The ongoing global coronavirus pandemic is certain to have an impact on e-commerce sales throughout the holiday season, just like it has on a lot of other things this year. Although the full effects of COVID-19 on Christmas shopping have not yet been fully determined, several companies have already started to offer Black Friday and online bargains in late October to tempt shoppers to spend all month long… or longer. Could the coveted Black Friday-only offer disappear in 2020 (for better or worse)?
It’s critical to have your approach in sync with the increasing competition for customer attention and spending so that you’re ready for high sales whether or not you’re offering discounts. See our guide below for our best advice on how to engage clients even during COVID-19.
Highlight your distinct qualities
Do you operate a small company? Did you contribute to the resolution of a specific issue during COVID-19, such as the production of masks for vital workers or the development of innovative ways to allow shops and restaurants to remain open? In contrast to big box merchants, who will probably survive during the coming months, many people are looking for methods to support small businesses or those who are having an impact during the pandemic. To show how your company helps the community, this season, emphasize what makes you special on social media and in other channels. Customers will be happy to spread the word and help out their friends and relatives.
Adapt the experience for each consumer
Personalized communication will help you capture and hold your customer’s attention. Include customization cues in your emails, make mention of abandoned shopping cart items or previous transactions, or provide a customized landing page experience that speaks to the individual path or journey of your buyer. Using call tracking data-driven integrations with Optimizely, Symplify, VWO, and AB Tasty, you can intensify your A/B testing efforts on crucial sales pages. Call scoring and keyword spotting are additional methods for focusing on highly qualified leads. To find out which channels are bringing in quality traffic and to figure out which leads you might want to target for follow-up messaging, isolate callers who use specific words, like “Black Friday,” during a call.
Set up performance monitoring
Get your pixels, UTM parameters, and conversion targets set up as soon as possible to ensure that you are completely prepared to track and evaluate the performance of this year’s sale, particularly when the metrics may differ from those of previous sales. To determine how well your promotion, pricing, and offer are received by your audience, it is essential for you to understand your traffic, email engagement, bounce rates, and conversion rates. With our Shopify, Google Ads, and Analytics connectors, you can ensure that data translates throughout your business and invest in distinctive tracking numbers to determine precisely which marketing channels are producing results during your campaigns. The number of customer interaction, the source of calls by channel and campaign, your return on ad spend, and how all of this evolves over the course of your promotional period are all displayed in real-time statistics.
Use SMS to encourage purchases and increase interaction
Text messaging is a very useful technique for interacting with clients who are already on your contact list or who may have left your website. You can design a personalized mass texting campaign to inform current clients about a sale or offer, invite them to get in touch with you again, or schedule another meeting. Create a trigger to send a text message asking visitors to your site who do not convert or make a purchase (depending on tags or scores your team sets) to return to your site or offer in order to increase immediate sales.
Establish new channels of communication
Offer live chat to your customers this season as an alternative to phone calls so they can communicate with you. Within the CTM platform, your agents can control calls, messages, form submissions, and chats. Customers are favoring live chat more and more, and our chat solution is a quick and inexpensive way to test out starting that new channel of connection.
Give your sales and support staff the tools they need to handle a growing volume
More sales and support contacts result from higher site traffic and sales. By creating specialized teams and queues to handle incoming calls or chats, you can give your team the confidence they need to handle the holidays, even if they are working remotely. You can review call recordings to instruct team members on how to respond to frequent inquiries or worries. Make sure your team members who will be working from home are set up with softphones so they can simply answer calls and offer help from any location. Consider providing a team incentive to the agent who achieves the most phone conversions to encourage your team to drive additional sales. Throughout the sales time, you may keep an eye on this by reviewing call or chat analytics, scores, and keywords used over the phone.
