The pandemic has changed online shopping trends across industries and customers today have a plethora of options to pick from. In fact, a Salesforce study showed that 2020 was the biggest holiday season ever as digital sales grew around 58 percent during the five days leading up to Christmas, despite earlier shipping cutoffs. With holidays around the corner, D2C businesses must upgrade their marketing strategies to increase their sales. As the competition can be really high during the holiday season, D2C companies must make sure that these strategies aim at retaining and expanding their loyal customer bases.

Think about it - This holiday season, while your competitors are offering everything that you are and maybe more, how do you make sure that your customer stays loyal to your brand? To do this, capturing customers' attention and keeping them engaged is critical.

With this shift, a lot of other aspects of conducting business also changed for companies. As this approach reduces the importance of relying on sales representatives to convince customers in person, the importance of implementing better content strategies came to light. Digital shopping experiences can only be enhanced once you have a full understanding of your customer’s demands. With new companies entering the market, how do you make sure that your business delivers something different for customers to keep coming back to you? The answer is personalization.

Keeping Up with the Changing Demands

Before, when experiences were digitized, and most shopping happened offline, companies didn't have to worry too much about customer experiences. With the operations moving online, digital experiences rapidly became the biggest differentiator in today's customer-centric market. Studies show that 84% of customers highlight the CX delivered by the company as equally important as its products and services.

Today's customers not only expect your product to be of high quality but also expect you to deliver high-level digital experiences customized to their needs. D2C businesses must find a way to stay at the top of the competition with personalization and top-notch holiday marketing strategies to drive optimal results.

What Must D2C Businesses Do?

To personalize customer experience through the holiday season, marketers must chalk down effective marketing strategies throughout the year. Be it right from Labor Day and Memorial Day to Black Friday and Christmas; companies must be ready with dynamic marketing strategies to stay one step ahead. They must develop strategies based on valuable insights about customer behaviors pulled out from these year-long efforts to deliver more personalized, targeted messaging during the holiday season.

Here are a few holiday season marketing tips companies can keep in mind while developing strategies -

The data that customers share with the brand is rapidly becoming crucial for companies today. Businesses are using customer data to derive insights by studying online customer behavior coupled with the data shared by the customers.

Companies today have Customer Data Platforms in place to generate effective insights on customer intent. They use different channels like SMS marketing, registrations on websites, and even telecommunication to collect relevant customer data. This helps them understand their customer better and deliver personalized customer experiences in terms of offers, store pickups, and at-home deliveries based on small information like pin codes. Furthermore, this can also motivate customer bases to repeat purchases across all buyer personas, in turn, increasing brand loyalty.

For instance, Home Depot asked their customers about what content they might be interested in or the kind of products they would like to shop for during the Black Friday Sale. This helped the company to improve their product recommendations and offers for the Christmas Holiday Season.

Customers often interact with their community before purchasing a product, especially if they are buying from you for the first time. Brands essentially rely on their loyal customer bases to increase profits by providing good feedback to the new customers and building trust.

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Fig. Thrive Market Using Blogs to Talk About Recipes Used in the Holiday Season

With the increase in demand resulting in supply chain shortages during the busy holiday season, new customers just need assurance from your old ones before making the purchase. They try to find these in the feedback and reviews of your company and products.

To do this effectively, retail and ecommerce brands can highlight the best customer experiences delivered in testimonials and reviews on their ecommerce website and pages. With that, spotlighting your customer's digital content on your marketing channels can make them feel more appreciated and connect better with your brand. Customer shoutouts often serve as a strong word-of-mouth marketing strategy as excited customers may even reshare their spotlight with friends, indirectly helping you market your product. Influencer marketing done right can help you immensely expand your customer base with increased brand loyalty for better revenue generation.

Add Omnichannel Marketing to your Holiday Marketing Strategy

Marketers must keep in mind the importance of personalizing CX based on individual channel preferences. They must also make the right choice while picking the correct channel to deliver the right holiday message. An effective Digital Experience Platform like Sitecore can help companies identify preferred channels for large customer bases.

An Insider study predicted that 60% of smartphone users increased their screen time during the pandemic. To reach them, D2C companies must come with the right mobile strategies while developing marketing strategies for the holidays. While posting content on different channels can help acquire larger customer bases, duplicating your messages across these channels might not have the same effect, especially if they're not personalized.

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Casper Website on Black Friday Sale

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Fig. Casper Using Email Marketing Strategies During Holiday Season

You can also add the surprise element for your shoppers by sending out thank you emails post-purchase. Consider surprising shoppers with incentives like free shipping or an exclusive gift to encourage repeat purchases this holiday season. You can also do this by giving out small rewards to a certain target audience to increase revenue from sales. This can be done both on emails and text messages to reach out to more people.

"9 in 10 consumers are more likely to choose brands that offer convenient shopping experiences", according to the National Retail Federation. Now that you know that customers look for simple, easy ways to shop, you must find ways to innovate this while building a marketing strategy for this holiday season to increase customer retention.

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Fig. Misfits Market Website Auto Applying Coupon Code to Make Purchase Convenient

You can do this by diversifying your payment, delivery, or shipping options, for online customers to choose you over your competitors. For example, if your customer hasn't made a purchase late in the holiday season, encourage them to use online pickup in-store. If you notice that they have become more price-sensitive based on their purchase history, highlight your 'buy now and pay later option in your holiday messaging.

Bottom Line

Marketers today must start preparing for the holiday season from the starting of the year. They must actively collect customer data to effectively gauge customer intent and interests to deliver for better conversion rates.

D2C companies must realize the importance of enhancing the online shopping experience in both the pre-purchase and post-purchase steps. While personalized engagement is essential to convert a prospect to a customer, to make sure that the customer stays loyal to your brand is by enhancing the post-purchase CX.

To better understand how you can maximize ROI from your customer data by developing the right marketing strategies, get in touch with us at marketing@altudo.co. Our technology experts will help you chart the right digital strategy roadmap to take your business to the next level.