Since the first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1924, the Friday after Thanksgiving has signaled US retailers and shoppers that the holiday rush has begun. Today, Black Friday is more of a long weekend extravaganza than a single day, stretching to include Thanksgiving and the so-called Cyber Monday of the following week.
Last year, Thanksgiving weekend drew 186.4 million US shoppers, down 1.7% from 2019. But eCommerce companies rejoice – Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday alone brought in $14.13 billion in online sales, up 19% from the previous year.
The more we shift to online shopping, significantly since the pandemic changed buying patterns, the more retailers need to utilize all the technology at their disposal to nurture and convert customers eager for Black Friday deals. Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a great way to manage the rush, cement new leads, and improve customer experiences during the holiday season. Let’s look at some tactics for implementing CRM that will help you make the most of the Black Friday rush.
What is CRM?
Before we get to the specifics, a quick note on terminology. Customer relationship management (CRM) is just what it sounds like – how you develop and maintain relationships with your clients. It’s a combination of tools and strategies for better understanding and serving your customers. But these days, when marketers talk about CRM, they’re usually talking about CRM software.
CRM software can help businesses track and organize all phases of a customer’s journey, from early-stage leads to long-time buyers. It enables you to centralize and interpret customer data like
- Buying and browsing behaviors
- Responsiveness to emails and messages
- How long a customer has been with your company
And more. All of this information can be distilled and utilized to improve the effectiveness of your future customer interactions.
We’re going to assume you already have some customer management practices in place and get straight into how you can maximize the benefits of CRM software to improve your performance.
Personalize customer communications
Customers expect a high degree of content personalization, and if they don’t find it with your company, they will go elsewhere. Fortunately, you can leverage CRM data to gather 360-degree context on prospects and customers and use that to tailor everything from product recommendations to email communications.
Get to know your customers
You likely have a ton of data about your customers and prospects, from their demographic information to their browsing habits. What CRM software does is help you organize and use that data productively. Built-in analytics will help you gather context to understand buyer intent better and tailor your marketing accordingly.
Most CRM software breaks down analytics to show you web metrics like bounce rates, email analytics like open rates, and sales data like what customers buy and when. With Freshsales in particular, you can view customer conversations, purchase, and interaction data from every digital channel, empowering them with a 360-degree view.
Cataloging all of this information about a particular customer will give you a relatively complete picture of their interests and habits. You can then use this data for client-centric selling and developing buyer personas of lucrative target demographics for future lead generation activities.
Personalize your emails
Black Friday is a huge time for discounts and advertising, and you’ll want to make the most of it. But how effective is a cold email? When they receive a random advertising email, most people delete it immediately – if it doesn’t end up in their spam folder from the get-go.
Instead, you should invest your time and money into personalized emails for prospects who actually want to receive them. You can use Black Friday traffic as a way to offer a discount and entice people to sign up for an email list or newsletter. Then, use your accumulated insights to target prospects with recommendations and free content that fits their needs and interests.
This type of personalization is significant for B2B lead generation (though B2C certainly needs email personalization too). You will have more luck converting a lead who signed up for more information and can benefit from a tailored pitch than you will while cold contacting people who might not be looking for your products or services. We’ll go into more detail on email strategies in a bit.
We’ve talked a bit about email already, but let’s get more into it now. A lot of marketers talk about open rates and other KPIs you should be monitoring. But with CRM software, we’re talking about comprehensive email metrics like geo-based data, time data, attachment viewing, click-throughs, and other interactions that offer more nuanced information about behaviors. This data is beneficial to inform all of the above tactics we’ve discussed and more.
Segment leads and customers
Black Friday is a great time to bring in the leads. But, all of those contacts can get overwhelming if you don’t organize them in a manageable, helpful way.
