Share article:
Customer experience: Your secret weapon this BFCM
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are all about deals, right? Set up your biggest-ever offers, get the word out, and you’re set.
Well, not quite. At Sinch MessageMedia, we’ve been involved with hundreds of BFCM campaigns over the years. Our key takeaway? The brands that support their fantastic Black Friday / Cyber Monday deals with brilliant customer experiences tend to win.
Here’s how to build customer experiences that sing – and how Sinch MessageMedia can help.
Make your customers feel seen
You can’t create great experiences for customers if you don’t know exactly who you’re dealing with.
Dig into your customer data, and you’ll find that customers fall into all kinds of groups, each with unique factors driving buying behaviour. Life stage, location, age, socio-economic level, gender, hobbies, and education level – there are many ways to look at your customer data.
Look for commonalities and differences to divide your base into smaller, more manageable subsets.
For example, a baby gear store could include four main groups:
- Expectant parents – buy high-value basics like cots, strollers and bedding.
- New parents – make small, practical purchases more frequently, including clothing, socks, bibs and nappies.
- Parents of older children – primarily buy practical items like clothing and lunchboxes.
- Grandparents – buy “cute” items like soft toys and knitwear for gifts.
Once you know which group customers fall into, you can design your BFCM comms to match. In the example above, the expectant parents would get the big stroller discounts, new and established parents get the clothing deals, and grandparents get the cutest, cuddliest offers.
You can also reach them in the right places based on shared demographics – those older Nanas are more likely to be on Facebook, while busy parents will probably be more responsive to an SMS, for example.
Get more insights into your audience
Start a 14-day trial with Sinch MessageMedia and take our SMS reporting tool for a spin.
Let your personality shine for a Black Friday customer experience that stands out
Dry, corporate comms don’t create positive customer experiences. Don’t be afraid to show some personality in your messaging – make jokes, use casual language or slang, and even throw in the odd exclamation mark! This is more effective when you know your customer groups, as you can tailor language and messages to suit each segment.
SMS is the perfect place to test out your witty, casual messaging because it’s made for informal communication. People use SMS to ask their mates about going to the pub or send a quick message to their mum, so they’re used to casual language and short, snappy messaging in their inbox.
Whip up some LOL-worthy messages this BFCM, and you’ll stand out in a sea of boring, generic comms.
Think: where, when, how
Customer experience is about finding moments of connection across different channels. You want your BFCM messages to pop up at the perfect time and place for a sale, which means getting inside your customers’ heads.
Recent data from the Sinch report, “The art and heart of meaningful customer connections”, shows that getting the timing and frequency in your messaging right is key. Customers are equally turned off when they receive too many messages as they are when they feel brands send them irrelevant information.
This is another chance to drill into your data. When are the peak activity times on your website? Are people buying on mobiles or laptops? What’s the average time from first look to purchase? How many carts are abandoned before the sale goes through?
Use your segmentation data to learn about your customers’ lives outside the cart. Is it better to send a message early in the morning before work, or after the 6 pm rush? If you’re talking to parents, do you want to send messages in the day, or after the kids have gone off to bed?
Put it all together, and you can discover those golden opportunities to send your sales messages.
Cart abandonment is a simple but effective example. According to Shopify data from some of our clients, the cart abandonment rate was at around 70% during last year’s BFCM sales. That’s two out of three shoppers deciding to click away at the last second. If you’ve got an integrated SMS system and you can send a well-timed nudge to those customers, you can get at least some of those sales back. Our data showed a 26% recovery rate.
Don’t leave customers on read
Be critical about your Black Friday / Cyber Monday communication. Are you giving customers a positive experience at every touchpoint? Inbound comms are a weak point in the customer journey for many retailers, with generic web forms and rarely-checked email addresses leaving queries unanswered.
During BFCM, when people want quick answers to their questions, this approach can lead to frustrated customers and lost sales.
The good news? It’s not that difficult to upgrade your inbound comms. Automated two-way messaging and SMS chatbot functions give customers an easy, reliable way to get in touch – and they’re surprisingly simple to set up. When you have these features activated, a customer can ask a question through your website, which seamlessly shifts into SMS.
If SMS isn’t your customers’ style, you can set up systems that connect to their preferred platforms – all managed through a single portal on your end. It’s about making the whole shopping experience as simple and stress-free as possible, so there’s no reason not to click “buy”’.
Ready for your Black Friday / Cyber Monday sales? Connect the customer experience dots with Sinch MessageMedia
When it comes to cutting through the noise of Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, delivering an outstanding customer experience is what’ll make you stand out.
Do you feel like you still have some gaps in your customer journey? There’s still time to close them before Black Friday-Cyber Monday.
Get in touch with Sinch MessageMedia to talk SMS, connected comms and customer insights.
