It’s the most wonderful time of the year: for families, children, and companies who need a boost in their sales. With Christmas around the corner, there is no better time to be thinking about how to convert customers, bring back returning ones, and come up with original and interesting marketing techniques. When it comes to...
It’s the most wonderful time of the year: for families, children, and companies who need a boost in their sales. With Christmas around the corner, there is no better time to be thinking about how to convert customers, bring back returning ones, and come up with original and interesting marketing techniques. When it comes to marketing around Christmas time, customer knowledge that you have collected over the year in your CRM becomes your most valuable tool to help you bypass the competition and get your customers set up with the products and services they are excited and interested in buying.
Discover What is Customer Knowledge and How Do You Get it?.
If you are working on collecting customer knowledge and wondering how you can best leverage it to work for you, this blog post outlines five ways that customer knowledge can help you create the most profitable christmas marketing campaign yet.
1. Knowing their family situation
It’s great that you know everything there is to know about one of your favorite returning customers, Kelly. But unfortunately, during the holidays, Kelly isn’t buying for herself. She is buying for her friends and family, so knowing what family members Kelly has and what she will need to buy is one of the best ways to prepare your company for holiday purchases. Remember that the holidays are all about buying for others, and use this fact to your advantage in your targeted marketing.
2. Knowing what products they already own
Part of knowing your customers buying habits is knowing what they buy, and therefore what complementary products or services you can offer them. Your current customers are your most valuable and profitable customers, and it is much easier to upsell a current customer than it is to try and convert a new customer (see infographic). Therefore, finding creative, incentivized, and strategic ways to upsell your customers with complementary products and services is one of the most profitable things you can do during the holiday season.
Use your customer knowledge database to answer questions like:
- What products does this customer already buy?
- What do other customers buy alongside these products that I could offer to this customer?
- What new services could we offer for this product that could help make it more useful/interesting?
An example could be to offer a premium membership to your software customers that offers them around the clock technical service if they pay a small fee. This could help them get more out of the software that they already buy, and get you a profit without finding a new customer. Whatever you decide, making sure you know what products your customers buy again and again is a great way to arm yourself for the holiday season.
3. Knowing their holiday pain points
Another great use of customer knowledge is determining what your customers’ pain points are so that you can come up with creative ways to solve them. Of course, the main goal of your product or service is already to solve a specific pain point for your target customer. However, special offers for the holiday season can take this a step further and solve holiday specific pain points like long lines, last minute ordering, or brainstorming gift ideas for those hard-to-buy-for family members. Sending out a smart survey asking a few of your best customers what holiday pain points they would love for you to help them solve is a great way to find out what solutions you should invest your time and energy in. Whether it’s free shipping, a blog post about gift options, or offering a new holiday product, you will solve your customers problems, niche your company a little more, and make the most of the holiday season all in one step.
4. Knowing their location
Not only does knowing your customer’s location help you determine things like whether or not you can offer free shipping (which is highly recommended), it also helps you market to them with seasonal products or services that are relevant to their needs. You should plan on having a different marketing campaign for your northern and southern customers. While your northern customers might appreciate a snowed in, hot cocoa approach to holiday marketing, your southern customers might love that you offer an alternative to the ‘white christmas” theme that doesn’t apply to them and their lifestyle.
5. Knowing their customer service needs
Any high performing CRM manager knows that customer service is the responsibility of the entire company, so equip your team as well as you can by giving them customer knowledge they can use. The holiday season is an important time for your customer service team to be in full gear, and having a CRM full of useful customer data is the best way that you can prepare your customer service team for the massive amount of frustrated phone calls, last minute purchases, exchanges and returns they are about to receive. Use customer knowledge like order histories, location tracking, and communication preferences (does your customer prefer a personalized phone call, or a fast, automatic text?) to ensure the most efficient and painless customer service as possible.
Discover 10+ questions to ask customers after an interaction with your call centre.
Marketing during the holidays is all about knowing who your customers are and what they need so that you can break through the noise and reach them when they are ready and eager to spend. Use your CRM to your advantage to make sure you are staying ahead of the game, and watch your holiday profits soar.
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