In today’s highly competitive business environment, eCommerce brands must bring their Black Friday/Cyber Monday game to a whole different level. Creating personalized mobile-friendly experiences is at the core of every winning marketing strategy.
Mobile-friendly, by definition, SMS and email help you meet shoppers where they are — on their mobile devices — and engage with each and every customer on a deeper level. Furthermore, you can personalize those interactions and provide tailor-made experiences based on actual knowledge and understanding of their interests and preferences.
One of the ways to maximize your BFCM success is to automate key steps of your customer journey with the help of our powerful SMS and email flows — enabled in just a few clicks. Make sure new subscribers are always welcomed at your store, abandoned orders are recovered soon after they’re left behind, customers don’t go long without making purchases, and sales opportunities never slip through your fingers.
Stay connected with customers and collect valuable insights to build the ultimate customer journey — before, during, and well after BFCM.
Engage right away with heartwarming welcome flows
Approaching shoppers with a sweet and personalized message as soon as they opt-in to your marketing program increases the likelihood of them making a purchase right off the bat. You can use either SMS or email, but our stats show that SMS welcome series have an 8x higher engagement rate compared to email.
Make your first contact even more engaging by asking relevant questions and allowing customers to text you back with a specific keyword that reflects their preference. Conversational SMS flows will help you learn more about each subscriber’s needs before extending an offer — much like any good sales assistant at a B&M store would do before suggesting bright orange ripped jeans to a lady with a taste for classic designs.
You can ask any question to help narrow down your products and refer your new subscribers to the most relevant ones. Over 41% of consumers are willing to share more information with a brand to receive personalized recommendations. Knowing you want to provide them with the most suitable deal, your subscribers will be more than willing to respond to your question and make sure what they buy is precisely what they were looking for.
And the best part? Later, you can retarget these shoppers based on different attributes by filtering them by their responses, i.e., approaching your curly-haired shoppers with a new hair-care product line for bouncy curls. This helps brands stay relevant, reduce campaign costs, offer ultra-tailored shopping experiences, and build long-lasting customer relationships.
After you’ve made an excellent first impression and have extended a spot-on offer, it’s time to think about what happens if, even after this effort, your new subscribers click on your link but don’t finalize their purchase.
Never miss a sales opportunity with abandoned checkout flows
Despite your best efforts to get people to visit your site and provide them with the most relevant product suggestions and offers, over 75% of your visitors will churn, leaving their cart behind or not getting to that point at all.
Abandoned carts are a massive black hole that sucks in millions of sales every year and, with that — millions of chances at a higher revenue. The good news is that you can easily flip this around and turn abandoned purchases into an excellent opportunity for your business, especially around high-traffic shopping events, such as Black Friday.
Enabling an abandoned checkout flow can help you recover over 33% of all churned carts. It will run in your store’s background and is triggered only when somebody leaves without completing a purchase, in no way interfering with your other marketing efforts.
For best results, attach images of the abandoned products to your texts or emails to entice customers to return. Don’t forget to add a small discount to sweeten the deal and make your abandoned checkout reminder convert even better. And a bonus tip — set up various discounts depending on the value of the abandoned cart to make sure you won’t lose on your profit margins.
Abandoned checkout messages are one way to retarget customers and make the most out of every sales opportunity, whether during Cyber Week or on a regular day. To keep customers engaged for longer and boost your average order value, your next step is to try and upsell them.
Boost AOV and CLTV with upsell and cross-sell flows
Black Friday might not have started yet, but this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to maximize your sales in the weeks before. Au contraire. Setting up a personalized upsell or cross-sell flow before the holidays will help you establish a better relationship with your customers, boost the average order value of your store, and save you some last-minute preparations. In fact, post-purchase cross-and upsells are responsible for 10-30% of a store’s revenue.
On big sales days, such as BFCM, people are actively looking for package deals, so you must map out what products fit best together well in advance. Cross-selling is offering a complimentary item to a product shoppers have already picked — like matching earrings to a new dress. Upselling convinces customers to purchase a more advanced version of the product they want or already have because of its added benefits.
Don’t wait too long to extend your upsell or cross-sell offer. Send it out immediately after purchase while your customers are still in a shopping mood. Send a follow-up message as a reminder of your sweet deal. Use urgency boosters, such as “we can’t keep this offer for very long” or “shop now before your offer expires.”
The earlier you enable your upsell or cross-sell flow, the more time you will have to test different products and combinations and see which ones convert best. This way, when the big week starts, you’ll be all set with your hot offers and recommendations!
Push shoppers to the finish line with back-in-stock, low-in-stock, and price drop flows
With the influx of shoppers around BFCM, you must be prepared for high sales and stay ahead of inventory issues.
Effective communication will take you from out-of-stock items to back-in-store customers, and Yotpo SMS & Email has the tools you need to achieve it.
