2020 has been historic for many reasons, reshaping business behavior for good. Learn how to create a powerful Black Friday customer experience and get more revenue.
An expressive slice of the market hasn’t been able to deal with all this properly, whether because they don’t know what to do or they’re not doing it right.
People were forced to develop new buyer habits, overloading the internet with demands, and even better services. That is why customer experience became a required foundation for every company right now. More than ever, there’s no more space for those businesses that don’t put their client first.
And with Black Friday just around the corner, your success and profits depend on how much you are taking into consideration in improving your customer experience. That is the only way to stand out among all competitors on this huge battlefield.
The impact of COVID-19 on Black Friday 2020
The worldwide pandemic caused a rupture on why people are purchasing something, how, when, where, and many other question-points. And you are just moments away from finding out all the answers.
Since some of the commercial barriers were taken down, shopping seasons also had their frontiers extended. People are already thirsty to live better experiences. So, why not anticipate Black Friday opportunities? Create scalable strategies to start increasing revenue right now.
You don’t have to wait until Black Friday reaches its peak to put out their great deals and offers. By that, you may get more buyers and compete with a less stuffed market.
1. Make It Easy For Customers To Reach Out To Your Company
Regularly, an expressive amount of customers would rather drop off the buyer’s journey at any point than spend their time trying to figure out an issue by themselves, even if the answer is right in their faces.
On Black Friday, that amount reaches sky-rocket levels, proving how frustrating and financially damaging a poor customer experience can be.
It is essential to keep in mind that customers try to reach out to the company most of the time because they need something, not because they simply want to.
And when you are not available, or there is no clear path to communicate with you, what kind of image do you think you’re building for yourself? So, there is no other way. Be available to your audience wherever and whenever they need you. Provide easy points of access, quick responses, and pro customer service.
Regardless of the reason, they need to reach out to you, having multiple communication channels ensures they will be able to contact you in their most convenient way. Also, different entries of communication give you multiple perceptions of customer behavior.
2. The importance of Being Omnichannel
Customers can be anywhere, literally! Having multiple entry points is vital to your brand. And since you can’t predict which channel they are choosing to contact you, you better provide excellence in all of them.
When you have multiple communication channels, you combine their features into your strategy, delivering a personalized customer experience. As we mentioned before, digital has no border.
Crossing different touchpoints create a narrative for your campaigns, promoting better engagements wherever your prospect may be.
Take a look at these omnichannel features your customer could get:
- Buy a product online that isn’t available in-store
- Purchase on e-commerce and collect at the store
- While collecting, being introduced to products or services to increase their experience
- After the customer abandons their shopping cart online, send an email with a special condition to get their purchase interest back
- Get a shipping notification via email and SMS
3. Live Chat for Black Friday
It is very likely Live Chat becomes the best and most efficient communication tool during 2020’s Black Friday. Due to its practicality, Live Chat allows customer service to be in-depth, making it easier to deliver tailored responses quickly, creating a greater customer experience.
Live Chat provides a more reliable way to build a customer relationship, creating momentum to strategically approach them while they’re browsing on your website. By that, you add much more value to the experience itself and your product or service, increasing the chances of making more and better deals.
This ultimate marketing and sales tool only takes three simple steps to start working:
- Create and personalize your Live Chat room
- Paste a single line of code on your website
- Start chatting and converting new customers
4. Using Engagement and Interaction in Real-time
In 2019, 61%; of Black Friday’s transactions were via mobile. This year’s anticipation is a significantly larger number, mainly because physical stores will not be operating normally. The best way to serve prime services and delightful experiences is having Live Chat strategically imputed on your website pages.
Your marketing and sales teams will be able to track customers through every step of their buyer’s journey on your website. See in real-time what pages they are browsing on, what product or service they are looking for, make proactive approaches to add more value to their experience to make upsells or cross-sells.
You can get your Live Chat service right now for free! Click here, build your own, and start using within minutes.
The Importance of Being Available 24/7
You can use data analysis to understand the best hours your customers are more likely to make a purchase, but you can not predict for sure. A 9 to 5 open store is not enough anymore. And if you are not available when your audience wants you, they’ll certainly spend their money on your competitors.
Understand that when you are offline, you are losing opportunities. And you don’t need to spend on bigger investments or hire new team members. You just need to optimize your services with Live Chat. A Live Chat agent can handle 6 to 7 simultaneous conversations.
By creating shifts or calls, you can have customer service available day and night, always ready whenever your customer decides to reach out to you.
