The holiday season is approaching fast and with it, a lot of chances for successful marketing. Irrespective of the industry you are in, the holiday season offers a lot of opportunities for your business to join in on the festivities and cheer, and sell more.
With this post, we will talk about holiday marketing on WhatsApp and thus help you gear up for the holiday season.
Why WhatsApp for holiday marketing?
A lot can be achieved through holiday marketing on WhatsApp due to the following seasonal shopping trends:
• Customers often plan as early as October for the end-of-year holiday season to shop for their favorite products at better prices.
• Customers often go online during the holiday season to find something new and more than half of them end up discovering brands and products through Meta platforms like WhatsApp.
• Shoppers are using Meta technologies at different stages of their shopping journey.
• More than half of the customers do their holiday shopping during seasonal discount sales.
• BFCM is a key event during which a majority of shoppers make significant purchases.
• Meta technologies have a lot of influence in shaping major sales day shopping, irrespective of the time of the year or region.
These trends really highlight what potential WhatsApp can tap into when it comes to holiday marketing.
Tips to set up a holiday marketing calendar on WhatsApp
These are some of the most important tips to follow when setting up a holiday marketing calendar on WhatsApp:
1. Plan key dates
Plan all the important dates early so as to stay timely with your holiday marketing campaigns and ensure consistency and effective execution of your strategy.
2. Leverage WhatsApp ads
Create visibility by leveraging click-to-WhatsApp ads, so that more people end up reaching you on WhatsApp, thus increasing the reach and efficiency of your WhatsApp holiday marketing.
3. Promote WhatsApp profile
Use social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook etc. and channels like email and your website to promote your WhatsApp profile. You can also add QR codes to your packaging to get more customers to sign up on WhatsApp.
4. Segment Audience
Segment your audiences to better target your holiday marketing campaign messages, thus ensuring relevance and adequate impact. You can easily do this by using a good WhatsApp Business API solution like Interakt.
5. Create themed content
Create holiday-themed content to entice audiences. Use WhatsApp templates to promote holiday gifting guides, videos, lookbooks and similar content to your audience.
6. Schedule reminders
Setting up automations using a WhatsApp Business API solution like Interakt is highly recommended. This includes the holiday sale promotions as well as follow-up reminders to stay on top of the customer’s minds.
7. Incorporate exclusives
Incorporate exclusive deals and discounts in your holiday marketing campaigns to make customers feel valued and special. You can also get more people to subscribe to WhatsApp updates by offering channel-exclusive deals.
8. Set up auto-replies
Setting up auto-replies for instant responses to customers and automating support and assistance with custom workflows is crucial for holiday marketing campaigns. This helps you provide shopping assistance to customers even if there is a high volume of queries.
9. Optimize timing
Understand and monitor when your customers are the most active. You can monitor the engagement rate on your campaigns with the help of WhatsApp analytics on Interakt.
10. Track engagement
Interakt’s analytics feature can be used to track engagement beyond mere send and open rate insights. This helps you identify the type of holiday campaigns that drive higher engagement and conversion rates.
Automated WhatsApp messages for holiday campaigns
Here are some of the different campaigns we recommend setting up for the holiday season:
Set up welcome messages
Send new subscribers on WhatsApp, automated festive welcome messages to make them feel a part of your brand’s community. This can also be accompanied by an exclusive holiday offer for a better impact.
Merry Christmas and welcome to the [BRAND NAME] family!
Here is a special something just for you- Flat 20% off on your first purchase!
Send countdown reminders
Automate countdown reminder messages for major sales days or special holiday deals. This not only alerts customers of what is about to go down but also builds anticipation regarding the deal or sales event.
Hey, [NAME].
Just a heads up… Our biggest winter sale with unbelievable prices across all categories going live in just 24 hours!
Create abandoned cart alerts
Send personalized abandoned cart reminders to customers along with a special holiday discount. With an incentive attached to it, customers are more likely to get back to their carts and complete the purchase.
Hello [NAME]!
We see that you have left your cart unattended.
Get back to it now and get a special New Year discount of 10% on your purchase!
Schedule seasonal updates
Send automated messages alerting customers about holiday season stocks, popular items, special collections and holiday discounts. This is important to keep the customers in the loop about the best deals and products that they might be interested in.
