The holidays are some of the best months for consumer brands. People are shopping more than ever. When shopping for other people, they want easy ways to discover products their friends and family will love. They are also seeking personalized and fun ways to buy products online.
In 2018, e-commerce spending in the United States totaled $199.54 billion. There’s a great opportunity to capture large amounts of sales and new customers. That also means your brand will be spending more on ad platforms than usual and facing heavier competition. After the holidays? You may find that advertising and creative budgets have been fatigued.
Rising ad spend is the greatest concern among e-commerce brands during the holiday.
Since brands are running more ads during peak seasons, this can also result in decreased click-through rate (CTR) and ad relevance score. The result? Potentially irritated customers and less return on ad spend when you need it the most.
How do you combat this slingshot effect after each holiday season? How can you continue to engage customers in a meaningful way while driving revenue? Conversational marketing chatbots. These are three ways that brands can use marketing chatbots to adjust to new holiday seasons when you have potentially less bandwidth for new creative and a more limited budget.
How marketing chatbots can create evergreen shopping experiences
Conversational chatbots can be quickly adapted to each new season
Brands can often focus ad and creative budgets during the holidays because of the potential return on investment. This leaves them with less resources after to refresh creatives on existing or new campaigns.
Conversational marketing chatbots offer a solution. They can be quickly adjusted for every new season. Marketing chatbots still require ad creative and conversation creative. However, they are much easier to pivot and optimize than creating new creative campaigns from scratch.
For example, a conversational marketing chatbot could be built for Christmas shoppers to find the perfect gifts for loved ones or great deals on Black Friday. Afterwards, it can be quickly adjusted for New Year resolution shopping, Valentine’s Day gifts and any other seasonal event. A conversational gift finder for the holidays can be easily turned into an evergreen campaign to help anyone find the best product for them, allowing marketers to capture as much revenue as possible with minimal creative investment when compared to launching new campaigns from scratch.
Sales copy, product recommendations, and the paths you take customers down can all be tweaked easily to maximize performance.
Browns, the iconic British fashion boutique, wanted to make it easy for customers to find gifts during the holiday sale period. They needed personalization. A way to provide each customer with customized recommendations. Browns also wanted marketing ROI that beat other channels and a convenient shopping experience.
The solution? A conversational gift finder on Facebook Messenger powered by Spectrm’s conversational marketing platform. The chatbot made it easy for customers to find the perfect gift during the high volume holiday season. Browns campaign achieved a 5x lift in conversion rate for click to Messenger vs website traffic campaigns and a 45% increase in average cart value with a single guided chatbot.
Learn how Browns achieved these results in their success story.
Marketing chatbots can increase return on ad spend to maximize post-holiday budget
With limited budget after the holiday seasons, you want to be able to maximize what resources your team has available. Conversational marketing chatbots are capable of significantly increasing return on ad spend. This is achieved through personalized product recommendations, segmenting audiences based on more meaningful declared data, and guiding customers from discovery to purchase starting from the very first touchpoint.
Marketing chatbots provide extremely valuable declared data when it comes to gift shopping. This is information volunteered by holiday shoppers when they engage with you. It helps you deeper understand customers needs, wants, and desires.
Who are they shopping for? What might that person want? What’s their price point?
When it comes to holiday gift shoppers who are buying for someone else, demographic data typically used in digital marketing audience targeting doesn’t help you as a marketer understand what that person is shopping for. It doesn’t help you make personalized recommendations for them. Declared data collected in conversation does.
You can also take this data and apply it to other marketing campaigns for better performance.
Marketers should continuously optimize marketing chatbots for increased conversion rates over time. Don’t set and forget it. Improve conversation flow by analyzing drop-off points, sales copy, and product suggestions. Train your conversational AI to respond more accurately to customer questions. Each tweak optimizes the entire chatbot experience to increase conversions and potentially give you increasing returns on ad spend.
Happy Socks, the Swedish clothing retailer, wanted to drive more sales, build customer loyalty, and achieve a positive return on investment during the Valentine’s Day holiday season. Happy Socks knew today’s consumers are more loyal to brands that understand their specific needs and desires. They wanted a creative way to drive sales for its socks during Valentine’s Day across 25 countries.
Their approach? Building a guided Facebook Messenger chatbot powered by Spectrm. The chatbot helped customers find the perfect pair of socks during the busy holiday season. Customers could easily navigate through 300 different pairs of socks to find the best pair for their needs. Happy Socks engaged customers at scale and built meaningful relationships with them. The Facebook Messenger chatbot helped Happy Socks achieve a 3.3x return on ad spend and 20% lift in revenue.
Learn how Happy Socks achieved these results in their success story. After the successful Valentine’s campaign, Happy Socks was able to turn the gift finder into an evergreen campaign. It helped people find socks as gifts, or helped to pick the perfect pair of socks for shoppers themselves. Using what they learned from the seasonal campaign, they were able to quickly iterate and launch a new guided shopping experience with less investment in creative than other campaigns.
Conversational marketing chatbots can accommodate each type of holiday shopper
Consumer behaviour never stays the same. What people demand one holiday will change the next. This requires you to constantly adapt creatives and campaign targeting. 42% of consumers demand product recommendations while shopping on websites and apps during the holidays.
This is because every customer’s preferences and purchase intents are unique. Some people are shopping for family and friends. Others are shopping for themselves or simply getting inspiration for what to buy. Conversational marketing chatbots are capable of adapting in real time to these different buyer personas.
For example, marketing chatbots can tailor recommendations to very specific situations like someone buying a gift for a partner, their kids, their friends, or even within a specific budget. Regular marketing campaigns can’t adapt dynamically to these preferences in the same way.
The bottomline on holiday marketing chatbots
The holidays are some of the best times of the year for e-commerce businesses. They can help drive increased amounts of traffic, sales, and new loyal customers. However, there’s often a post-holiday slump. Advertising and creative budgets become fatigued. It’s difficult to update or create new campaigns.
How can you combat this? By using conversational marketing chatbots. They can be quickly adapted to each new season and holiday. For example, a chatbot made for Christmas can be adjusted for New Years shortly after or Valentine’s day after that. Learnings from these seasonal shopping campaigns can be used to create well optimized evergreen conversational shopping experiences.
Chatbots still require ad and conversation creative. They are just much easier to iterate and optimize on the fly.
Marketing chatbots are also capable of significantly increasing return on ad spend. If your brand’s budget is fatigued and lower than usual after the holidays, you’ll want to make the most out of it. Personalized product recommendations, segmenting customers, and delivering meaningful experiences maximizes your ad dollars.
You will also be able to more effectively accommodate each type of holiday shopper with a marketing chatbot. It doesn’t matter if they’re shopping for themselves. A friend. Family members. You can match their budgets, needs, and desires to capture more sales and adapt to each customer’s individual preferences.
Want to learn more about growing your business with conversational marketing chatbots? Get in touch with one of Spectrm’s experts today.
