Holiday Marketing Series Part 4: See Your Return

In this fourth part of our series on how to get a 20x return on your holiday marketing spend, we’re focusing on seeing your return.

You’ve built an audience that’s actively engaged with your brand well in advance of the holiday season. You’ve nurtured your chatbot by collecting, learning from, and utilizing smart data. And you’ve amassed this audience knowing that, while you won’t see your return immediately, your ROI will come in folds when the holidays roll around.

But seeing your return from a chat marketing campaign doesn’t mean sitting back, having a few drinks, and idly eating your turducken while millions of sales pour in. Even when you do make those sales, they certainly aren’t the end of your continuous engagement with customers. Quite the opposite, in fact. Building and engaging a captivated audience means the onus is on your brand to keep that audience re-engaged throughout the entire year, long after the initial sale is complete.

After all, the impact of holiday sales has trended downward in recent years: in 2014, holiday revenue accounted for less than 20% of total revenue for the American economy. And “The Holidays” are but a few of many commerce-heavy holidays on the calendar. Let’s not forget Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Back to School, Graduation, and the myriad other holidays that inspire customers to buy. Add in seasonal sales, product launches, and other campaigns, and you have endless opportunities throughout the year to engage your customers.

Furthermore, the whole beauty of personalized conversation and smart data is that your brand can continuously learn and evolve alongside your customers. Is your customer a new mom? Did they move to a new house, or a new city? Are they recently single? All those changes can have a major impact on their purchasing behavior.

Say you’re a homeware brand, and your customer has recently moved from a rental apartment to a house they’ve purchased. Thanks to the data you’ve amassed on them previously, you know they like colorful midcentury-modern furniture, eclectic pieces, and that they live with their partner and two children. Your bot can ask the customer what pieces they’ve brought with from their apartment, what new pieces they’ve purchased, and what they still need. The bot can then suggest pieces based on previous purchases, adhering to the customer’s budget, and send along a coupon code to entice the customer to buy.

And that’s just one instance of the chatbot evolving along with the customer over time. When brands create a personalized, intimate shopping experience, the customer is more likely to stay loyal to the brand in the long-term. The most innovative and customer-focused brands know that it’s important to stay engaged with the customer, and attuned to their needs, throughout the year, not only during the holidays. In fact, it’s important to re-engage customers and connect with them through their entire lifecycle as a customer. People want to feel heard and valued, and if your brand can provide that over time, you have a major competitive advantage in today’s crowded global marketplace.

Consequently, that 20x ROI on your holiday spend could easily be double that, or triple. Instead of paying for retargeting ads and sending a slew of ineffective emails, a chatbot is an automated marketer, customer-service agent, retention tool, and brand ambassador all in one. When you select the right chat platform, the platform that enables you to evolve and grow alongside your audience, your chat marketing strategy will vastly outperform any other digital strategy.

Learn more about how Chat Marketing can help your brand at Chatkit.com.

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