How Soprano CPaaS Can Support Your Black Friday Strategy

Is your Black Friday strategy a unique opportunity to capture or engage new and existing clients? Known as one of the busiest online shopping days of the year, it serves as one of the most important commercial dates in sales globally. This is not limited to the retail sector but any company providing goods and services.

In fact, its growth and significance has become so widely accepted that we have moved from a single dedicated day to extending Black Friday to days and weeks after. We even have a new day, Cyber Monday, a 24-hour online shopping event as an extension to Black Friday sales.

Disruptions wrought by the coronavirus pandemic have also resulted in shoppers changing their shopping habits and migrating to a digital environment.

According to Nosto, a leading eCommerce platform, 67% of the people surveyed have increased their online purchases. However, in-store purchases continue not to be insignificant at least from a purchase intent perspective.

Leading digital experience platform, Raydiant, found that 46% of the people they surveyed would, given an option, prefer to purchase in-person instead of online.

This confirms that Black Friday represents a unique date for companies to utilize in order to attract new customers and to delight existing ones.

The unique challenges Black Friday poses for retail business communications

Companies want to provide a consistent customer experience throughout the shopping journey. But a big challenge companies face is delivering just that across promotion, purchase, product delivery and more.

Resolving this challenge involves resolving other specific challenges as well. This includes capturing and maintaining a healthy customer database, ensuring that the information maintained is error free and continually updated but also includes details of buying behaviors.

According to reports, 50% of consumers would be willing to buy more if they were to receive personalized offers from brands. But such offers come down to ensuring that the communication effort is able to leverage the customers’ personal data held by the brand.

The other challenge is to identify all of the customer touchpoints during the purchase journey. It is necessary to explore how each touchpoint could be elevated for a smooth and pleasant customer experience that leaves a positive indelible mark.

After all, it’s been reported that 65% of customers who have meaningful experiences along the purchase journey go on to become long-term customers.

The risks associated with not having a well-planned Black Friday strategy

We’ve touched on the importance of identifying all the touchpoints and seeing how these could be enriched. Communication is key to achieving this.

This means knowing what to communicate and to whom, when this should be done and identifying the channel that’s best suited. Carefully aligning this with enriched touchpoints will ensure a meaningful, memorable customer experience.

But did you know that brands often struggle with achieving consistency in this? A Khoros report published notes that 77% of brands struggle to create a consistent customer journey between all of the channels and devices used, an indication of the inherent flaws in the communication strategy of these brands.

Customer touchpoints that are not enriched can lead to bad customer experiences. As you yourself might have undergone a terrible customer experience at some point, you can understand how this aspect of communication failure could create such a negative impact.

As Review Control points out, a company can lose 10% of its potential customers from just one bad review.

Why Soprano CPaaS presents the ideal choice for your Black Friday strategy

Retailers face even more challenges to improve customer engagement because of tech advancements, increased digital migration and the variety of communication channels at their disposal.

Fortunately, there is a solution that addresses these challenges. Soprano CPaaS integrates and adds value to the most common communication channels available, doing so on a single platform for an enriched customer experience.

This is a cloud-hosted Communications Platform-as-a-Service that offers any company, regardless of sector or size, to reap the benefits of mobile communication.

Soprano Connect solves the communication challenges associated with improving the customer experience:

• Consolidation: Companies access a range of communication channels (such as SMS, WhatsApp, email, RCS, Google Business messages and voice) – no need to deal with a different provider for each channel.
• Complexity: A customer journey may involve interactions with different communication channels at different stages, all of which Soprano CPaaS can adapt to specific communication needs to enrich these touchpoints.
• Consent: Alignment with data protection management standards is simple with Soprano Connect because the functionalities focus on managing customer consent.
• Security: Certified under ISO 27001:2013, you are assured that customer information in Soprano Connect is secure, at rest and in motion.
• Reach: Soprano’s global presence allows you to reach almost any part of the world and to do so with meaningful interactions.

So how would this work in real terms? Let’s examine the various touchpoints in a customer’s journey and how these could be enriched with meaningful mobile communications.

You could:

If you are looking for new and proven ways to support your Black Friday marketing strategy, consider what Soprano CPaaS can do for you and the impact it can drive for your business.

Discover more about the benefits of a Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) today.