A comprehensive guide on how to bring customers closer, this festive season
As the festive season fast approaches, brands are already looking to make the most of their sales. According to a recent report, 23%(1) of shoppers are planning to shop more during this festive season as compared to last year, with consumers reporting a 84%(2) increase in their online shopping budgets. Notably, 11%(3) of respondents highly prioritize convenience, signalling a strong preference for accessible and time-saving shopping options.
While advertising and consumer promotion expenditures are projected to rise by a remarkable 20-25%(4) year on year, the key concern for brands is how they can acquire customers more efficiently and engage them through their lifecycle.
The solution lies in taking an innovative approach such as conversational marketing to capture your customers’ attention, lower acquisition costs, boost sales, and make them customers for life.
Introduction
The most wonderful – and the most busy — time of the year is here.
As the festive season fast approaches, brands are already looking to make the most of their sales. According to a recent report, 23%(1) of shoppers are planning to shop more during this festive season as compared to last year, with consumers reporting a 84%(2) increase in their online shopping budgets. Notably, 11%(3) of respondents highly prioritize convenience, signaling a strong preference for accessible and time-saving shopping options.
While advertising and consumer promotion expenditures are projected to rise by a remarkable 20-25%(4) year on year, the key concern for brands is how they can acquire customers more efficiently and engage them through their lifecycle.
The solution lies in taking an innovative approach such as conversational marketing to capture your customers’ attention, lower acquisition costs, boost sales, and make them customers for life.
How can Conversational Marketing help you this festive season?
We are living in an experience economy in which customers are loyal to the experience, not brands. Messaging apps are now the most popular smartphone apps, with almost 90%(5) of global smartphone users utilizing at least one of them. According to the latest 2023 report, over 2.7 Billion people use WhatsApp, 1.3 Billion use WeChat, 1.3 Billion on Instagram, 930 Million use RCS, and 700 million use Telegram worldwide every month. In India alone, 535.8 Million people use WhatsApp every month! Messaging apps not only provide an opportunity for brands to connect with customers on a one-to-one basis, but they also offer enormous potential for personalization – something that customers love.
By leveraging the popularity of the messaging app brands can capitalize on the unique strengths of conversational marketing to attract, engage, sell and delight shoppers during this festive season.
Move the needle with marketing that matters
#1 Create experiences that elevate customer engagement across the lifecycle
Festive season is the highest revenue-generating period of the year for businesses of all sizes. While conversion is one goal, achieving maximum Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) and Average Order Value (AOV)is an entirely different challenge.
The modern customer is informed, digitally-savvy, and demanding. Great products and suitable prices are not enough to satisfy them, much less earn their loyalty. Instead of generic, cookie cutter-type shopping experiences, they expect smooth, convenient, and personalized experiences at every touchpoint, and every stage of their buying journey.
Capitalizing on seasonality depends a great deal on where, when and how you connect with your customers. With conversational marketing, you can not only attract, convert, and retain customers to grow revenue, CLV, and AOV but also create memorable experiences that improve their satisfaction across the customer lifecycle.
#2 Devise an Omnichannel conversational strategy to generate an alway- on customer connection
Increasingly, customers expect a hyper-personalized and consistent experience across channels. With Gupshup’s omnichannel automation support, brands can now stay fully functional on all channels – WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, RCS, etc., increasing the brand’s chances of discovery, conversion, engagement, and loyalty. With festive spending expected to increase 10 percent compared to last year, largely on online channels, omni-channel conversational strategy is the key differentiator to success.
Here’s how your brand can get creative and plan festive campaigns on multiple channels to improve ROI:
| Drive high quality conversations across the customer journey on WhatsApp
Festival season is a busy time for brands and consumers. To succeed, brands should proactively use WhatsApp to acquire new customers & promote offers. With 2B+ monthly active users the channel offers 80%(6) read rate.
