This is a guest blog post from Kara Holthaus, VP of Client Services at SmarterHQ – a Movable Ink Exchange Partner.
Holiday shopping is in full swing, and like most things in 2020, it’s looking a bit different than in years past. In the COVID-19 era, shoppers are more cautious about browsing in-store (let alone for doorbuster days like Black Friday), shipping delays have become an expectation, and consumers may be more conservative with their gift lists.
Thanks to these changes and the added pop-up shopping extravaganzas like Amazon’s Prime Day, it’s more pertinent than ever for brands to capture their customer’s attention and create a seamless consumer journey across all channels.
By using their product catalog to drive marketing campaigns, retailers can communicate with their customers through personalized interactions, and ensure shoppers are getting what they want, when they need it.
Here are four ways brands can use their product inventory to come out on top this holiday season.
Product Alerts
Back in Stock, New Arrivals, Price Drops and Low Inventory. These are just four product alerts brands can use based on their customer’s past behaviors — whether they’ve browsed, carted, added to their wishlist, or shown interest in a specific product or category.
How customers react to this content can tell brands a lot about their customer. Are they consistently bargain shopping? Do they often want the hottest new arrivals in a specific category or brand? Does urgency in availability drive them to take action?
Once retailers find a way to leverage their product catalog and the movement within it — the content can live in many initiatives — from stand alone triggers, to content modules in larger emails, to push notifications, display and more. It’s also a great way to save on margin or drive sell-through rates on overstocked items, alerting those with an affinity to a product or category before dropping the items on full clearance pricing.
In-Store Product Alerts
With the growth in online shopping due to COVID-19, many retailers have experienced shipping delays, which have now become an expectation of consumers. To avoid these delays, customers may choose to shop in-store or prefer BOPIS, but with shopping in-store being a much more planned activity, people want to know what they’re looking for is in stock. A catch-22.
So how can brands solve for this? By alerting customers with content around what is available in-store through notifications such as:
- Back in stock in their preferred store
- Products they’ve purchased or browsed that were out of stock but are now back in stock at their preferred store, and
- New arrivals at their preferred store
If customers know they can quickly pick up items from stores rather than waiting for items to be delivered, brands are able to manage shopper expectations and they may be more likely to make the trip. This is also an opportunity to cross-sell or up-sell with similar products that are available in-store.
Smart Browse Campaigns
It should come as no surprise that 74% of millennials say they are frustrated with too many marketing communications. Yet, according to our Holiday Marketing Analysis, retailers are still flooding customer inboxes with mass promotions and generic messages. To stand out among competitors, brands need to be sending personalized messages based on customer interactions and past behavior.
Understanding the categories and products shoppers are browsing by processing the full product catalog means retailers can use Smart Browse Campaigns to send more tailored, direct messages to their customers. This allows retailers to nurture category engagement, and keep customers coming back again and again.
Here’s an example. Using SmarterHQ’s personalization platform, brands can capture customer data from their e-commerce sites where shoppers are engaging with specific products or categories in real-time, and with the help of Movable Ink, personalize the content and creative at the time the email is opened. Ultimately, this leads to higher engagement and relevant messages to customers, who feel they are being spoken to on a very personal level.
Affinity Campaigns
To create personalized interactions with customers, it’s important to understand their interests, passions, habits. If shoppers are engaging at high levels with specific categories or products, or are showing repeated interest in a brand, Affinity-Based Campaigns can be used to drive post-purchase campaigns, or cross-sell complementary products.
When leveraging product catalog data throughout the entire customer lifecycle, brands can employ targeted campaigns across all digital channels to encourage customer engagement and loyalty.