Every year, businesses try on many different and new approaches to skyrocket sales opportunities in the busiest times of the year. In this lockdown period, consumers’ online spending patterns and behavior have been continuously developing. This has urged many merchants to sell online and led the e-commerce world to be more saturated than ever. Shaping this holiday season like no others in the past, putting extra effort to understand changes in the lockdown period is crucial. In this article, we will introduce to you some of the most useful apps on the Shopify app store to support your BCFM campaign, and help you stand out amongst direct competitors in this pandemic.
The uncertainties that 2020 has brought greatly changed consumers’ online shopping behavior. Research has shown that 73% of the consumers who tried different brands over lockdown intend to include their discoveries into a routine. Moreover, consumers are seen to continuously search for new brands and are keener to try out new products, looking outside their regular remit. By investing in audience retargeting, you could seize this opportunity; expand your audience base with look-alike customers, build up impressions, and acquire potentials who are on the hunt for BFCM good deals.
Ako Retargeting
With the Ako Retargeting app installed, a Facebook product catalog from your existing products on your Shopify store will automatically be produced. You can personalize your ad creatives to the demand and enhance ad experiences with the rich formats (image, video, carousel, collection) provided. Instead of providing the same repetitive ads, the app offers sequential retargeting, a sequence of experience of delivering different ad creatives to website visitors within different time frames after they leave your website.
Furthermore, you can also set Dynamic Product Retargeting ads, delivering the most relevant product information and special offerings with carousel ads to re-engage with shopping cart abandoners, those who previously added items they are interested in into their shopping cart but did not purchase. This cost-effective tool ensures that your ads are delivered at the right time, right impression, and right cost. Helping your business build-up impressions effectively, your brand will be what first pops in the customers’ head when looking for a BFCM bargain. This could not only lead to more conversion of sales but also optimize your ROAS. You can learn how to build your sequential retargeting campaign here and start your 14 days of free trial: https://apps.shopify.com/ako-retargeting
Growave
Growave is an all-in-one marketing platform that helps Shopify brands reach and engage with their audience, and increase conversion rates with ease. Growave’s key features include some of the most essential tools for BFCM: Loyalty and Rewards, Wishlists, Reviews, Instagram, Social Login, and Automated Emails. During the holiday season, you could make use of Wishlist to monitor out-of-stock items and notify customers about their favorite items being on sale with an automated email, launch referral campaigns for more traffic and engagement, and use Shoppable Instagram galleries to allow customers to shop directly from the uploaded posts.
Also, keep in mind that you would want to retain your loyal customer base even after the BFCM. Growave offers loyalty programs such as points, referral, and VIP tiers that enable your business to establish the connection between customers over others as well as customer reviews and user-generated content features to help build up and enhance your brand impression. Growave’s features could replace the needs of installing 4–7 different apps, supporting various marketing activities all in just one App, it might just be the app that you have been looking for.
Stockbot
Inventory planning is highly correlated with your marketing decisions and strategies. However, it is not as easy to manage your inventory, with Stockbot it could help you keep track and forecast your inventory efficiently. The app identifies items that are below the low stock level you set and reminds you via email alerts with a report of the list of items that are needed to be restocked. The email also updates on items that just turn low on stocks, providing purchasing behavior insights as well as enough lead time for you to restock before your best-selling products run out.
In addition to this, the app’s forecasting plan helps you understand the amount of inventory you need to fulfill future orders based on your past sales and lead time. This is extremely useful during BFCM since it gives you an idea of the items that are likely to see an uptick in demand. Furthermore, the app supports the identification of slow-moving items in your store. This is where you can take action to run promotions or bundle up a set range of products to organize your inventory smartly. Not being able to meet the demands of your customers promptly can affect your sales drastically and Stockbot prevents this by helping you stock at the right time and the right quantity.
Recom.ai
The holiday season is one of the most important and hectic times for any store and with customer acquisition not getting cheaper, you can achieve and maximize higher average order value and better profit with upselling and cross-selling. BFCM is not about who offers the biggest discount instead, it’s about who optimizes sales by offering the products consumers want at the best price possible. Once you know your best selling products, the items consumers are looking for, you can present customers with the option to buy complementary products or “upgrade” their order (e.g. offering a belt to go with a purchase of pants). Recom.ai helps you save the game with automated upselling and cross-selling campaigns, surfacing the offer at the right time and in the right place while still crafting targeted recommendations to customers.
The app allows you to take full advantage of the holiday buying season no matter how big your business is, with a machine-learning product recommendation engine that does the heavy lifting for you; delivering personalized, trending, recently viewed, and new products. Here are several ways to use personalized product recommendations and maximize your sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday:
- Introduce your new arrivals and trending stuff
- Highlight best-sellers and Bought Together products
- Offer relevant product at the point of purchase
- Create a Buy One, Get One for A Discount (BOGO) offers
- Promote related and recommended items
With just a little effort, some willingness, and smart guidance, Recom.ai can help your upselling and cross-selling run in no time effortlessly and create sales opportunities.
Re:amaze
Re:amaze is a helpdesk and customer messaging platform designed for e-commerce businesses that can not only help increase customer support efficiency but also increase conversions and sales, helping eCommerce brands build out a multi-channel and automated support infrastructure. Some of the core features in the apps include: Multi-channel shared inbox built for teams to handle emails and chats, fully custom chatbots with unique dialogue flows to automate every engagement and live chat built-in with fully integrated FAQ.
The latest statistics from Statista shows that we’re at a point where over 60% of online shoppers prefer digital self-service tools. With the trend of strong adoption for a chatbot, the productivity improvements and lowered response time are predicted to save a combined 2.5 billion hours for both businesses and consumers by 2023. Hence, to help cope with more traffic, more customer support volume, and less than desirable order completion rates in this week spectacle, e-commerce businesses like yourself need to consider the implementation of chatbots that offer one or more of these core experiences:
- A bot that can greet customers when they arrive on-site
- A bot that can send targeted messages to customers based on current shopping behavior
- A bot that can send targeted messages based on previous shopping history and purchase history
- A concierge-like shopping bot for helping with product discovery
- A bot that answers specific customer questions
As the year goes by, merchants are noticed to run their campaigns longer and splash offerings earlier whereas consumers are seen to expect lower pricing and look out for promotions way ahead of the event day. This has put many businesses at a disadvantageous position of being less profitable. Instead of pushing prices low, setting a different strategy, and using various efficient tools is what you should be doing to drive sales. Moreover, cascading the new insights of the changing consumer behavior and incorporating some of the most useful apps could efficiently help your operation. Now, it’s time for you to head start others in the market, take in different considerations, and effectively plan to create an outstanding BFMC campaign during this holiday season!
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Author Bio
Irene Wijaya is the Business development at Akohub. Akohub helps merchants turn website visitors into customers, recovers abandoned carts and increases sales conversion rates with Full-Funnel Retargeting Campaigns. Feel free to try Ako Retargeting app 14 days free trial from the Shopify App Store.
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Ako Retargeting on Shopify: https://apps.shopify.com/ako-retargeting
Contact us: service@akohub.com