Black Friday Guide 2023: How to achieve success with your campaigns
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Black Friday marks the start of the Christmas season and you have the opportunity to increase your revenue and reach new customers with the right communication. Take your Black Friday campaigns to the next level! Besides being a significant opportunity for more sales, Black Friday is also an opportunity for your business to improve visibility, increase traffic and promote customer loyalty. Achieving success with your Black Friday campaign requires careful consideration of various key factors. In this Black Friday guide, you can get tips on how to design your campaigns and prepare your customer service for the most popular shopping day of the year!
5 tips to make your campaigns successful on Black Friday 2023
At this time of year, everyone wants to be noticed, and to get noticed and manage the period in the best possible way. This requires the right tools and communication channels. Considering the revenue at stake, you need to be prepared to use the necessary means to reach and engage your customers - LINK offers the tools to help you with this task!
💡5 tips for Black Friday 2023
1) Analyze past performance
Before determining the strategy for your Black Friday campaign, first and foremost, you need to analyze past campaigns, looking at similar time-critical campaigns to maximize your campaign performance. Review which channels and content have worked well for which audience so you can best adapt your Black Friday campaign and personalize your Black Friday marketing.
2) Plan your offer
What does your offer look like? And how does your offer differ from your competitors? Google trend reports, past purchase patterns and campaign statistics can help you position your brand.
3) Communicate at the right time and on the right channel
As expectations for accessibility have increased, so have the range of communication channels, and it's becoming more and more important to be available on the channels where your customers already are. To improve your Black Friday campaigns, it's a good idea to combine different communication channels and get out there early.
Black Friday week is fast-paced and it can be difficult to stand out in the crowd of offers and promotions. It is therefore important to use the right channels and tools to achieve visibility.
4) Warm up your customers well in advance
Continuous contact strengthens your customer relationships and makes your customers more receptive to personalized offers - plus, you'll have more data to rely on leading up to major shopping events like Christmas and Black Week. Create hype among your loyal customers and sow seeds in your new customers that your business has the right offers worth pursuing.
5) Don't bet everything on Black Friday
Today, the Black Week phenomenon is bigger than Black Friday - giving you more days to promote different offers and promotions. Black Friday is a big sales day from the US that takes place the day after Thanksgiving, but in recent years, more companies are focusing on more marketing activities throughout the week - resulting in even better sales figures!
Black Week starter
Black Friday
Cyber Monday
Make sure to spread your promotions and offers throughout the week and guide your customers in the right direction with e.g. Emails, SMS or RCS and you'll be successful with your campaigns during Black Week 2023!
How to choose the right channel for Black Week
Once you've planned offers and gathered information about the relevant audiences, it becomes easier to choose how and when to reach them. Here are some considerations when choosing the right channel:
How much information do you want to send out? (e.g. short message with a link or more text and images, like a newsletter)
What does the buyer's journey look like? E.g. in-store or online?
When should the broadcasts take place? Is it time-critical (e.g. exclusive access to discounts for VIP customers an hour before the official start)?
What does your customer data look like? If you have consent for both email and SMS, it's a perfect opportunity to combine the two channels for best results!
Email marketing is perfect when you want to visualize and inspire!
Email is still a popular and effective communication channel when it comes to offers and promotions. Start communicating with your customers well in advance of Black Week, use Black Friday Email Marketing to give them a hint of what to expect. Build your campaign by creating early interest in your upcoming offers, visualize them with images, videos and longer messages.
Attract customers to your website by creating a dedicated landing page where you showcase upcoming offers and why not create a countdown? Create awareness by giving your customers incentives to choose to shop with you.
SMS is the ultimate channel to boost sales and reach customers quickly
Once your campaigns are up and running, SMS is a great way to generate extra attention. SMS has a high open rate and grabs your customers' attention immediately. SMS is the channel to use when you want a quick response. By hinting at your campaigns via email and website at an earlier stage, you can now be short and to the point in your Black Friday SMS Marketing - all it takes is a great offer and a clear call to action.
RCS is great for creating a superior mobile shopping experience
Looking to find new ways to stand out with visualizing messages and interactive customer experiences? Rich Communications Services (RCS) allows you to send multimedia messages directly to the SMS inbox on Android phones. Use images, videos, Call-To-Action buttons, QR codes and more - it's great if you want to grab your customers' attention during Black Week.
Cultivate unique customer experiences, offer shopping assistance, real-time customer service or create conversation streams that facilitate the customer experience for your customers.
Marketing Automation when you want to extend customer relationships
Convert your new customers from Black Week into loyal customers who make repeat purchases with you! Implement Marketing Automation and stay in touch with your customers throughout the customer journey with user-triggered messages based on individual behavior and activities. In MarketingPlatform, you can easily create Automation Flows with beautiful email broadcasts and engaging SMS campaigns using the Drag and Drop feature.
Combine SMS, Email, App Push and social media to create a natural conversation flow between you and your customers throughout Black Week. Remember that SMS is best suited for more time-critical messages and Email is suitable when you want to visualize offers and need space for longer messages. Create flows where you remind Abandoned Cart, provide tips on related products or deliver desirable information like order confirmations and delivery status.
How to prepare your customer service for Black Week
Having attractive offers and communicating with your customers in the right way is a good start, but to take full advantage of Black Week in the long term, it's important to have well-prepared and effective customer service. By providing exemplary customer service, you can increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and lifetime value in addition to increasing revenue. 93% say they will make repeat purchases from businesses that offer great customer service.
Whether customers visit a physical or digital store, they expect the same service. With customers increasingly shopping online, expectations and demands for accessibility are growing. They want the ability to get support anytime, anywhere, on the device and channel they prefer.
Chatbots are there for you when you want to streamline your customer service
Providing the customer service that today's consumers demand requires increased accessibility, especially as customers expect to be able to contact businesses around the clock. This is one of the reasons why chatbots have become a popular tool.
Given the competition and revenue at stake during Black Week, it's important to offer customers effective customer support to avoid losing customers in the buying process. Chatbot Flows, based on common questions that arise at this time of year, can help streamline and reduce the burden on your customer service team. Using a chatbot can save up to 30% on customer support costs while improving customer communication and response times, as chatbots can handle up to 80% of routine questions.
Omnichannel is the solution when you want to create seamless customer experiences
While a chatbot can solve many of your customer service requests, it's also important to offer customers flexible communication channel options. By implementing chatbot functionality in channels such as SMS, RCS, WhatsApp or on your website, you can make it easy for your customers to contact you on their preferred channel. Offering the ability to speak to a representative and have the same experience regardless of where and how they choose to contact you is crucial for customer satisfaction and long-term relationships.
By implementing an omnichannel customer service strategy, you can contribute to a better customer experience where customers can seamlessly interact with your business. By connecting all customer touchpoints, you can create consistent experiences and follow customers at every stage of their customer journey. Make sure you take full advantage of Black Friday and turn both new and existing consumers into loyal and satisfied customers.
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LINK Mobility is Europe's leading mobile communications provider specializing in Messaging, Marketing Automation, SMS Gateway, digital services and intelligent use of data.