Using Your Black Friday & Cyber Monday Customer Data for Follow Up

Black Friday and Cyber Monday signal the beginning of the holiday season and businesses that participate can expect an influx of new customers. With each sale, you get a wealth of customer data that can be used during the holiday season and beyond.

This data can be utilized in many ways but one of the most effective uses is to follow up with customers. If you’re not familiar with the concept, following up is simply reaching out to customers after an event has occurred. You can use the opportunity to present new products, understand their experience, or make sure they’re enjoying their purchases.

The follow up is a versatile way to communicate with customers and can be used to do everything from improve loyalty to generating revenue. In this article, you’ll learn a few ways to use the customer data that’s sitting in your CRM software to follow up with customers and improve your business.

Use customer data to personalize experiences

As technology advances, personalization becomes more important. Consumers see more marketing and sales messages than ever so a generic follow up is unlikely to get their attention. This is where you can use the customer data you collected during Black Friday or Cyber Monday to create a better experience.

For example, a customer gets a discounted massage for herself and a friend during the November sale. The spa that’s providing the deal is new and she’s been meaning to check it out so it was the perfect opportunity. The date rolls around and the ladies have a great time. The service is excellent, the ambience is just right, and they feel like royalty. After that day, she doesn’t visit the spa again because she occupied during the holiday season.

The spa is busy with new customers and has been using their email marketing channel to send notifications about the latest sales. There’s no space for customer follow ups until the beginning of January. The spa doesn’t send a generic email asking about the spa experience. It has been too long for the customer to articulate it clearly. Instead, the spa leverages the customer data in its CRM to send a personalized email offering the customer another spa day just like the one before. It even mentions the masseuse that took care of her last time.

Since the customer has positive associations with the spa, she takes advantage of the offer. When she arrives, the staff ask ushers her in and takes care of her. After her stay, they ask her for a quick review. This kind of interaction is a direct result of properly leveraging customer data. CRM platforms like Vcita, which are geared towards contact management, make this simple. It doesn’t matter if you have customers that spend $25 or clients that spend $2,500. You can deliver the same level of personalization to each of them.

Target the right customer segments

Not all customers are created equally. Some customers will buy every product and service you have no matter the price point. Others will patronize your business once and you’ll never hear from them again. This doesn’t say anything about your business. Rather, it’s how the world is.

Use your historical customer data to find the common characteristics of each customer segment. For example, a business digs into their customer relationship database and realizes that the customers which stay with them the longest usually spend over $200 on their first purchase. The ones that don’t come back tend to spend less than $30 on a first purchase.

Armed with that data, the business is able to determine which kind of follow up campaigns to send customers acquired during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The customers that spent more than $200 may get a lighter follow up and different messaging because they’re the least likely to churn in the near future. The customers that spent less than $30 may get a more aggressive campaign with benefit driven messaging because they’re the most likely cohort to churn.

CRM software solutions like Pipedrive are designed to make tracking customer segments simple. You’re able to add labels and custom fields to quickly identify which segment the contact belongs to. In the example above, new customers that spent $30 may be labeled “high risk of churn.”

Create better offers

The offer, right after the targeting which was discussed in the last section, is the single most important aspect of sales. Your customer relationship database can help you find the parts of your deals that resonate the most with your customers. With those insights, you can put together an offer that’s irresistible to the right person.

Before you launch your next follow up campaign, go through your CRM software and look for patterns in the deals that resulted in a sale. Did they include a value-added service? Was there a discount or feature added in that made the difference? When looking for patterns, segment by customer type or deal value because what works for one group may not matter to another group.

After you’ve found the individual components that make a great offer for a target customer group, combine it and test different ways of presenting it. An offer is one thing but if it’s not introduced to your customers the right way, it won’t have the effect you’re looking for. Send out multiple follow up promotions with the offers you’ve put together so you can find the one that works best for each customer segment.

Build a customer journey map

A customer journey map is a visual representation of all the experiences a customer has with you. It encompasses the entire lifecycle of a customer which means it represents what happens before and after the sale. When you understand and optimize the customer experience, you can expect to double revenue within 36 months.

A customer journey may seem straightforward on the surface. Someone interacts with your business, buys a product, and that’s the end of it. In reality, there are many factors. Maybe someone visited your website but where did they come from? Was it a referral, social media, or search engines? Once they landed on your website, what pages did they interact with before buying a product or scheduling a call? What happens after they schedule a call? What’s the estimated time from initial touch to paying customer?

All of these are made clear with a customer journey map. It combines historical data from past customers and data from new customers to predict future needs and deal flow. CRM systems like Hubspot combine many of the features you need to track interactions and build a holistic view of the customer journey.

When you have this understanding, you’re able to decide the best time to follow-up with customers, what kind of messages to send, and actions that need to be taken by customers to move a deal or sale along. If those actions aren’t taken, it may be a sign that a different approach should be taken with your follow up campaigns to ensure you achieve your goals.

Conclusion

This year’s holiday season is expected to be the biggest one in history. There are countless opportunities to make extra revenue in a short amount of time. It’s important to consider what you’ll do after someone becomes a customer so the relationship stays strong and they patronize you for a long time to come.

This article has outlined multiple ways to follow up with your new customers. It can also be applied to old customers. Choose a few tactics to use in your business but don’t try everything at once. Implement them one at a time, measure, and improve. Eventually, your follow ups will yield more revenue, reviews, and goodwill for your business.