5 ways to win this festive season

Historically, Diwali has always been a festival that denotes prosperity and positivity. It is during this festival that businesses across India and even in some parts of the world buckle up to handle the huge amount of ready-to-buy customers that throng their outlets and eCommerce stores. Diwali is a festival around which e-commerce giants like Flipkart & Amazon run mega sales across their platforms selling billions of dollars of products in just a mere a week or so. Right from street hawkers to retail giants, everyone earns money and mostly everything gets sold out. The buying frenzy during Diwali is unmatchable.

This Diwali is bound to be a competitive challenge for brands across industries, especially retail where the competition is already very stiff. To be successful this Diwali, everything needs to go right from brand positioning to product selection to marketing.

To help you win at marketing, Xeno’s marketing strategy who’s responsible for over 100 retailers generating a 100x+ ROI is sharing 5 tips along with real brand examples so that you can win this Diwali. Here you go:

1. Clarity on CRM goals will lead to better aligned CRM campaigns that’ll lead you to meet your revenue goals

It is the time of the year when all of your revenue goals can be achieved. And the only way forward is to have a robust CRM that delivers personalized campaigns to your customers at a time and channel of their preference. Not only this, you need to have crystal clear clarity on your annual brand objectives. As ad clutter intensifies, brands have to work harder and smarter to stand out. It’s that time of the year when wallets are loosened up and spending propensity is at an all-time high. Also hitting stratospheric heights is the traffic and the clutter.

It’s important to have a set strategy and objective before getting into the war and standing out in the festive season. It can be either, using this festive advantage to complete your CRM goals or have a tailor-made limited-time strategy to achieve your brand’s revenue goals. The main goal being having a clear idea of what the objectives are, and what the strategy is to achieve them.

2. Don’t follow the default thought process of sending every campaign to every customer just because it’s a high sale time

People behave differently from each other, they have different beliefs and different values. That is why it becomes essential for your brand to understand and tap into the behavior of your audience to derive insights enabling you to generate maximum sales and deliver relevant marketing campaigns with minimum effort.

For example, if you want to promote T-shirts, you should go through your customer database and create a bucket of customers who have bought T-shirts from your brand in the past. This way, you will be able to retain your customers from trying T-shirts of any other brand all the while reducing your cost and increasing profit.

“Retaining a customer is 20% cheaper than acquiring a new one”

Here are some categories you can leverage the power of identifying your customer behavior to run successful campaigns on Facebook to increase sales and reduce the budget:

• Target customers who have bought products from your brand during the festive season previously.
• Analyze and identify products that have sold better in previous festive seasons.

Xeno’s clients also use a curated list of audiences that is selected by Artificial Technology to deliver their Facebook Ad campaigns to. And these audiences have generated up to 200X ROI for many of our clients. Learn more about them here.

3. Please don’t depend only on SMS or email! Facebook, Instagram, Youtube & Hotstar are key to winning this season.

Brands with a sound multichannel marketing strategy retain 89% of their customers on average. But, as with everything, it becomes confusing on what channels to leverage.

Digital consumption has increased by more than 40% during the last two years, meaning more people are spending time online. Channels such as Instagram, Linkedin, Google, Facebook, Hotstar, etc are on a tremendous rise.

YouTube has garnered over 300 billion views in Q1’2020 which is 13% more than Q4’2019 & 11% more than Q1’2019.

But for brands looking to get the most bang out of their buck, it becomes essential to identify channels that work best for them.  It is essential to identify which channels your customers are active on in order to optimize content and strategy according to channels.

4. Find the right balance between marketing a specific product & bombarding 1 customer with all products

If your customer cannot see your product, they won’t buy it. If you show too many of them, they will get confused and won’t buy it. With some initial thought and planning, you can ensure to create a balance between these two polar situations. Which is much more essential in these times. Here are some examples.

• Selecting the best products or bundles or packages that suit the flavor of the festivities: By carefully compiling your products into festive-themed bundles you can easily portray your products as a gifting alternative.

• Favorite product and next best product: You can also promote your best product with the next best product to ensure that our customers get a chance to explore your different product ranges. In the form of gifting bundles, it will also increase your brand visibility to new potential customers.

• Season-themed campaigns: You can also run campaigns according to the season or an upcoming season. For increasing your ROI for these types of campaigns, you can deliver them to your customer base that has previously bought the same type of clothing the previous year. And to acquire new ones, you can create a lookalike audience on Facebook.

5. Stand out from the crowd by finding the right offer & timing to connect with each customer

If you browsed a product on Amazon, you probably might receive an email later offering a discount from Amazon. This type of email communication is part of a very large shift in marketing that’s taking place. Called Personalised marketing, it involves the practice of delivering brand communication targeted to an individual prospect.

According to research by Gartner, 50% of marketing leaders are pursuing one-to-one personalization.

Here are some ways you can personalize your customers experience online:

1. ATV-Based Discounts: Your brand can run campaigns to customers according to their transaction history both in the online and offline space. This way, you can talk to your customers in a language with offers or prices they are most likely to respond to or buy at.
2. Digital Channels: By analyzing your customer purchase behavior on how and when they are most likely to buy, you can personalize their experience and increase your chances of making a sale. For instance, you can show ads to a customer at the beginning of the month when on Facebook at night when he is most ready to respond to it.
3. You can also use creatives that seem like they are talking to the customer in a personal way. For instance, a customer interested in buying t-shirts won’t respond to an ad for a pair of trousers. And to get this understanding you can leverage your customer purchase behavior from the past.

This may seem hard but is quite easy. Our clients such as Forever New, Biryani By Kilo, Taco Bell, and others are already able to talk to their customers and pitch their products for purchase consideration by following a very 3-step process with a Next-Gen CRM.