Group leads intelligently
The right CRM software will make grouping leads easier by comparing each new lead to predetermined categories of characteristics. Most software can automatically segment based on specific groupings like demographics or industry, or you can set the groupings yourself if you want more specific categories. Once you have your contacts segmented, it’s easier to search by age group, location, or any other relevant data to your marketing needs.
Segmenting is extra important during the holidays because a strong CRM software will auto-assign leads by territory to handle surges in sales. You can configure your territory rules to automatically assign all incoming leads to the group they satisfy, saving precious time.
Lead scoring
In addition to segmenting, CRM software can help with lead scoring, so you don’t waste time on leads that are unlikely to convert. For example, CRM email monitoring can show you which prospects are leaving unopened emails vs. those who open them, click a link, or navigate to your site. Data like this will help you identify the highest value prospects to prioritize your time and resources better.
Effective lead generation is about quality, not quantity. Ultimately, the best way to understand which leads are good is to know where they are in the buyer’s journey. Leads who are direct, have communicated to your sales team that they intend to buy, make inquiries, and respond fast to your responses are of the highest quality because they are nearing the end of the buyer journey.
Take advantage of automation
Remember those buyer personas we talked about? You can use segmented leads to trigger different messaging for different personas, different stages of the buyer journey, etc.
Rely on automation to handle your email and SMS campaigns for you. Write your email and SMS messages ahead of time, and then schedule them to be sent throughout the month. This will be much more efficient than writing each message right before sending it. It’s important to write different messages for different types of customers.
Consider launching different triggered email and SMS campaigns, for example, one for early-stage prospects, one for one-time buyers, one for people who haven’t logged into their account recently, etc. The content in emails should be personalized, but the sending can be triggered to automatically go out to segmented contact lists at different times or based on different user actions.
Warm-up cold contacts
CRM can help your sales teams better manage outreach and form long-term relationships with contacts until they become clients or repeat customers. Automation and streamlined scheduling make sales activities far less time-consuming and error-prone, so sales staff can spend more time forming meaningful connections.
Reconnect with existing customers
As you monitor your website traffic and sales history, you will probably find some customers make one purchase or sign up for your email list, then don’t come back. Similarly, if you have a subscription business, you may see customers whose engagement slacks off over time.
Your CRM tools can help you address this by targeting unengaged customers to get them buying again. You can automate follow-up communications, so customers don’t feel ignored. With subscription-based models, you can send automotive renewal reminders so your customers remember that they are subscribing to your service and get back into regular use.
There is no time better than Black Friday for this because people will already be in the shopping mindset and hunting for promotions. They’ll remember that they had a positive experience with your company in the past and jump at the follow-up offer or discount code you send them.
Follow up with cold leads
If a prospect showed initial interest and then didn’t follow up, it may be time to follow up with them. CRM data can help you detect this behavior and address it by reminding you to contact them or nurturing prospects with content tailored to their interests. A personalized email or call from a friendly salesperson will remind them why they were interested in your service and give them an easy way to reconnect with you.
Identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities
Shoppers will be rushing to get in on the best deals for Black Friday, but you don’t necessarily want them to grab the cheapest offer possible. Instead, you want to know when to sell them something bigger and better.
Know when to sell
Simply put, AI-powered data insights can help you make better sales decisions. CRM tools like Freshworks’ Freddy AI can help you better understand your customers’ needs at different stages of their journey. For example, this tool will offer recommendations of the next action you should take with a particular client based on past interactions across multiple touchpoints.
Let’s say you manage a subscription service for online courses. Your sales insights show you that many customers are individually buying a data science course and a business course. Well, just in time for the holidays, consider offering a bundle where you sell those two courses plus a couple of other relevant ones for a bargain price. Your subscribers will be pleased about the deal they’re getting, and you’re making more money on the bundle than you were with individual purchases.
Integrate seamlessly
When choosing CRM software, you want to make sure it integrates with other business-critical software. For example, you should look for invoicing software with critical features such as branded templates and automatic billing for repeat customers. And you will want to make sure that you represent the payment history of your long-time customers in your CRM.
