According to the National Retail Federation (NFR), the holiday season accounts for 20% of total annual retail sales. Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are enormous opportunities for brands to meet or exceed annual sales targets, but competition for consumer attention during the holidays is fierce. A multifaceted marketing approach combined with an optimized digital customer experience will help your brand stand out.
Now is the time to optimize the customer experience to maximize BFCM sales. Here are five proven customer experience strategies to help your Black Friday & Cyber Monday campaigns succeed:
1. Create a Culture of Collaboration and Learning
Improving the digital customer experience can only be accomplished through a holistic approach that unites key departments, including marketing, IT, customer support, and operations, to align on goals and objectives. Most importantly, your organization must foster a culture of collaborative testing and learning.
Each department seeking to improve CX can benefit from the development of two tools: customer personas and customer journeys.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce describes a customer persona as a detailed description of who marketing is marketing to as well as the “best” customer for your brand. Ask your teams questions such as:
- What causes does this individual care about?
- What types of media does this person consume?
- Are there barriers preventing them from completing a purchase?
A customer journey map outlines the steps an ideal customer, or persona, will take before purchasing. This can include becoming aware of your brand through a marketing campaign, exploring your website, and even asking a chatbot a question before completing the checkout process.
Teams equipped with clearly defined personas and journeys can effectively experiment with discounting techniques such as bundling, volume, prepayment, and seasonal discounts. Most importantly, the cross-departmental collaboration will align activities to maximize impact across the customer’s experience. It can also be helpful to share valuable learnings and insights across departments as customers move through the checkout process.
2. Personalize Promotion Tactics
Consider testing the effectiveness of discount coupons, gift cards, product bundles, free shipping, or other creative tactics to drive traffic and catch consumer interest. Along with cost savings, remember that everyone prefers personalized promotions over mass messaging. However, delivering superior personalization is only possible with an AI-driven testing tool that serves progressively better user experiences.
According to Deloitte’s 2022 Global Marketing Trends report, CMOs from high-growth brands are focused on deploying first-party data to personalize content via dynamic creative optimization. Concurrently, customers believe that brands today have more than enough data to personalize digital customer experiences effectively. There is an expectation that personalized touches will carry across the entire user journey, regardless of the digital channel (i.e., social media, website, or email) used, so be sure to prioritize personalization.
3. Prepare
Plan your promotions and map out when you’ll send key promotions to generate traffic. To attract attention from new and repeat customers, you’ll need to send more than one email, customize your homepage experience, and test landing pages.
Creating easy-to-update pre-launch promotional assets and templates now will leave you some bandwidth to respond to new offers or promotional opportunities your company may extend.
Also, be prepared to communicate with potential customers before, during, and after BFCM ends. Promotions don’t just stop when the clock strikes midnight. More and more brands are offering sale prices well after Friday and Monday, seeing more sales and higher returns on their advertising investment.
4. Test and Learn
Review every step of your user journey. Work with your team to review organic content themes and topics to search engine marketing (SEM), social media, and advertising campaigns. Don’t forget about your checkout pages and return policies that are an integral part of the customer experience.
AI-driven experimentation and personalization tools can simplify testing and experimentation methods, freeing up valuable time. Continuous improvements to digital campaigns through new and improved testing strategies will improve ROI, which leads to increased higher profitability.
Sophisticated testing tools go beyond the basics of A/B and multivariate testing (MVT) by applying automation at scale and providing insights-packed analytics to the observations gathered by your team.
- Make shopping easy – Discover and serve progressively better journeys regardless of the digital channel. To personalize the customer journey, you must examine every touchpoint your shopper or buyer experiences.
- Educate users – Based on visitor attributes from other sources like customer data platforms (CDPs) or audience managers, help visitors automatically understand the products or services that best interest them.
- Action your insights – Through AI-driven experimentation and personalization, immediately capitalize on real-time insights and improve outcomes without delays.
5. Integrate and Optimize
It’s never too early to start planning for next year’s digital customer experience, according to the NFR. Even if your 2023 plans are still in outline form, you can begin gathering data to shape future campaigns. Use these calendar benchmarks to start crafting your next BFCM strategy:
- June: Identify which products will lead your marketing campaigns.
- August: Build campaign assets, especially ones you can apply to last-minute or extended promotions.
- September: Apply code to your site and begin collecting that valuable data.
- October – December: Watch and learn how shoppers interact with your holiday campaigns.
- January: Paint the vision and regroup with your team to guide internal decision-making.
- February: Apply learnings to your evergreen campaigns and explore the post-sale experience (remember to also look at areas such as returns and customer support).
Get Going!
Every interaction should improve your digital programs. Evolv AI powers intelligent experiences so you can learn from every session and continuously improve conversions. If you’re ready to level up your BFCM and other holiday promotions, talk to one of our experts to learn about the complete lineup of testing tools available.
