The crazy digital holiday surge is upon us, gnome sayin’? If you want to win best in snow you better brace your elves and be sure to put a bow on a great experience this season! Ok, I’m getting a little carried away with the holiday puns here…
But really – online shopping is going to be unlike any other this year so we’re here to help you prepare and plan so you can take total advantage of it!
Get 2020 retail holiday ready with these 7 ways to spread more experience joy this holiday season.
1. Bring your brands in-store experience online
Be personable, be helpful, be relevant and be personalized in the experiences you’re providing – just like you would for customers walking into your store while browsing around. What makes your in-store experience delightful for customers? How can you make that experience happen digitally?
To do this, you’ll need to leverage the complete digital view you (hopefully) have of your customer to provide them with recommendations, offers, and help about what interests them most.
2. Be ready to quickly help customers who might be stuck
As nuts as it may seem, a lot of this year’s digital shoppers may not have a lot of experience shopping online. Empower your chat and call center tools, people and process ahead of time and think of every situation that might warrant an uptick in customer service inquiries. Order issues, product information and more might be a common theme.
Aligning your support tech with your customer data is a bonus too because then different teams can see the same information about the same customer in real-time— look at you creating a merry experience!
3. Prepare backup audiences in advance
Marketers are great at pivoting, and the holiday season is the best time to use that skillset. With end of year budgets approaching it’s important to leverage learnings on the fly so you can put them to play in other ways. What does that mean? Maybe you traditionally identify a ‘big spender’ based on their total purchase history, but it might be interesting to also test different ways of defining that audience too to up the ante for more big last minute purchases.
It may be worth targeting new audiences in case your typical audiences aren’t responding. Perhaps “high lifetime value” has historically worked for you but this holiday season it isn’t— then maybe you should try looking at loyalty tiers instead.
It’s important in a busy season that brands have both (1) alternative segments to use, and (2) alternative ways of identifying the same segment to be more agile in the moment!
4. Complete a data source audit and plan for volume
I know this might not sound fun but it will really help in delighting your customers more. How so? By doing a data audit you might uncover that there are key gaps in campaigns you should be running or new insights into data sources you could be leveraging (that you’re not) to create more powerful segmentation. And more sophisticated segmentation means more personalized moments!
Plus, performing the same type of audit around your volume of data in contracts with your martech vendors will help ensure you’re not overrunning your projections from the beginning of the year, which might be a bit off due to so much rapid digital acceleration happening.
5. Triple check all consent collecting practices
Third-party cookie loss is going to happen before we know it and will totally affect how marketers are using data in targeting, attribution and so much more. By evaluating how you collect data and consent preferences on your website, in your mobile app or on any other of your digital products now will ensure that your brand will be ahead of the pack when third-party cookies are gone.
6. Generate cool insights that you can use in the moment
Want to separate out poor targets or focus on the best targets? You can do both when you leverage data-driven and predictive insights! By identifying the likelihood of a prospect or customer to complete a milestone or goal you’ll be creating insights to drive targeting and suppression of audiences to optimize performance. And what does this ultimately mean? That you’re spending more efficiently, but also that you can improve performance in channels where there’s low media cost, like email. Told you that would be cool!
7. Segment in real-time for hyper-personalized moments
Segmenting your audience in real time allows you to better optimize engagement to drive greater campaign performance. And we highly recommend automating this process so you can drive more efficiency and have more agility in campaigns during the busy holidays.
When you automate your audiences across your tech stack you can create more seamless, and personalized experiences vs ‘batch and blast’ based approaches that might create more disconnected and clunky experiences.
So there you have it! By putting all of these practices into play you’ll be well on your way to being 2020 retail holiday ready!
Need help with getting your customer data in order for the holidays? We can help!
Wishing you a very merry, bright and joyful holiday season with the experiences you’re providing from all of us at Tealium.
