11.11, Black Friday, and not to mention shopper’s favourite season, Christmas holiday, are always the golden mines for retailers. Countless shopping festivals and events drive us to shop. With the rise of e-commerce and the advancement of technology, companies could even launch more personalized and tempting discounts and offers, which can help retailers to break the sales records again and again. Cha Ching!
To strive for success during these digital shopping events, the endeavor of different departments in a firm is needed. There are two major stages in every digital shopping event: Marketing stage and execution stage. Although a shopping festival could just last a week or less, the event preparation could even kickoff half a year, or literally one year in advance. Apart from technical support, well-quality products, and a wide customer base, promotion and marketing strategies are also critical for an online shopping event. It is likely that the lack of the above-mentioned activities might result in poor sales and wasting an enormous amount of resources on technical and product development.
Importance of Branding and CRM
Therefore, brand building (or branding) is undoubtedly worth investing in. It could be difficult for customers to discover your products and purchase them all of a sudden. Apart from the seasonal promotions, it is crucial to consolidate the customer base on a daily basis. The unique values of a brand is equally important as an outstanding product or service. These key messages could be delivered through promotion campaigns in order to earn loyalty from the existing customers. As we all know, existing customers are more valuable than new customers, therefore, it is definitely worth retaining them.
A membership scheme is one of the common and effective customer retention methods. By providing exclusive offers and privileges, companies may enhance the loyalty and returning rate of their existing customers. In the world of e-commerce, the game of membership schemes started from a simple form of registration applications on digital platforms. This very first step could allow the company to start engaging the members via sending newsletters, posts and advertising campaigns on social media platforms, and so on. Customers can easily receive the latest information about a brand simply through their mobile phones. The companies can also promote their shopping events via these channels and optimize the shopping atmosphere.
Yet, to maximize the effectiveness, firms should ensure that the strategies of customer relationship management are executed successfully for earning more loyal customers, frequent buyers, and subscribers. When and where to engage the existing customers and new customers could be an essential question.
Case Sharing of YOHO
Take the local e-commerce platform YOHO as an example, the platform has been providing discounts and offers for their VIP customers, serving them with low-priced and high-quality products and services, to retain the valuable group of customers. Also, YOHO grabbed the chance to impress their customers with great discounts during the 11.11 festival every year. Therefore, a lot of customers would wait until the 11.11 festival after they added items to the wishlists.
Knowing its advantage and strength, YOHO has launched a countdown calendar for 11.11 in November this year. The platform provides different price-down products to the customers together with a countdown feature. Not only did the calendar announce the discount offers for future days, but also reminded the customers of the 11.11 festivals, reminding them to participate in the event and add the items to the cart in advance.
The Power of Reminding Strategy
It is also worth mentioning that the reminder stage should take place timely before the execution stage, including the above-mentioned advertising campaigns and other interactive activities, such as a countdown and lucky draws. These are considered reminders for the festivals. Through reminders, companies can deliver their message to the loyal customer base. The reputation and the CRM performance of a firm determine the effectiveness of the reminders.
Sustaining the shopping mood of the customers for the next festival is also important. Making use of the waste heat of the shopping festivals in November like Black Friday and 11.11 festivals, a lot of firms launch festivals like Cyber Monday and 12.12 festivals to let the customers keep shopping, and along the way to the Christmas season.
Shopping festivals attract a lot of customers to enter the e-commerce websites, browsing and purchasing in it. How can we ensure the server and the website are able to process and withstand a huge amount of users and traffic? We will take a deep look at the technical part of the shopping festivals, stay tuned!