Great news [NAME]!
Our Winter collection is here and it might be the quintessential winter shopping experience you were looking for!
Offer last-minute deals
Offer limited-time deals and last-minute offers to customers through automated messages. These offers are excellent at creating a sense of urgency and FOMO, compelling customers to act fast and make the purchase.
Hello [NAME].
Here’s a special Thanksgiving present just for you.
Get 20% off on your next purchase along with free shipping! Offer only valid till midnight so hurry up!
Send order confirmations
You can automate order confirmations and delivery updates to ensure that you are not missing a beat. You can further add a holiday theme to these messages to make them more intriguing.
Season’s greetings [NAME]!
We have received your order of [PRODUCT] and have finished processing.
The order will be dispatched shortly.
Set up holiday greetings
To ensure that your brand remains on top of the customers’ minds, you can share automated holiday greetings for key holidays.
Greetings [NAME].
[BRAND] would like to wish you and your loved ones a joyous Christmas, filled with warmth and love!
Enable re-engagement messages
Once the holiday season is over, you can still share automated thank you messages and future shopping incentives to maintain engagement and build a long-term customer relationship.
Hello [NAME].
This Holiday season we have been glad to have you as part of the [BRAND] family.
We hope to see more of you around here. Thank you for shopping with us and have a joyous year ahead!
Request reviews
Request reviews from customers who have already bought a product through a clever automated message. These reviews can be used to create social proof and thus attract more buyers.
Happy New Year [NAME].
How are you liking your [PRODUCT]?
Tell us all about it and stand a chance to win discount coupons of up to 50% off!
Must-haves to 2x your holiday marketing results on WhatsApp
Below are some of the must-haves we recommend to double the impact of your WhatsApp marketing campaigns:
WhatsApp flow to create engaging holiday campaigns
Use WhatsApp flows to create an interactive experience that guides customers through various stages of the buying journey – all without leaving the chat app. These flows use automated, structured messages to engage users without creating too many distractions, making them highly effective for holiday marketing campaigns.
Businesses can design flows tailored to different objectives, such as lead generation, product recommendations, cross-selling, and appointment scheduling during holidays.
For example, travel businesses promoting deals on tours can use WhatsApp to first promote the sale, then nurture the interest, gather more details for lead generation and then set up follow-ups for booking the package.
Bulk messages for holiday campaign management
With WhatsApp bulk messages you can share messages to a wider audience at scale. There are two ways in which you can send WhatsApp bulk messages.
With the WhatsApp Business App, you can share messages to 256 contacts while with the WhatsApp Business API, you can increase your messaging limit.
Bulk messages are a highly effective way to reach a lot of customers with your holiday marketing messages, allowing brands to share festive greetings, updates, timely offers and more, to drive better engagement and sales.
Multi-agent access for managing high holiday demand
During the peak holiday season, you need to have a way to assign conversations and manage the high volume of queries and conversations.
Solutions like Interakt can easily help in setting up a WhatsApp CRM and shared inboxes, which can help you better handle customer conversations. This way multiple agents can access and handle conversations without running into any setbacks while providing 24×7 support even at the peak of the festive season.
Holiday marketing success story of Bombay Sweet Shop
With its innovative take on traditional Indian sweets, Bombay Sweet Shop has become an industry name that has become known for bringing authentic and diverse sweets from all over the country to its customers.
The sweet shop gets high volumes of queries during peak festive seasons and WhatsApp has become its chosen way to answer them. But this meant a lot of time was being utilized for answering each individual query.
With Interakt and a chatbot named Boondi, the business was able to automate customer communication regarding product-related queries, order delivery updates and more.
Using Interakt the brand was able to share timely personalized marketing notifications informing customers of their new offerings, order-related updates and more. As a result, the brand was able to 4x their revenue during the holidays!
Conclusion
Holiday marketing on WhatsApp is a lot about timeliness.
The success of your campaigns is not just dependent on the deals you set up, but also when your campaigns go live.
This is where brands using WhatsApp automations to address the different stages of the buying journey come into play.
But to be able to really segment and personalize WhatsApp marketing campaigns at scale, you need the WhatsApp Business API.