Keeping all this straight will make things much easier when it comes time to follow up with old subscribers and get them reengaged. Plus, when Black Friday brings in an influx of web traffic, you don’t want your checkout process, chat features, or anything else to be bogged down.
See how campaigns are performing
CRM software can generate detailed reports on your campaigns and see how they compare to past ones so you can adapt your messaging as you go. You can also determine whether you’re sending your emails to the right person. This can make a big difference, particularly for B2B companies who want to communicate with someone with purchasing power, not just a gatekeeper.
For example, if you’re selling invoicing software to large companies, you might be contacting a company of 100 or more people trying to land a call with the right target. CRM data can help give you a complete profile of different target people to check if you are interested in your solution and have the power to make that decision for the company.
Identify upselling opportunities
Email monitoring is also an excellent way to identify promising sales opportunities based on engagement. You can see if an email is opened and when and whether the recipient takes any action. Someone who opens your email immediately and clicks a link to your site is probably a better lead than someone who only opens one out of every three emails. Then, you can immediately follow up with the engaged recipient so you can move on that sale while they’re interested.
Automate triggered responses
Good CRM email tracking will let you set up automatic emails based on actions and insights. For example, you can sync your calendar to send appointment reminders to your clients before a sales call. Or, you could trigger automatic discounts to be sent if someone leaves an unpurchased item in their cart overnight. Always be clear in your messaging about why they are receiving the email so they trust the legitimacy and respond promptly to your call to action.
Leverage chatbots
Robust CRM solutions will offer chat campaigns as part of good customer management. Using a chatbot provides several benefits in improving customer experience and increasing the reliability of your company. In fact, 74% of customers report preferring to work with a chabot when searching for answers to simple questions.
Advantages of chatbots include:
1. Improve customer service
Hopefully, you’re already using chatbots for this purpose, but if not, Black Friday is a good time to start. Suppose you’re doing well with your digital marketing. In that case, you can anticipate an influx of web traffic on Thanksgiving weekend, and you will likely need to automate some communications to keep up.
With more traffic will come more questions, returns, etc., and it’s helpful to push off the more minor of these to an AI-powered chat feature. However, make sure you have the option to elevate a ticket to a human in the case of more complex situations. You can set up your bot to handle specific flows based on common situational use cases. Chat transcripts also provide valuable buyer intent data for developing personas and personalizing future communications.
2. Use targeted chat campaigns
Customer service usually involves a client making the initial contact, but there’s no reason you can’t also make the first move with CRM chat features. For example, you can use sales insights to trigger chat pop-ups on pages with high buying intent, like price comparison pages and checkouts. This is where your prospects will most likely convert or flake, and your chat feature can help push them in the right direction.
3. Get Black Friday ready
Chatbots are a great way to improve customer experience and scale customer interactions. You want to be sure your site is prepared to handle the influx of visitors around the holidays. While we’re talking about your website scalability, it’s worth mentioning that as you prepare for the Black Friday rush, you might want to consider switching to cloud hosting.
According to web development expert Alex Williams of Hosting Data, cloud hosting benefits virtual space without requiring you to pay for a whole server.
“It’s simply far less likely that several servers all across the world will crash at the same time, and thus send your web site down the chute,” says Williams. “If your site suddenly needs a surge of resources to handle a spike in traffic – no problem. Take advantage of viral attention without worrying about your site squeezing your bandwidth.” Black Friday may require that surge of resources, and you want to make sure your website is equipped to handle it.
Conclusion
Studies have shown that salespeople spend two-thirds of their time on non-revenue-generating activities – busy work like email sending and data entry. This is not a good use of resources or personnel hours, and you will start to feel the crunch at rush times like Black Friday. Instead, opt for a robust CRM software solution that will automate the grunt work and make it easier to manage clients and gain valuable insights from data analytics. Your customers, sales teams, and holiday revenue will thank you.