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| Design social posts to convert into actionable conversations
Festive season is when brands go all guns blazing with their social media handles. Channels like Instagram are provided to get 10 times more festive visits to online shops.
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| Turn local searches into Business Opportunities
Research suggests that 46%(7)of all Google searches are directed towards seeking local information. With the festive season around the corner, GBM is the perfect way for businesses to connect and engage with customers directly at the moment of consideration. Ways to get the most out of GBM
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| Reap higher open and engagement rates with retargeting campaigns on WhatsApp & RCS
Festive season is the best time to re-engage dormant users, given that the cost of reactivation is notably lower during this time
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#3 Optimize the conversational journey to purchase and foster post-festive loyalty
Once you get your customers conversing on their favorite channels what makes the difference is the quality of the conversations they have. While a one-way blast can get you the open rate you’d want, it might not leave a memorable impression. It therefore becomes imperative to design a conversational journey that is interactive, intuitive and engaging. What’s crucial is to tailor the experiences as per the natural course progression the customer would most likely prefer to take.
Would you like the customer to make a purchase? In this case, design the journey to address pre-purchase queries, share reviews and ratings, display product catalogs and categories. |
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Know who your customers are and how they talk. For example- using the latest lingos, emoticons, and GIFs with teenagers or using a formal tone with homemakers to establish an instant connect and help build trust. Adapting to regional languages and colloquial can also make a huge difference. |
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How technical is the product you’re selling? Would it need an installation guide, technical support, a demo video, etc.? If yes, planning follow-up conversations after the products are delivered can be a great way to showcase that your brand cares. If the product is a high-value purchase, offering live agent support upfront can speed up the purchase process |
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When designing the conversational journey, you have the power not only to shape the interaction you’d have with your customers but also guide the final destination. Every messaging app offers a range of interactive elements such as quick reply buttons, catalogs, carousels, location templates, listicles, etc. |
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AI is becoming a part of your customer’s life. With Gupshup’s newly launched ACE LLM brands can build truly intuitive conversational experiences based on enterprise datasets, making it a digital sales assistant. |
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Customer Journeys To Leverage This Festive Season
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Customer acquisition with conversational ads
Improve return on advertising spends with ads that inspire customers to converse. Drive pre-launch registrations, organize grab-a-discount challenge, and build your sales pipeline by generating a first-party database with Click to WhatsApp Ads
2. Journey Drop-off Campaigns
Improve conversions, incremental daily orders, and CTRs by sending personalized alerts for browsed but not purchased, abandoned cart & Wishlist reminders
3. Nudge new registered users
Grow your loyal customer base with faster ramp-up. Run targeted campaigns to users who registered but haven’t made a purchase yet, send nudges to make customers place their 2nd/3rd order, and drive app installs after a few orders on the website.
4. Drive incremental revenue with upsell and cross-sell
Grow order value and customer lifetime value by sending relevant upsell & cross-sell recommendations over WhatsApp, Instagram, or any channel of your choice.
5. Launch products & push seasonal stock/offers
Increase purchase frequency and customer lifetime value with campaigns like new launches of Products, Product Range, Collection, monthly sale events, special seasonal, etc.
6. Product replenishment reminders
Boost customer lifetime value with restock, replenishment, and back-in-stock reminders. Verticals like grocery, household supplies, and skincare can benefit tremendously and secure customer purchases by sending timely reminders about products they might be running low on. For example, “Do you want to reorder Pomo Diapers pack of 36? Order Now and get 5% off!”
7. Reactivate lapsed users
Activate lapsed users by engaging them in interactive shopping journeys with personalized offers and discounts.
8. Drive store visits
Invite customers to visit the store to avail lucrative festive offers
9. Convert offline viewers into omnichannel customers
Encourage offline visitors to take the conversations online and improve loyalty.
Popular Journeys By Industry To Leverage This Festive Season
Retail
For consumers, the festive season is all about fun, family traditions, gifts and celebrations. For brands, it’s the most critical time of the year.
