Holiday season is big business. Is it the prime opportunity for businesses to take advantage of pushing sales on an eager-to-buy audience. As if pushing campaigns wasn’t already hard enough, you now have even bigger competition from all the other businesses hopping on the Cyber Monday bandwagon. We looked at which campaigns performed best last year so that you can create a killer cyber Monday campaign that stands out from the rest this holiday season.
Step 1: Be original
Position yourself as an unrivalled specialist retailer amongst an inbox of competitors. Capitalise on setting yourself apart from the rest, and offer your audience something unique. Everyone is offering big discounts. If you want to create value, you need to tell them why you have the best product not the best discount.
Step 2: Launch your campaign before Cyber Monday
Get in there before all the rest. Your clients’ inbox is going to be swarmed with Cyber Monday deals around this time. If you set up your campaign to run at least 3 weeks before Cyber Monday, you can make sure your message strikes first. Why do you think we’re publishing this blog now?!
Step 3: Connect on a personal level
Sending out a newsletter of everything you’ve done this year just isn’t going to cut it. In fact, it may be totally overlooked by a potential buyer. Tailor your communications to them and offer value rather than just an arbitrary message.
In the B2B industry, you need to show that you care about your customers and that you’ve taken note of what they’re interested in. You can do this by creating targeted campaigns by checking what they’ve looked at on your website and by collecting information on what campaigns they’ve previously engaged with.
Step 4: Promote a relevant discount
Don’t just slash your product or service by 50% for the rest of the year to meet some annual target your MD has given you. Remember, it’s about creating genuine value for the customer, not about degrading your worth just for the sake of it.
Step 5: Automate your email campaign
If all goes well with your email campaign, expect A LOT of traffic to be coming in as a result. Although this seems good, you need to continue to nurture these leads and keep them organised. That’s why it is so important to direct them into a workflow to keep them engaged until they are sales-ready. With an automated workflow you can easily respond to what buying behaviour they have exhibited since they’ve been in your campaign, without having to manually keep track.
Step 6: Tell the sales team what you’re doing!
The sales team need to be aware that they may experience an influx of sales. There is nothing worse than an embarrassing miscommunication between departments, leaving your customers to think you’re unreliable. Prepare the sales team so that they can make effective follow-up calls. After all, personal follow-up calls see the highest conversion rates.
Cyber Monday is a big deal, no matter whether you are in B2C or B2B and the perfect opportunity to make the most of the holiday season buying. You can create an effective and successful Cyber Monday campaign but you need to be on the ball to get the best out of the event this holiday season.