5. Live Blog for Black Friday
Keeping the audience engaged is a very common challenge on digital right now. The user’s navigation journey is quite fragmented, and even though there is interesting content available, there are not enough motivations to keep them browsing and spending time on the website.
The reason why people are conditioned to go to their social media whenever they want to engage is that most websites don’t offer spaces for conversation. Interactivity and timing are the keys to customer retention.
When you Live Blog, you open a space for discussions and ideas exchange. A Live Blog is sort of a live text that can be integrated into websites, providing real-time coverage of an event. “Liveblogging allows you to post regular updates to your blog as an event is taking place, rather than writing about it just afterward.”
Imagine a product launch or a live event with an open chat to interaction. That creates a community sense, reinforcing you and your website as a reference when it comes to a specific topic or niche.
To get better results with your Live Blog, design a plan to monetize interactions and set some prospection approaches. By that, your brand will be responsible to offer a powerful customer experience during Black Friday 2020, keeping the audience spending more time –– and, maybe, more money as well –– on you.
6. How to Enrich Data Using Customer Data Platform (CDP)
Black Friday is also a time to convert leads more rapidly without that obligatory need to walk them through every stage of the funnel. It is also a time to be discovered by customers who have never heard about your brand before. The way to succeed in both situations is knowing your customers better than they know themselves.
Building a customer profile during the interaction to understand their tastes and preferences is great. But what if you could know exactly what they want before the first contact is settled? How impressed do you think your customer will be when you anticipate their desires and needs?
Through Customer Data Platform (CDP), you can automatically gather information about your audience and transform them into a precise profile, just like a photograph. CDP is a single place that collects data from all your touchpoints, organizing them by similarity and relevance, providing you a complete background history about your most ideal audience.
During a shopping season like Black Friday, you can’t have small distractions or time-consuming demands. All eyes must be on your customer! CDP not only collects, analyzes, and executes data but also optimizes your work, increasing the chances of making higher profits.
CDP spares you from manually gathering and decoding customer data to get insightful ideas. The answers you need will now be readily available on the Customer Data Platform. All you have to do is decide how to turn that into the best sale approach.
7. Paying close attention to different types of audiences
Customer experience is a 100% induced process. There must be no random decisions or actions. Everything should be data-based and built focused on your real audience. For Black Friday, you must know who are the ones more likely to look up for your products or services?
Each segmentation has particular characteristics that must be, more than ever, applied to the strategy. For example, early 20s to mid 30s prefer going mobile for their shopping experiences. By knowing that, you can open Live Chat rooms to translate the convenience, speed, and high-quality customer service they need.
8. Proactive approaches
But you should keep your current customers in mind as well. Do you know it is 5x easier to retain a customer than acquire a new one? That’s because they already know you and how good what you have to offer is. So, how about trying an upsell approach? Maybe a great deal for a lifetime subscription? Use their preferences to increase the value of the experience.
9. Selling experiences, not products
The pandemic has repurposed the meaning of buying. It still has all those well-known reasons from before. Although, the strongest one, this time, is emotion.
Customers are now purchasing things looking for ways to improve their lives and take back some of the value that was lost during the 2020 issues. Products and services are craved to create a parallel reality to distract people from everything that’s going on in the real world.
And how can your brand touch that point? How to sell feelings and emotions combined with what you have to offer? You must deeply understand your audience and become the personification of what they need.
Excel that, and you may get lifetime customers who will carry gratitude for how you were responsible for bringing back meaning to their lives.
10. Best Free Tools To Create A Powerful Customer Experience
Now that you’ve got all the strategic panorama of creating a powerful Black Friday customer experience, it is time to supply your marketing and sales teams with the right tools!
- Live Chat: Within 3 simple steps, you can have as many Live Chat rooms as you want on your website. First, create and personalize your Live Chat; second, paste a single line code on your website; third, start chatting with your audience.
Click here to get Arena’s Live Chat For Free.
- Social Stream: You can now monitor the social web and find the best user-generated content on social media. Engage with the right audience!
Click here to get Arena’s Social Stream for free.
- Live Blog: Empower your team to publish news as they happen, in real-time! It works on any website and you won’t need coding.
Click here to get Arena’s Live Blog for free.
- Customer Data Platform (CDP): Apply your efforts to convert new customers instead of wasting time analyzing a messy and disconnected data pile.
Click here to get Arena’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) for free.The solutions are not over yet! Arena has a complete platform to provide what you need to make 2020’s Black Friday the one to remember. Click here and learn more!