With conversational journeys brands can sell more with a personalized and easy-to-navigate shopping experience on messaging apps.
Popular Use cases for Retail Brands:
- Customer acquisition
- Product discovery
- Cart Abandonment
- Back-in-stock alerts
- Conversational shopping over vernacular voice notes
- Payment & Purchase
BFSI
With the festive season fast approaching, the BFSI sector is already experiencing a remarkable upswing in credit card sales, personal finance, and retail insurance. With conversational journeys brands can automate customer engagements across sales and support, securely and at scale.
Popular Use Cases for the BFSI Industry:
- Lead Generation
- Renewals and Pending Payments
- KYC & Document Submission
- Block Card Using Voice Notes on WhatsApp
- Web And App Chat for Visitors
Food & Beverage Industry:
Food and family hold a significant role in every celebration across the world. Festivals are the perfect time for people to come together and enjoy their favorite food and for brands to make the most out of this opportunity and maximize their revenue with conversational AI.
Popular Use Cases for the Food & Beverage Industry:
- Order placement and tracking
- View menu & order online
- Onboard delivery partners over chat
- Easy checkout and payment
Travel & Hospitality Industry:
The festive season is the best time to strengthen bonds and create lasting memories through travel. With Gupshup’s AI-powered chatbots, you can automate the entire traveler journey lifecycle from marketing to support
Popular Use Cases for Travel & Hospitality Brands:
- Lead Generation & Nurturing
- Tailored holiday packages
- Booking Support
- Booking Reminders
- Traveler assistance on the go
- Hotel bot: Check-in, Upgrade, Room service
- Flight booking and check-in
- Messaging in native language
Best practices to maintain high-quality customer experience and performance this festive season:
#1: Start Now!
Festive related shopping begins at least 3 months prior. Allow time for campaign planning and preparation, start pre-festive campaigns now and keep optimizing your campaigns.
#2 Consider Rich, Interactive & Personalized Experiences
Leverage all the features on any platform of your choice (e.g. message personalization, buttons, rich media formats, product messages, two-way interactions, NLP-based conversational flows) to build interactive experiences that increase stickiness and quality.
#3 Don’t focus on only one type of standard campaign for one cohort of users, experiment with more categories of campaigns
Diversified campaign mix to target different cohorts like active browsers registered but not purchased, new-to-brand users, premium loyalists, inactive users, and journey drop-off customers Campaigns can be pre-buzz, sale bursts, personalized recommendations, engagement ones and more.
Success Story
Engaging more consumers with customized messages and offers with WhatsApp
Brand’s goal: Tailoring customer engagement
Tata CLiQ wanted to reach every customer opting to receive follow-up communications through its website but observed conventional methods like email and SMS often yield lower open rates and fewer flexibility in creative messaging. To target more customers with personal, relevant notifications, the company needed a dynamic and reliable dedicated communications channel.
Solution: Custom-fit notifications for shoppers
| Tata CLiQ launched its WhatsApp channel to engage shoppers.
With custom-fit notifications, customers are 1.7x more likely to purchase when using WhatsApp. Witnessing the speed and ease of delivering messages via WhatsApp, Tata CLiQ ramped up their campaigns —which involved more sophisticated customer targeting and customization—for the high-volume sales days of the Diwali holiday and Black Friday. |
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The Impact:
| $500K
in sales in one month attributed to WhatsApp |
10x ROI
increase over email, in-app push notifications, and SMS messages |
57%
click-through rate with WhatsApp |
“Our customers had a clear preference for WhatsApp, which averaged a 57 percent clickthrough rate. Customers who visited our website from a WhatsApp notification were 1.7 times more likely to make a purchase. We’ve seen $500,000 USD in sales attributable to WhatsApp during our Diwali and Black Friday campaigns, with an ROI 10 times higher than our conventional channels”
Amit Kumar Customer Retention Manager