Make sure you’ll make the most of shoppers’ intent and keep them informed when a product is back in stock, low in stock, or its price has just dropped — all with the help of our advanced flows.
Another tactic you can use to maximize your pre-holiday and Black Friday sales is setting up a winback flow to try and re-engage customers who’ve been inactive for a while. And make sure these leads — and the revenue they can bring — don’t fall through the Cyber cracks.
Bring buyers back to your store with winback flows
As Black Friday is entirely a sales-driven event, trying to maximize your reach is crucial, and this often means starting your communication with customers well in advance. In other words, take the time before Cyber Week to throw a rehearsal campaign.
Reach out to customers who might not have been active for a while and bring them back to your store with pre-Black Friday offers based on what they’ve purchased from you before. This way, when you contact them again with your BFCM sales, you will still be fresh in their memory, and they will be more inclined to do their holiday shopping at your store.
Why is this important? It costs 5x more to acquire a brand new customer than to retain one you already have. Тhink about it this way: wouldn’t it be great if at least half of the customers that have at some point shopped from you return to order from your Black Friday sales? With a personalized winback strategy, you can make this happen!
Enable a winback flow to approach lapsed customers with timely and personalized messages. Think of an enticing way to bring them back, such as a sneak peek at your upcoming Black Friday sale, a pre-holiday deal to have them beat the crowds, a flash sale to make them act fast, etc. Always follow up with a second reminder if they don’t take advantage of your first message. Brands that use this approach see an 18% recovery rate.
Once you succeed in bringing back these inactive shoppers to your store and making them convert, it’s time for a solid post-purchase strategy.
Nurture retention with post-purchase flows
During big retail events, when customers usually shop more and from many different stores, proper after-sales care is crucial. Automatically triggered messages, such as order confirmation, shipping status, and updates, have a much higher open rate than promotional ones, meaning one thing — they are important to customers and, therefore, should be important to you, too.
Enable Yotpo SMS & Email’s transactional messages to keep your customers in the know about their order details, tracking numbers, and other essential shipping details. It will give them peace of mind and is the pathway to long-term engagement and loyalty.
After-sales courtesy is when your brand can truly shine as a good host, looking after its customers’ worry-free experience even during the most hectic times, such as Black Friday. What’s more, stats show that over 60% of consumers are more likely to come back for another purchase from a brand or retailer that communicates with them directly after a sale.
Another way to level up your post-purchase strategy is to ask shoppers for feedback.
Follow up with review request flows
When sales and site traffic are high, it’s vital to leverage that and collect as much social proof as possible. Sending customers a tailored text or email to thank them for the purchase and ask for feedback will show that you value their opinion, help build brand credibility, and generate important product and site reviews.
Review requests through SMS enjoy a 66% higher conversion rate than any other form of review collection, indicating that shoppers find it convenient to use their mobile phones to share feedback. Play this to your advantage and automate the process well before BFCM hits so that you can turn every upcoming sale into a review.
Enable product or website review request flows with a click of a button and seamlessly start collecting valuable user-generated content.
Provided the customers leave a review, follow up with a message to appreciate their effort, and offer a small compliment for their next order. A happy customer is easy to retarget and reengage.
And talking about happy customers…
Finish strong with loyalty flows
Did you know that 46% of consumers would complete a purchase if the message included loyalty points or rewards? Improve your store’s post-purchase experience by offering customers who have just purchased from your store to sign up for your Loyalty program.
Once they do, send a heartwarming welcome message to congratulate them for becoming VIP members and share all the exciting perks they can enjoy.
Combine SMS, Email, and Loyalty to enable powerful triggered message sequences. Leverage over 14 data points to send ultra-targeted texts and emails.
With Yotpo SMS & Email’s advanced flows, you can remind subscribers to shop for more points and unlock a discount, congratulate customers for reaching a new VIP tier, or notify them how many points they currently have and how to redeem those for prizes. You can also send shoppers timely and personalized reminders if their loyalty tier is about to expire soon.
If you want to drive even more revenue to your store around BFCM, reward shoppers with double or triple loyalty points for making a purchase or leaving a review.
Give customers a good reason to use their points: mention the new item or collection you just launched or the special deal you are running on a category they’re interested in. Both will drive excitement, urgency, and, of course — more sales and revenue your way.
Maximize BFCM success with Yotpo SMS & Email
Shoppers are and always will be looking for a personalized approach. They not only want it, they expect it.
Yotpo SMS & Email’s powerful flows will enable you to engage with shoppers at every step of their customer journey and collect valuable information on their product preferences and previous purchase history.
Using that data to identify trends and deliver unbeatable, one-of-a-kind shopping experiences tailored to every customer is what is going to bring them back to your store for BFCM.
If you are looking for more ideas on how to utilize flows as part of your marketing strategy, chat with an expert today.