the shipping estimations and offer a new deal for the next purchase.

If you send an email, include the product purchased, how much they paid for it, etc. If you send a text message, be brief. See the example below:

Increase your engagement, conversions and sales with Omnisend's new SMS marketing feature

Start Re-activating Your Dormant Customers

The value of existing customers is huge, with no doubts. Existing customers tend to buy more and spend more.

The problem is that sometimes customers stop buying from you for no reason or for unknown reasons. They become dormant. Every business has such cases. It’s hard to measure, but there are guesses that dormant customers take about 30% of the online business database.

The good news is that you can re-activate at least a part of them. Re-establishing relationships with your loyal customers is beneficial, especially before the holidays.

So how can you do this?

Launch an automated customer reactivation campaign/ workflow. Double-check your average buying cycle and set up messages that will send automatically once your customer becomes inactive.

Usually, for fashion, small electronic devices, books or household goods, we suggest sending the first message after 30 days of inactivity. Then you can make a sequence of three or even more messages a week after week.

The idea of such messages is to show appreciation of the customer. Bear in mind, that an incentive in this case is a must to include in your messages. The workflow can look something like this:

omnichannel-marketing-holiday-campaigns4

The text message at the beginning of the workflow is critical to grab the customer’s attention and to re-establish your connection. If he/she ignored your emails in their inboxes for a while, reactivation emails without initial momentum won’t work as effectively as they could.

If you don’t have data for sending text messages, use FB messenger instead. And you may also add Facebook retargeting to this reactivation campaign. Be visible to customers that already know your brand and trust you, and when they are looking for a place to shop, they will finally land on your site.

You may also find useful this channel recommendation table.

How it works:

Gray star: Not recommended for this campaign
Light green star: These channels can be used and can work in certain situations
Dark green star: These channels are highly recommended for this kind of campaign

Omnichannel customer journey Channel_Recommendation_table_02

Wrap Up

So these are five ideas of how you can stand out from the holiday sales crowd and reach customers that are ready to buy.

Not all of them should be implemented at once. Pick one or two and these small baby-steps will lead you to great customer experience as well as bigger sales.

subject-lines-part1

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This article was originally published by our friends at Omnisend.

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