The final chapter: how to send better BFCM SMS . We’re covering some of the highlights and tips from our Head of Marketing, Rach Hooper and her years of marketing campaigning and work with marketers worldwide to get you through Black Friday and Cyber Monday from the Ecommerce Australia podcast. It’s about how to do SMS marketing by an SMS marketer.
See the other articles:
Listen to the podcast
Want to know more? These tips are from Rach’s podcast with Ryan @ecommerce Australia
Listen to the PodcastTo offer or not to offer this BFCM (and BFCM SMS)
When it comes to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it’s hard not to think about offers and discounts immediately. It’s what we’ve been trained as marketers to offer and as consumers to receive. But great marketing is about setting the expectation for your audience and being in the right place with the right message at the right time.
So not every BFCM SMS or campaign needs a discount. Valuable offers can come in many different shapes.
It’s a question of what your customer is doing, their process and buying cycle, and how customer behaviour can change. And this is where linking up with good customer data or a loyalty platform (and integrating) can be beneficial in using segmentation and automation to trigger your SMS campaigns.
Thinking differently about offers and channels
Customers don’t always need a discount incentive. Unless you’ve trained that customer into knowing that that’s the behaviour they can expect from you. It’s all a question of how you train and educate and set expectations for customers as a brand. If you always will send a discount, then customers will come to expect that from you. Use the SMS channel educationally and conversationally. It can be more empowering to help customers enable power customers to have a deeper engagement with your brand.
Consider early access, ensuring you give your most important and valued customers priority access to time-limited lines. One makeup brand made sure must-have and constantly out-of-stock lipstick (thanks to TikTok) was available exclusively for a small group of highly loyal, highly engaged customers when it was re-stocked. The SMS channel could be the perfect VIP connection so that those customers were the first to know when was available and that they had money-can’t-buy-first access. BFCM SMS ensures your customers see your offer in a timely and exclusive way that doesn’t get lost in a world of notifications or emails.
That’s how you can take the SMS channel to not a price-sensitive request but a highly engaging channel that your customers repeatedly return to.
So, how do Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year
Black Friday and Cyber Monday season will be an absolute cracker this year. And we know it because many of the clients we’re working with are planning it now. And when we say they’re planning it now, this isn’t just about what will be in that campaign copy and creative, whether that’s paid, social, email or your BFCM SMS.
It’s about building and strengthening your database now.
You could be
- Collecting more opt-ins
- Building more SMS consistency through warm-up campaigns and regular contact
- Developing SMS exclusivity with SMS-only offers
- Creating anticipation for early access for VIPs
- Ensuring your loyalty base is ready to go
It’s so that when Black Friday and Cyber Monday (and Singles Day) comes, you can target those customers and make sure that that channel is converting in the best possible way – and mobile-first.
We predict that it will be a season for your loyal and returning customers that drive your campaign revenue and deliver substantial customer lifetime value for the ultimate ROI across all channels
We’re expecting an incredible September, and October, leading into Cyber Monday and Black Friday. It will be about building the most robust possible database and datasets and segments and target audiences now so that we will see an absolute blitz for BFCM. And it’s going to be massive.
What about the early access creep?
We love the idea of early access, and it’s getting earlier and earlier in November. Direct channels like SMS and email are great for early access and to keep paid media clean for broader marketing efforts. Try using the SMS as your exclusive offer channel for your preferred customers and keep early-sales creep away from your new acquisition, socials and website until you’re ready to go hard on the sales days. It also means you can get that CLTV dollar earlier in November rather than waiting for the sales days and balancing your dispatch and shipping.
Is it too late to start now?
Absolutely not.
Yes, many marketers are actively collecting mobile numbers in exchange for great offers, great exclusivity, excellent early access in outstanding prioritisation so that the consumer will be the one who wins this year. From a marketer’s and ecommerce manager’s point of view, we’ll see customer revenue coming through the door. That means constant customer lifetime returns because those customers will recognise the channel for what it is – a precious channel. And we’ll see them this Black Friday, Christmas, end-of-year stocktake sales, and on and on next year.
Happy BFCM!