5 Tips to Maximize Your White Friday Sales

Razan Saleh at Infobip outlines five tips to maximize your White Friday sales.

As we head towards White Friday shopping weekend, digital communications will play a critical role this year since most of the shopping will happen online. Retailers may no longer witness people packed into lines or stores as eCommerce sales are expected to grow by 11% to 15% during the upcoming shopping season.

We anticipate that companies will significantly leverage digital communications to provide their customers with the products and information they need. This is why brands must seize every opportunity to get closer to customers and make a real connection.

The big question is, how will you prepare for a significant boost in White Friday sales performance? You will need to provide a connected customer experience that makes customers want to engage with you. To help you achieve this, we’ve put together a quick guide of five White Friday marketing strategies to help you deliver an exceptional customer experience, build loyalty and maximize your sales.

Make It Easy for Customers to Reach Out to You With Omnichannel Connectivity

White Friday deals usually run through the entire weekend, including the Thursday before. This means customers will be making purchases outside of regular working hours.

And while they may have a few channels for contacting customer care (phone, email, live chat, etc.), what happens in the evening and over the weekend? What happens if no agent is available or if you have a phone line problem even during business hours?

Adopting an Omnichannel Communication Strategy with different channels ensures that you adapt to customers’ preferences while staying connected to them.

You won’t have to rely strictly on emails this season. Instead, you can use different channels such as WhatsApp, Mobile App Messaging, SMS, and Live Chat while guaranteeing to keep customers engaged at different touchpoints. It all boils down to being available for your customers around the clock and, most importantly, over the channels of their choice.

Empower Your Team to Provide Frictionless Support

Shopping seasons can be tiring for customer service representatives, and no matter how well prepared your call centre is, it won’t hurt if you take a few steps to protect and empower your support team. Switching to a Cloud-based contact centre like Conversations will empower your agents to provide omnichannel technical support through a single interface.

This solution allows you to integrate multiple channels to provide one experience throughout the entire customer journey while having easy access to the conversation history and previous customer interactions.

Having this data in one location enables your agents to create detailed and accurate customer profiles and deliver truly personalized, frictionless support. And just remember when you keep your team happy, they will take care of your customers.

Introduce Automation and Self-Service Options for 24/7 Support

Take a step back and put yourself in your customer’s shoes; what would you look for to ensure a frictionless shopping journey this year? For most customers today, the top 3 elements of efficient customer service are quick resolution, knowledgeable service agents, and fast responses.

While having proper cloud contact centre technology is very important, it’s also critical to have automation in place to help your agents with their workloads. The easiest way to eliminate friction is to introduce self-service options, such as a chatbot-building platform like Answers.

Set up a chatbot to:

• Improve Customer and Agent Experiences
• Provide 24/7 Automated Support to Handle More Queries
• Offload Frequently Asked Questions From Your Agents

Using chatbots helps improve your overall contact centre metrics and gives customers the quick response they expect and a shorter time to resolution.

Ensure Collaboration Between Agents and Chatbots

Although using chatbots has several benefits for the retail industry, it can also be a source of customer frustration if not implemented properly. In the highly competitive context of White Friday weekend, upsetting customers can push them to switch to a competitor.

To avoid this, chatbots should only be used for basic and specific queries like delivering shipping information and providing office hours or redirecting to the appropriate product page.

Integrating your chatbot solution with a digital cloud contact centre solution guarantees that the information collected previously is seamlessly transferred and conversations are routed to the right agent based on the customer’s intent.

Having this data in one location enables your agents to easily create detailed and accurate customer profiles and deliver truly personalized and impeccable support.

Utilize Data to Deliver Personalized Experiences

During a shopping season like White Friday weekend, your communication strategy must be data-driven. This is a great time to convert leads more quickly without having to guide them through the entire funnel.

White Friday is also the perfect time to build awareness and discover new clients who haven’t heard of your company before. In both situations, the key to success is establishing an emotional bond and getting to know your customers better than they know themselves.

To make that happen, you will need additional tools such as a customer engagement hub to plot a personalized journey through targeted marketing campaigns based on customer behaviors and demands.

Investing in an omnichannel customer engagement solution helps you gather information about your audience automatically and transform it into detailed customer profiles. This, in turn, helps businesses leverage end-to-end customer data to gain real-time insights into behavior, product usage, and channel preferences – resulting in stronger customer profiles and hyper-personalization.

White Friday 2021 Is All About the Customer

White Friday is right around the corner! Start your planning well in advance to ensure your business is properly prepared for the year’s biggest shopping weekend. Think of yourself as if you were the customer.

What are the key factors that you would look for to have a seamless and smooth shopping journey? You can start by recognizing patterns and learning how to best suit those patterns through data analysis, tracking customer shopping habits and behavior, social media interactions, and other indicators. The goal is to make the most of White Friday 2021.

Focus on providing the finest deals and customer experience while also expanding your brand – and keeping your customers’ demands and behavior in mind. With the right Customer Engagement and CX Tools and Strategies, businesses can easily drive sales, acquire new customers and build brand loyalty.

Author: Guest Author