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Your Black Friday Marketing Strategy to Turn Peak Sales into Loyalty

JAMIE MACKIE, PRE-SALES CONSULTANT @ MAPP
Your Black Friday Marketing Strategy to Turn Peak Sales into Loyalty
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Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas Holidays are an opportunity to give your annual sales performance a boost! Marketers often approach their Black Friday marketing strategy with customer acquisition in mind, as shoppers activate their deal-seeking behavioral mode. But, all too often, the return on investment from acquiring one-off shoppers doesn’t equate to enough for the long haul. 

How can you turn this seasonal sales spike into long-term revenue? 

The trick is building a customer-centric Black Friday marketing strategy that extends over the Holidays and the foreseeable future to promote loyalty. This means backing your campaigns with data to deliver outstanding customer experiences, every time, to give your customers an even better reason to become loyal to your brand. 

We partnered with Talon.One, AKQA, Alpenite, and Jakala to create the Black Friday & Holiday Masterplan series to help you grow your sales long past December. Let’s dive into some unmissable Black Friday tips to acquire, nurture, reactivate, and retain customers for long-term growth.  

Black Friday Strategy #1: How to acquire new customers and grow your database

Think With Google found that 2 out of 10 shoppers haven’t decided which brand to buy from when shopping for Black Friday. They keep hopping between brands in the hunt for unbeatable deals and discounts. This presents a golden opportunity to reach new customers and collect more data. 

Talon.One, joined us to explain a fantastic Black Friday marketing strategy for growing your database and engaging new customers from the first touchpoint. But how can you deliver an outstanding experience to new shoppers when you don’t have their data?

Enter gamification: a powerful marketing tool that lights up the brain’s dopamine-driven loyalty system by providing an entertaining and interactive shopping journey. You can use gamified experiences to guide customers towards your business goals. Afterwards, reward them for reaching targets with personalized discounts and deals. 

Here’s an example. An unknown customer decides to embark on your gamified adventure. As they make choices in-game, you can ethically and GDPR-compliantly gather data about them to help build a 360-degree customer profile through your Customer Data Platform (CDP). You find out her name is Sarah, and now understand her demographics, behaviors, history, and preferences.

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With an enriched customer profile, you use her behavioral data for instance to create and send Sarah personalized messages with relevant recommendations and rewards. From there, it draws Sarah back to your website as she browses between your product categories, allowing you to track her user journey and send hyper-personalized content, such as emails, website pop-ups, and if you have the information, SMS. It’s a positive spiral: she engages with your tailored content, you learn more about her, and she engages even more. 

Holiday Strategy #2: Nurture your customers with engaging experiences

It’s important to prioritize customer relationships from the get-go. We invited AKQA to share how they maintain customer loyalty throughout the holiday season. 

It’s often best to start your Black Friday campaign early so that you can grow your customer relationships with interests and familiarity, rather than only offering discounts. Strategize your communications by segmenting customers into two groups: year-round shoppers and holiday-only buyers. From there, you can leverage data about how customers behaved last holiday season. That data will answer some critical questions: Is a shopper buying for themselves or others? Are they collectors? Are they buying items to host holiday gatherings? Answering these questions will help you to personalize your messages effectively. For example, if a customer is shopping for family members, their demographic data won’t be relevant. 

While it’s essential to nurture customer loyalty with personalized messaging, it will backfire if you go overboard, so don’t make customers uncomfortable! Overly personal messages, such as contacting customers about their current location, can feel creepy. 

Always use a discrete approach to holiday marketing by keeping communications relevant, personal, and aligned with each customer’s desires. The more data you have, the less likely you are to bother shoppers with monotonous and irrelevant messages. Text and email campaigns are potent tools, but use them wisely! 

For more nurture marketing tactics, have a look at improveyourmarketing! 

Golden Quarter #3: Engage and reactivate your inactive customers throughout

One way to lower costs is to think smarter than your competitors, rather than outspending them. Reactivating customers who haven’t made a purchase in some time is a cheaper option than chasing new shoppers, and it can yield significant gains in the future. 

To illuminate your Black Friday marketing strategy, we paired with consultancy company, Alpenite. Here’s a practical roadmap to wake up your inactive customers:

  • Troubleshoot: First, identify why customers disengaged. Have they missed critical messages due to delivery issues, or are they simply overlooking them? Ensure your communications aren’t falling into spam traps or causing delivery issues. 
  • Segment: To start your reactivation campaign, divide customers into “active” and “inactive” groups. Then, adjust your marketing approach to target each group specifically. Consider using Recency, Frequency, and Monetary Value (RFM) modelling to bolster your segments with historical data, such as purchase history, behavioral insights, and zero-party data.
  • Personalize: Embrace comprehensive personalization by tailoring offers, product recommendations, and search results. Personalized pricing is an option, though it’s worth noting its controversial nature.
  • Select Channels: Identifying the channels customers respond to is crucial. During peak times, many brands are bombarding customers with messages. So, avoid overwhelming your customers with repeated or excessive messaging. Misjudged timing can lead to customers flagging your messages, impacting deliverability.
  • Engage: Automate your communications to target customers with tailored content in the lead-up to the holidays. Additionally, consider sending extra incentives to inactive customers to encourage re-engagement.
  • Act: Define the specific actions you intend to take. For example, you can use tactics like private shopping sessions to engage VIP clients.
  • Plan Ahead: When dealing with time-critical offers, focus on capturing the recipients’ attention. But don’t limit your communications to the Black Friday period. Instead, plan ahead to increase anticipation and ensure seamless user experiences and deliverability.

Our Deliverability team also gave essential black Friday and Holiday tactics to help your emails land in customer inboxes. Have a watch below!

2024 & Onwards Strategy #4: Retain and grow customer loyalty  

When it comes to Black Friday marketing strategies, it’s crucial to be consistent and think long-term. Our partner, Jakala, joined us to discuss a surefire way to keep customers returning to your brand. 

Begin by establishing the key performance indicators (KPIs) you must monitor to achieve your goals. You can build a loyalty strategy framework based on customer data that aligns with your brand’s objectives. If you understand clients’ expectations and how they interact with your brand, you can implement loyalty programs that fit these expectations. Consider campaigns such as earn-and-burn, tiers, and mixed loyalty point schemes. 

Growing lifetime value (CLV) requires you to send personalized messages throughout the whole customer lifecycle. Determine which benefits and rewards work for each shopper. Then, explore opportunities to enhance their experiences, including potential partnerships with other brands to offer discounts.

Ensure your personalized messages go beyond using a customer’s first name in emails. Use real-time data to hyper-personalize offers, such as offering targeted discounts to high-value customers based on their behaviours and past purchases. This approach preserves your brand’s budget while fostering loyalty and repeat purchases. 

Don’t forget to ask for customer feedback! First-party data helps you adjust your strategy quickly based on opinions. 

Next Steps: Develop your first-party data to build customer loyalty

Want to ensure you’ve got the right set up to create customer-centric campaigns to grow customer loyalty throughout the future? The first step is ensuring you have a solid pool of data to back your campaigns. Get started today with our first-party data eGuide

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