Black Friday, also known as the unofficial kickoff to the holiday shopping season, is right around the corner. It’s essential for companies to re-engage shoppers during Black Friday to prevent drop-offs, maximize revenue, and retain loyal customers. Among those planning to shop for the holidays, 65% say they will shop online more. This presents a huge marketing opportunity for businesses to showcase their products and capture the attention of a broad potential customer base.

• Promotion through Social Media Marketing

So, what’s the most effective way to go about re-engaging Black Friday crowds?

One way would be through social media marketing to promote your upcoming sales. Keeping your potential customer base in the know is vital. 84% of holiday shoppers say they will keep an eye open for deals, discounts, or promotions throughout the holiday season. So, it’s important to know where to find your customers and to leverage that into your own campaigns. Instagram is a great channel for your holiday promotions, since its users expect to be shown ads. You can even narrow down your target audience based on various demographic features such as age group, interests, and location. By doing so, you can increase your CTR as your ads will be shown to the most relevant audiences.

Take this one step further and opt for intent-based data. At Resulticks, we have an integration with Versium that can help you unlock proven, standardized, and diverse audience data—including intent and audience propensity data—to acquire a holistic view of your audience with minimal effort. More importantly, it empowers you to tap into all that data for precise segmentation from the very beginning. This will help you identify, profile, and engage every audience member—whether it be unknown visitors, ideal prospects, or returning customers—to accelerate their path to purchase and loyalty.

• Investing in the Right Martech Tools

Optimizing your website is another great way to keep your customers engaged during Black Friday, but you need to back it up with the right martech tools. Investing in customer data platforms (CDPs), customer engagement platforms, and identity resolution solutions like SmartDX will help you get the 360° views of your customers.

SmartDX, for instance, can help you track anonymous shoppers flooding your digital channels and their buying habits, so you can really maximize your revenue potential during the holiday season, without resorting to cookies at all. Once you learn about their interests as they browse through your site, you will know exactly the types of coupons and notifications you need to show them to get them to convert. Plus, with the right technology, this can all happen in real-time.

For example, if a shopper is browsing on your site for belts and keeps dropping off, you can just re-ignite their interest and maybe secure a sale by prompting them with a notification about a limited 35% off discount for belts. Even if the shopper isn’t a known customer, you can track their behavior as an anonymous user.

While a cookie-independent tool like SmartDX can add some extra fire to your holiday season campaign, a robust CDP and a comprehensive audience engagement solution can set you up for long-term success, affording you the abilities to further foster the pipeline of leads and new customers in the coming year. They will also come in handy during the incoming holiday rush, of course. Consider the CDP’s ability to consolidate your data, ensure its quality, and tie together once scattered information across your systems into concrete, actionable profiles of shoppers. A 360° shopper view will help you avoid having to risk sending the wrong promotions to the wrong groups. It can save you from pushing out assets that barely elicit a reaction because they were presented through the wrong channel.

What about the growing complexity and channel agnosticism of shoppers in 2023? Those aforementioned solutions will equip you with a set of automated processes, AI-fueled analytics, and intuitive workflows to handle the various permutations of real-time shopper behavior and move them down the funnel with appropriate responses—with assurance and at scale.

Instead of worrying about your data tools being overwhelmed or losing out on purchases from shoppers disappearing through the cracks in your CX journey, an integrated, data-driven audience engagement arsenal—whether in the form of large-scale enterprise systems or lightweight, SMB-focused multichannel tools—can have a major impact on your top-line performance.

• Run Marketing Campaigns through Different Channels

Another way to re-engage your customers is through various marketing campaigns. In fact, in September 2023, 45% of US consumers said they would like to receive communications from retailers and brands about end-of-year holiday promotions, deals, and gifts. During this time of the year, customers are ready to open their emails so you can expect CTRs to skyrocket compared to the rest of the year, especially if you have good deals to share.

Nowadays, a lot of customers are using multiple channels to shop, all while exhibiting increasing reliance on their mobile phones when conducting research. How can you possibly follow them through their complex customer journeys to help you make a sale?

As mentioned before, investing in the right martech tools can help you make sense of all this data and can help gain insights into your customers and their needs. It’s especially important to use these tools to branch out and use other channels besides email to deliver the holiday campaigns to your customers. RESUL offers RESUL—an enterprise-scale, all-in-one audience engagement solution—and Marketing Star—a lightweight, quick-to-implement multichannel marketing tool—to help marketers of varying digital maturity levels and budgets deliver and measure marketing communications across Email, SMS, WhatsApp, QR codes, IoT devices, mobile notifications, landing pages, and more.

A good channel to invest in this year would be SMS. The popularity of SMS as a channel is growing drastically. Did you know that SMS messages boast a whopping 98% open rate in comparison to emails, which have a meager 19.8% open rate? SMS messages are received instantly and are very quick to read. In addition, customers are already getting bombarded with countless other emails so yours may get lost in the mix. It’s important to invest in a cost-effective tool that can help you optimize where, when, and what to deliver to your target shoppers—whether during initial outreach, retargeting, or retention—to ensure the best revenue impact this season.

Conclusion

Black Friday marks the start of the holiday season, when you and your competitors will be vying for the attention of today’s shoppers. To secure a bigger piece of the pie and grow your customer base for long-term engagement, it is critical to invest in martech tools, talents, and strategies that will empower you to keep up with changing shopper behavior and surging digital traffic.

You need to determine the operational, marketing, and analytical use cases that can prepare you to capitalize on omnichannel shopper journeys. Personalized retargeting, real-time trigger interactions, a 360° customer view, IT-independent orchestration, and cookie-independent identity resolution are just some of the features that will come in handy this holiday season,

The good news? Resulticks’ products will have you covered, no matter your budget or industry. Interested in how our solutions can make an immediate impact?