For B2C brands, the holiday season is the time to make merry. According to Retail Dive, e-commerce sales in 2022, are expected to grow between 12.8% and 14.3% to reach between $260 and $264 billion year over year.
So how can you take advantage of the spirit of shopping infecting your customers this holiday season.
Simple – leverage the power of omnichannel marketing!
A recent PwC survey found that since the start of 2022, over 80% of respondents have shopped across at least three channels. Further, Salesforce discovered that for 70% of customers, “connected processes are very important to win their business”. All these findings show that delivering omnichannel experiences to customers is more important than ever.
If done right, holiday omnichannel marketing with consistent, authentic, on-brand messaging can help you to deliver great customer experiences across all channels. And these experiences can translate into:
- More sales
- Greater brand awareness
- Increased customer retention
- More loyal customers
- A stronger bottomline
However, successful omnichannel marketing requires a lot of planning and a whole lot of work! Fortunately, the right tools can make life easier for you and your marketing team. Enter Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC)!
Here are five ways to leverage SFMC’s powerful capabilities to make omnichannel marketing work for you this holiday season.
Connect interactions across email, mobile, web, and advertising with SFMC Journey Builder
Successful omnichannel holiday marketing starts with building omnichannel journeys. Use SFMC’s Journey Builder to set up personalized marketing and automated journeys. These journeys will help you market more effectively during the holiday season and build customer relationships that endure well beyond it.
With Journey Builder, you can:
- Lay out visual customer journeys to review and refine your holiday marketing strategies
- Create smart cross-channel experiences across all your holiday marketing channels, including email, mobile, web, direct mail, sales, commerce, and advertising
- Trigger customers on journeys based on real-time events and behaviors such as purchases or mobile app downloads
- Align holiday messaging across every channel to connect the entire experience for each customer
- Unify marketing, commerce, sales, and service departments in the overall journey so they all communicate seamlessly with each customer to increase customer engagement and satisfaction
SFMC Journey Builder is easy to use and highly visual so you can easily optimize channel selection for each customer. Equally important, you can build personalized messages across every channel based on detailed customer data like attributes, demographics, browsing behaviors, and purchase histories. You can also adjust journeys based on their current and predicted behaviors and thus continually deliver connected, omnichannel experiences to each buyer during this holiday shopping season.
Capture customer data to understand them and deliver amazing omnichannel experiences
Data will help you understand customers better and get a handle on what they are looking for this holiday season. You can then create flawless customer journeys to deliver amazing omnichannel experiences. And you can easily capture and analyze this data with SFMC’s Customer Data Platform (CDP).
With SFMC CDP, you can:
- Create a complete picture of each shopper by unifying data from Salesforce and external data sources
- Leverage automation to personalize and scale every omnichannel engagement across email, mobile, web, and advertising
- Use real-time intelligence and analytics to understand customers better and make better marketing decisions
- Use CDP’s flexible matching rules and AI capabilities to resolve customer identities and enrich profiles across any device
CDP is powered by Salesforce Genie, a real-time CRM that brings in-the-moment customer behavior data. Use this data to build a single view of every customer. These profiles will adapt to customer activity in real-time so every department in your omnichannel ecosystem gets up-to-date information and can work together to deliver magical shopping experiences this holiday season.
Then, by activating data across all engagement platforms, you can create 1-to-1 personalized messaging, enrich your audience segments, and deliver unforgettable experiences that will bring customers back to your brand even after the holiday season is over.
Engage in the email and SMS inbox with personalized messaging via Email Studio and Mobile Studio
This holiday season, you want to deliver amazing customer experiences with omnichannel marketing. To this end, customer journeys and behavioral data are both crucial. It’s also vital to create personalized messages that resonate, impress, and wow each customer.
SFMC includes multiple tools to orchestrate personalized messaging with scalable content that’s relevant to each individual customer. Use Email Studio to build all kinds of personalized email campaigns, whether they are basic marketing campaigns or automated, sophisticated, 1-to-1 messages.
With Email Studio, you can:
- Build holiday messages with customizable templates and custom content blocks, regardless of audience size or location
- Easily create dynamic messages with drag-and-drop functions, personalized scripting language, and interactive content like carousels and weather reports
- Create mobile-ready emails that always appear exactly as intended on every device
- Use rich first-party data to scale personalization across all holiday email campaigns
- Automate intelligent messages with SFMC Einstein AI and refine messaging over the holiday campaign period with asset-level metrics
SFMC also includes Mobile Studio, another useful tool for your holiday omnichannel marketing toolkit. According to Salesforce, mobile devices accounted for 60% of order share in Q4 2021 and 72.9% of total e-commerce spends. So if mobile is not a part of your holiday omnichannel strategy, now is a great time to start.
With SFMC Mobile Studio, you can effortlessly personalize holiday mobile marketing with SMS and chat messages, plus push notifications. The tool includes custom templates for outbounds, text-response, email opt-in campaigns, info capture, and multimedia messages to build and automate your ideal holiday mobile campaigns. Like other SFMC tools, Mobile Studio is also data-driven, so you can capture information about customer preferences and behaviors to send relevant personalized messages and drive greater engagement at the best moments.
Incorporate the three Cs of personalization into your holiday marketing strategy
The three Cs of personalization are content, channels, and compassion. Quality content, the right channels, and compassionate, authentic messaging can never fail you as an omnichannel marketer. But it’s especially important to pay attention to these aspects during the holiday season.
The first C is about delivering personalized content for all your holiday messaging. Use customer data to understand their preferences. Then use SFMC Einstein AI to pull insights from this data and Email Studio to deliver powerful one-to-one email content in a scalable way. And as we have already seen, you can also use Mobile Studio in SFMC to power your holiday mobile messaging and deliver seamless personalized experiences that make them feel valued.
SFMC’s Advertising Studio is also a useful tool for omnichannel marketing. Use this tool to create personalized advertising campaigns across search, display, and social media. Harness customer data to create unforgettable holiday ad campaigns and deliver 1-to-1 customer experiences across their preferred channels – which is the second C you should think about in your holiday omnichannel marketing strategy. Also, use email for messages that require storytelling with visuals and copy, and SMS/push messages to drive interactive experiences this holiday season.
The final C compassion is about showing kindness to your customers. Create messages that make their lives easier and bring convenience to their shopping journey. Also consider offering more options for payment, delivery, and shipping. Create gift guides and offer exclusive deals or personalized offers to loyal customers. The bottomline: make sure that the customer is always at the center in all your omnichannel holiday campaigns.
Optimize holiday omnichannel campaigns with Intelligence Reports
After you collect customer data, set up customer journeys, and design omnichannel campaigns, you must check whether these campaigns are performing as planned. SFMC’s Intelligence Reports is a powerful tool that provides a single view of campaign performance. With its prebuilt dashboards for email, mobile, and journeys, you can measure campaign performance from Day 1.
Reveal fast, flexible, and easy-to-use analytics to build amazing messaging experiences for every customer during the holiday season. Sort the available data across any metric and uncover opportunities to improve performance. The tool also includes ready-made apps to help you unlock cross-channel marketing insights in order to:
- Gain a deeper understanding of customer behaviors across email and web
- Connect marketing spend to sales wins/conversions
- Assess holiday ad performance across all channels
- Unify paid marketing data to get deeper insights across every social media channel
- Query granular data to build personalized messages and individual journeys
A Final Word
Omnichannel marketing can help you create smooth, inviting customer journeys and deliver personalized experiences that drive repeat purchases and loyalty this holiday season and even beyond. If you are looking to delight customers with personalized messaging during the holidays, Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be a great addition to your omnichannel marketing toolkit.
Reach out to the Email Uplers team if you need support designing omnichannel journeys and marketing campaigns for this and future holiday seasons.